The SSC Naples can already make the championship in Serie A perfect this weekend. This is also a success of two men who made this ascent possible.
As types they are different, no question. The interview-shy manager and the president, whose temperament is often described with the adjective “vulcanico” (volcanic) and suggests that he does not belong to the quiet contemporaries. But it’s a duo that works, for eight years now. Cristiano Giuntoli and Aurelio De Laurentiis have once again made Napoli a major player in footballing Italy with comparatively little money.
Cristiano Giuntoli – Manager without a Wikipedia entry
Cristiano Giuntoli is the lesser known of the two, but the real doer. In Germany, Naples’ sports director has not even made a Wikipedia entry. In Italy, too, football fans shrugged their shoulders at the name Giuntoli until recently.
One reason: The 51-year-old sits on the bench for all games, but rarely appears in front of television cameras and gives few newspaper interviews. Giuntoli acts as a diligent and clever string puller in the background. He leaves the stage to the coach below him (Luciano Spalletti and the president above him (De Laurentiis), both of whom love the media appearance much more.
Giuntoli is the architect of the team
But the architect of the prospective championship team is Giuntoli. Born in Florence, he has been working for the SSC since 2015. All the players who have sent Naples into a new football frenzy this season have been brought in by him.
And almost all of those Giuntoli signings were before moving to Napoli”No names” in big football: Giovanni Di Lorenzo, Mario Rui and Piotr Zielinski came from Empoli, Amir Rrahmani from Hellas Verona, Stanislaw Lobotka from Celta Vigo in Spain, André-Franck Anguissa had difficult years at Fulham and Villareal. Giuntoli brought them for Small money to Naples, always accompanied by great skepticism from the fans Today, the Giuntoli discoveries are all pillars of the budding title team.
The masterpiece: The Kvaratskelia transfer
Giuntoli achieved his masterpiece last summer. When he – as always with the savings targets of his president in his pocket – sold the top performers Lorenzo Insigne, Kalidou Koulibaly and Dries Mertens and instead of the stars loved in Naples, the South Korean Min-Jae Kim from Fenerbahce for the defense and the Georgian Kvicha Kvaratskelia from Dinamo Batumi fetched for the storm.
The fans felt like they were being made fun of and saw these commitments as cheeky for an ambitious club like Naples. Today, Kim and Kvaratshkelia are fan favourites, have risen to become internationally coveted stars and are protagonists of the new Neapolitan football fairy tale.
Giuntoli still works traditionally
The fact that Giuntoli does not match the football romance that surrounds Naples’ sports director money ball-is younger. So none of the managers who first run player statistics through computers in order to discover affordable kickers somewhere that few others have on the list. According to Giuntoli, he works largely traditionally, which is confirmed by sources from the Naples area.
The “Talent Factory” (Corriere dello Sport) of the SSC Sports Director consists of a worldwide network of scouts and a small team of six permanent employees in Naples. They don’t do much else from morning to evening than watch football matches – mostly in quick succession – and talk about what they’ve seen. To discover new talents or to follow up specific tips from scouts. If a player has been shortlisted, there is usually an agreement with the coach and then the final decision is made in a joint discussion with the president.
Kvaratshkelia was actually too expensive
The Causa Kvaratshkelia is typical of the Giuntoli system. They had had the dribbling striker on their radar in Naples for three years. During his time in Russia with Rubin Kazan, however, the man now celebrated as “Kvaradona” was already too expensive according to the rules that the SSC imposed on itself. Only through Covid and Kvaratshkelia’s move back home to Batumi did he become affordable for Naples. Giuntoli’s now extensive network in Italian and international football also paid off in this case.
Cristian Zaccardo, a former Wolfsburg and 2006 world champion who has made Georgia his second home as a players’ agent, had heard of Giuntoli’s fundamental interest in Kvaratshkelia. When the financial demands changed in Batumi, Zaccardo sent the signal to Giuntoli that the deal could now go ahead after all.
75 million euros fee – all in for Osimhen
Giuntoli has only gone “all-in” once in his managerial career. When he was three years ago Victor Osimhen von Lille OSC to Naples – for a respectable 75 million euros. A sum that was surprising not only in view of the other Schmalhans transfers from Naples, but also because Osimhen had just had a good season in France.
The risk seemed high, but Giuntoli and his team were convinced. They were also able to convince their stingy president – and they were right. Osimhen’s goalscoring abilities have been instrumental in Napoli’s successes this season. And instead of the 75 million paid, Napoli is now asking interested clubs (which are said to include Bayern Munich and Manchester United) to double the transfer fee at the time.
