Napoli sat on €200m this summer while Allegri pays the price

The transfer window closed with swaps, not investment, and Champions League qualification is slipping away. De Laurentiis has now said he would sell the club.

by Rosaria CimminoSunday 18 October, 20:21 CET· 2 hours ago

Aurelio De Laurentiis — Foto: Presidenza della Repubblica · Attribution

Ninth place, 10 points from seven games, and no points after two Champions League matches: Napoli's crisis under Allegri did not start with Saturday's defeat at Venezia, but with a decision made months earlier. In the summer the club had liquidity reserves of close to €200m. That money stayed untouched, right when the squad needed it.

The numbers from the window that closed on 1 September tell the story. Lucca arrived from Udinese for €35m, a fee almost entirely covered by the €26m sale of Gutiérrez to Bayer Leverkusen. It was a market of swaps, not investment, while Champions League qualification — vital for a club that funds itself the way De Laurentiis's does — now looks a distant prospect after opening defeats to Arsenal and a 3-1 loss at Villarreal.

Chiavelli's line, and an uncomfortable precedent

Behind that caution is the approach of chief executive Andrea Chiavelli, the club's numbers-and-contracts man, whose line the president has chosen to follow again. It echoes an uncomfortable precedent: the post-Spalletti period, when the club handed the team to Rudi Garcia without major investment, and the results followed accordingly. This time there is no hard-nosed figure in the dugout the way Conte was in the summer of 2024. Instead there is Allegri, under contract until 30 June 2029 with a mandate to finish fourth and take a step forward in the Champions League — not to win the title.

Allegri is certainly not primarily responsible for a transfer window that went nowhere, but having accepted the job on those terms, he has become jointly responsible in the eyes of supporters. His name absorbs most of the criticism from a disappointed fanbase, while the ownership stays in the background. Neither De Laurentiis nor sporting director Giovanni Manna has had contact with other coaches, either after Villarreal or after Venezia: Raffaele Palladino's name, which has circulated in recent weeks, has never been a concrete option.

De Laurentiis opens the door to a sale

On 12 October, at the Collare d'Oro al Merito Sportivo (CONI's sporting honour), De Laurentiis publicly opened up to selling the club, telling TG5: "If there's someone willing to pay for my efforts, let them come forward." The comment carries extra weight at a time when the team is struggling on the pitch and the club is accused of having kept the purse strings too tight. In the same period, the president discussed the new stadium project on the former Q8 site with Chiavelli, with a yes-or-no deadline set for December 2026 — a decision on future investment coming just as last summer's missing investment is under scrutiny.

The issue remains open, and it concerns the choices of those who run the club, not only those who coach it. Napoli go into Tuesday evening's Champions League match at the Maradona against Bodø/Glimt on zero points, with a question hanging over the game: was this summer's financial caution, with €200m left unused, a sensible choice, or the reason the Champions League is already looking out of reach?