The men who rebuilt Napoli from 'only a name' tell their story

Aurelio De Laurentiis paid €32m and has repeated the judge's reply for years. In 2013 the president described the day of the auction at the court in Naples like this: "When I won the auction for the club at the court in Naples, I knew nothing about 4-3-3 or 4-4-2. I didn't know what I was getting myself into. After paying out €32m, I asked the court how I would acquire the offices, the stadium, the players… That was when the judge told me: 'I think you haven't understood; you have bought only a name!'"

The first is Pierpaolo Marino, then general manager, who did not say yes straight away. "I didn't say yes immediately, I was under contract with Udinese. I went to see De Laurentiis in Switzerland. I arrived at 23:00 and we talked until 4 or 5 in the morning. What interested me was understanding the guarantees behind the project."

He still regrets that the first season started late. "If we had started at the same time as the others, we would have won the league. The following year (2005-2006), we won it with three or four games to spare. Winning that league was like winning a scudetto."

Castel Volturno, 20 years on

The part that weighs most on the present is something else. "The Castel Volturno training centre, which is still the club's today, was built back then, on my idea, with the help of a builder: the owner of the hotel where we were staying," Marino says. He claims credit for "an entrepreneurial model" made possible "thanks to the trust and autonomy the president gave me".

The side that won two titles in three years still trains there. The new centre at Qualiano, with ten pitches, a mini-stadium of around 2,000 seats and living quarters, is waiting on the preliminary agreement for the land, and work should start by January. The new stadium on the former Q8 site still needs a preliminary yes from the city's institutions.

Seen from here, a training ground put up with a hotelier's help is a credit to those years. It is also a measure of how little the club has moved on facilities while it was winning on the pitch.

Then there are the fans. Emanuele Calaiò remembers: "The miracle was seeing 50,000 spectators at the first Serie C1 game and reaching attendance figures that were hard to achieve even in Serie A: this is a miracle of love." No balance sheet records that part of the story. It deserves remembering every time someone tells the rebirth as the work of one man.

"Winning that league was like winning a scudetto."

The story comes in an odd week. In March De Laurentiis turned down €2bn. The Rizzetta consortium has since dropped to €1.3bn, the president has met the Apontes twice in Geneva, and all the while he repeats that "Napoli is not for sale". Sporting director Giovanni Manna, in an interview recorded in September, talks of "the end of a cycle".

The club bought as "only a name" is now worth billions, and that is down to De Laurentiis. Saying so is not public relations. But Marino has pointed out that the rebirth also rested on executives who were given trust and autonomy. With Napoli seventh on 14 points after nine games, it is fair to ask who has them now.

Next up is Juventus, also on 14 points, at the Allianz Stadium on Sunday 1 November at 20:45 CET (19:45 UK, 14:45 ET). Landucci will be on the bench, with Allegri suspended.