Giuntoli: “Sometimes you have to lie”
Giuntoli became a successful football manager on the second educational path, so to speak. He now teaches the basics of the sporting director business at the Italian Football Federation’s sports school in Coverciano, about which he says bluntly: “As a sports director, you sometimes have to lie in public”. Giuntoli had to work hard to earn his recognition in the structurally conservative Italian football.
As an active player, he had limited success as a defender through the third and fourth leagues. The only success the footballer Giuntoli achieved in 1999 with Imperia was winning the national amateur championship, in the original, not very glamorous: “Campionato Nazionale Dilettanti”.
Giuntoli was already convincing at Carpi
The multi-talented student studied architecture and, after passing excellent intermediate exams, almost started constructing houses and bridges. But then Giuntoli devoted himself to building football teams and in 2009 got a chance at the northern Italian provincial club Carpi.
There, the man with the special talent for talent wrote an Italian football fairy tale. Giuntoli led Carpi, also with mini-budgets, within five years from football’s no-man’s-land in the fourth division to Serie A, for the first time in the club’s history.
De Laurentiis – at the helm of Naples since 2004
This success story caught the attention of Aurelio De Laurentiis in Naples. The film entrepreneur loves show and provocation, but also has a knack for personnel. The 73-year-old, nephew of Oscar winner Dino De Laurentiis, who was born near Naples, took over the traditional football club in 2004 after SSC Naples went bankrupt and was transferred to the third division as a penalty.
First, many think of a PR stunt by the entrepreneur who needs recognition. But De Laurentiis was serious and within a few years led Napoli back into Italy’s top division and back into the top regions of the table.
Napoli adhere to financial fair play
De Laurentiis was and still is met with skepticism from the fans. At the beginning they had hoped for an old-school Italian club patron who would spend millions with grand gestures to fuel dreams of titles and success. But De Laurentiis did the opposite. The line he set when he took office: Never again should SSC Napoli spend more money than it earned.
The rules of Financial fair play would be respected. After Napoli won titles under De Laurentiis for the first time in 2014 with the Coppa Italia and then the Supercup, the president wanted to take his “make a lot out of little” strategy to the next level – with Giuntoli. To make one possible in Naples after the miracle of Carpi.
Naples spends significantly less than the competition
Eight years on, Napoli have managed to dominate Serie A on a budget almost ridiculously small for a top international side. The team, which proves this season that even little money can score goals, costs just 71 million. The lagged competition in Italy has significantly more expensive teams.
Juventus Turin spends 162 million on player salaries, Inter Milan 133 million. In the national salary ranking, the SSC is only fifth. In Germany, Bayern Munich pays 267 million a year for its squad, almost four times as much as Naples. And Europe’s Croesus Paris Saint Germain spends 408 million on its players, almost six times as much as the SSC.
De Laurentiis multiple times “Football Leader of the Year”
Sparfuchs De Laurentiis has received the “Football Leader of the Year” award several times in Italy (awarded by the national coaches’ association) in recognition of his sustainable management of football and compliance with financial fair play.
That’s one side of De Laurentiis. The other side is that of a president who never misses a fight with his colleagues from other clubs and is sometimes on the verge of becoming violent when criticized. De Laurentiis had to pay 25,000 euros to settle a case before the Italian sports court.
The President of Naples had previously described a journalist as a “boor” on the sidelines of transfer negotiations and threatened him with a beating among witnesses. De Laurentiis also caused a shake of the head during the Covid pandemic when he took part in an association conference infected with Corona, but only announced his illness the day after.
To date, problems between fans and de Laurentiis
De Laurentiis is still at odds with the organized fans of SSC Napoli. Despite the successes achieved under his presidency, chants and banners against Laurentiis are not uncommon. Also because the President, from the Ultras’ point of view, does not omit any provocation. After the riots by local and Frankfurt hooligans before the Champions League game in Naples, De Laurentiis has called on the government to show toughness against football fans.
In Italy, the SSC President thought that action should be taken as harshly as it was Margaret Thatcher made in the UK in the 1980s. Otherwise, De Laurentiis never misses an opportunity to make it clear that he can do without the organized fans in football.
SSC Napoli – de Laurentiis’ greatest hit with the public
De Laurentiis himself emphasizes that he is an entertainment entrepreneur. A good businessman, he thinks, also makes profits in sport and not losses. Incidentally, says the President of Naples, there is an obligation in the film business, like in football, “to entertain the audience“.
Luckily for football fans, De Laurentiis does this in sport – see Naples’ fun attacking football – much more sophisticated than in the cinema. There De Laurentiis made a large part of his fortune with the production of so-called “Cinepanettoni”, the cheesy, flat Christmas comedies that bring in millions of euros in Italy every year.
SSC Napoli should now be De Laurentiis’ biggest hit with the public. Up to three million people are expected to attend the championship celebrations in the city. Naples fans also want to take to the streets in other cities in Italy.