Vettosi: Napoli is too beautiful for a stadium alone

While president Aurelio De Laurentiis works on two fronts — state funds to restyle the Maradona ahead of Euro 2032 and a letter of intent signed with Q8 for a new 70,000-seat ground at Napoli Est — an insider voice has pushed back against the dominant story. Fabrizio Vettosi, an economist specialising in football finance and for years Napoli's representative in the Lega (Italian league) assembly, spoke to Radio Marte's programme 'Forza Napoli Sempre'. His view: a club-owned stadium, as many describe it, is not the decisive lever it is made out to be.

The core of his argument is that the stadium's impact is overstated: "The stadium, given how we consume football today, with all the competing leisure alternatives, matters less than some people claim." On the Maradona's Sky Boxes he is blunt: "There aren't many, but they work well for Napoli as a city. The ones at San Siro cost €150,000." He backed this with an anecdote from Borussia Dortmund's general manager: "Dortmund is appropriately ugly to experience in a football stadium, while Napoli is too beautiful to experience inside one. In some ways, the same is true of Milan."

On the finances, Vettosi points to Juventus as a case study: "They don't make money from their stadium. It's not a certainty. It brings in €100m in revenue, but at what cost? It increases turnover, not profitability." He widened the point to the sums being discussed elsewhere: "For Roma, the figure being mentioned is over a billion. In a city with lots of visitors, you need €400-500m: which Italian club has those resources?" As a counter-example he cited AEK Athens, a "beautiful" stadium built for €75m with capacity just under 40,000 — proof, in his view, that it can be done for far less than the figures being discussed for Roma or for the Bernabéu's restyling, which cost €400m.

This is where Vettosi tries to get inside De Laurentiis's thinking: "The owner sees the stadium as a user, paying what is necessary. Not so much as infrastructure to invest in." In his view, De Laurentiis knows he cannot do this alone, and has already sounded out sponsors and investors interested not just in the stadium but in the ancillary facilities around it — the same approach De Laurentiis has put in writing in the letter of intent for the 38 hectares at Napoli Est, where he has talked of sky-boxes and a ground to be built in around 24 months at his own expense. Vettosi believes the president's message to the city council is just as direct: "Everyone says De Laurentiis is a 'galletto' (a cockerel — Neapolitan for someone cocky and combative), but they seem like one too. You challenge an entrepreneur, and an entrepreneur is used to a challenge."

One question Vettosi's analysis does not resolve: if the president really does treat the stadium as something to manage sparingly, why has he chosen this autumn to push two stadium plans at once — the publicly funded restyling of the Maradona backed by Cipess (the state investment committee), and a brand-new ground at Napoli Est? Deputy mayor Laura Lieto has already made clear that, for now, no formal proposal has reached Palazzo San Giacomo (Naples city hall). Until that changes, Vettosi's words say more about De Laurentiis's caution than about a project truly ready to move.