Napoli's academy has banked just €34.8m in ten years

Napoli have taken in €34.8m since 2016 from selling products of their own academy, the Scugnizzeria, through a mix of permanent sales and deals booked as capital gains.

What stands out most is how the €34.8m was built. It is not the product of a handful of big first-team sales, but a long run of smaller deals spread across ten years.

Gianluca Gaetano tops the list. The midfielder came through Castel Volturno (Napoli's training ground) entirely, went through several loan spells and first-team stints, and his eventual permanent sale is the single biggest contributor to the academy's books.

Gennaro Tutino comes next, having moved back and forth between Serie B and Serie A, with a sale valued at around €5.8m among the deals that delivered the largest capital gains. Other long-serving academy names complete the picture, starting with Sebastiano Luperto — players who never nailed down a regular starting place at Napoli but were still turned into revenue on the market.

This is not just an accounting footnote. The summer window that has just closed left Napoli with a net spend of around €47.5m, and president Aurelio De Laurentiis has said the club invested around €60m to buy Rasmus Højlund and Alisson outright, leaving no room for further signings.

In a business model that leans on self-financing, an academy that has produced barely more than €34m in ten years — a sum some clubs generate from a single sale — is not a minor detail. It is a missing piece in the numbers behind the squad.

The question is timing: whether the next generation to come through the Scugnizzeria can move the needle more than Gaetano and Tutino did, or whether Napoli will keep leaning on first-team sales to balance the books, as with the Kvaratskhelia and Gutiérrez deals completed at the end of September.