The forgotten scudetto: Napoli's second title, Maradona's last
Three years after the first tricolore, Alberto Bigon's Napoli won the club's second Serie A title in 1989-90, with Diego Armando Maradona still wearing the shirt.
The first scudetto, won in 1986-87 under Ottavio Bianchi, started something. In 1989-90 that cycle produced its second title: Napoli were champions of Italy again, this time with Alberto Bigon in charge. Diego Armando Maradona remained the team's axis, at the height of his Naples years.
The title came just a year after the 1988-89 UEFA Cup, still the only European trophy in the club's history. Built around Maradona since his 1984 arrival, engineered by Corrado Ferlaino, that Napoli side confirmed itself as the strongest team in Italy of the period, winning on multiple fronts within three seasons.
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The second scudetto was followed by the 1990 Supercoppa Italiana, another trophy added to the Napoli cabinet in those years. It was the last title Maradona lifted in a Napoli shirt: his departure in 1991 closed that cycle for good, and the club would not win the league again for more than thirty years, until 2022-23.
Of the club's four scudetti, 1989-90 remains the least told, overshadowed in collective memory by the first triumph in 1987 and by the Maradona myth. Yet it is the title that proves that team was no flash in the pan, but one of the strongest sides Italian football has seen, in a city that has been waiting to reach those heights again ever since.
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