Napoli won their first ever trophy while playing outside Serie A

Napoli had already been through a series of false starts by the 1950s. Relegation in 1941-42. Promotion back up after the war. Then another relegation in 1948, this one enforced — the Caso Napoli match-fixing scandal cost the club the Serie A place it had just won back. Napoli were a club used to rebuilding, long before they became the club of four league titles.

That win remains close to unique in Italian football. Napoli are one of only two clubs — alongside Vado — to have lifted the Coppa Italia while playing outside Serie A. No other major Italian club can claim the same. It says something about the competition in 1962: the Coppa Italia then was not a trophy reserved for the teams at the top.

A roll of honour that starts in 1962

The 1962 Coppa Italia opens a roll of honour that today stands at six wins in the competition, the most recent in 2019-20. It is the first entry in a list of honours that has since grown to include the 1986-87 league title, the 1988-89 UEFA Cup — still the club's only European trophy — the 1989-90 league title, the 1990 Italian Supercup, and, decades later, the 2022-23 and 2024-25 league titles.

Pesaola's name rarely comes up when Napoli's history is told, overshadowed by the Maradona years and by more recent ones. But a Coppa Italia won by a team outside Serie A remains, for its date and its rarity, one of the most unusual episodes in a hundred years of the club's history.