The trick, with Aurelio De Laurentiis, is to sit and to wait. He tends to take the scenic route through a conversation; his answers come wrapped in anecdotes and parables, laced with riddles and rhetorical questions.
There are times when you wonder if he has taken one detour too many, become so distracted by his own tangents that he has lost his thread. Listening back, it is hard to pinpoint how, exactly, a question about the Champions League’s revenue distribution leads to a brief but powerful homily about the dangers of the ‘Ndrangheta, the Calabrian mafia, but it does.
It is, though, no great ordeal. De Laurentiis might be most famous now as owner of S.S.C. Napoli, the Italian soccer team he rescued from oblivion and painstakingly restored to Europe’s head table, but he is still, at heart, a film producer, a showman. He knows how to weave together a story, how to craft a compelling pitch. And when he gets to his destination, as he always does, it is invariably worth it.
De Laurentiis is, after all, never knowingly short of ideas on how to revolutionize soccer, never without a sacred cow to slaughter, never without a tradition to overhaul. He has, at various times in the recent past, suggested cutting games from 90 minutes to 60 and advocated the effective abolition of UEFA, European soccer’s governing body, instead handing power directly to Europe’s biggest clubs.
He is also never lacking an adversary, some villain standing in the way of progress, holding the game back through lack of imagination. His list has previously included not only UEFA but FIFA, Adidas, Nike, collective television deals and the Italian political establishment, among others. Many others.
He does all this with a relish and a frequency befitting the scion of one of Italy’s great cinematic dynasties. In his eyes, soccer (and life, most likely) is entertainment. Creating a stir comes naturally. It is all part of the show.
Sitting in a hotel in Liverpool, England, in December, on the eve of what would turn out to be Napoli’s final Champions League game this season, he did not require a vast amount of assistance, then, to land upon his current bête noire.
He would like, he said, to change the way prize money is handed out by the major leagues. He thinks underperformance should not be rewarded. Rather, he thinks it should be punished. “You finish first, you get €100 million, for example,” he says. “You finish second, you earn €50 million, and so on. But if you finish last, you pay a fine.”
This has been a recurrent theme for De Laurentiis this season. He has singled out Frosinone — a minor team from a town between Rome and Naples, promoted to Italy’s top league, Serie A, for only the second time in its history last year — as an example of a club that arrives in the top flight “already relegated.”
Clubs like Frosinone do not draw fans, or interest, or broadcasters to the league, De Laurentiis says. They come up, they do not try to compete, and they go back down, except with their coffers stuffed by what he sees as an unwarranted share of the division’s television revenue.
“The problem is the small teams have the same rights as the big ones,” he said, adding, with a reference to a type of bread: “Why should Frosinone have a season in Serie A, be given a slice of the pagnotta and then be relegated back to the third division? If they cannot compete, if they finish last, they should have to pay a fine. They shouldn’t be given money for failing.”
After yet another tangent in which he dismisses an overmatched club in a major league as a mere “sparring partner,” he quickly builds up a head of steam. “Promotion and relegation is the biggest idiocy in soccer,” De Laurentiis says. “Especially when you also have UEFA trying to force clubs to comply with financial fair play rules. Clubs should be structured geographically, so they can all be self-sufficient. If they cannot survive financially, if they cannot be self-sufficient, they should be booted out.”
It would be easy to listen to De Laurentiis’s words, to hear the many and varied ways in which he feels soccer has gotten things wrong, and to assume that he holds it in contempt, that he has wearied of the sport in the 15 years or so since he bought up what remained of Napoli — “just the name,” he has said previously — and set about reinvigorating it.
His actions, though, are rather different. De Laurentiis is not distancing himself from soccer; rather, he is embedding himself more deeply in it. He has, for several years, been seeking to add another club to his portfolio; ideally, he would have liked one in London. “We never found the occasion,” he said.
He switched his attentions to the United States, investigating an offer to buy an expansion franchise in Major League Soccer. He spent months examining proposals in Baltimore, Detroit and Las Vegas, he said, but was put off by the cost of a team — more than $150 million, plus the cost of a new stadium, in the last expansion round.
Then, in August, De Laurentiis received a phone call from the mayor of Bari, a port city in Apulia, down near Italy’s boot heel. The local club, which played in Serie A as recently as 2011, had been declared bankrupt and had been relegated to the fourth tier of Italian soccer. The mayor offered De Laurentiis the chance to buy it.
“I was surprised,” he said. “I don’t know anyone in Bari. I have barely ever been there.”
More surprising still, however, is that De Laurentiis eventually said yes. Napoli and Bari are, strictly speaking, rivals, but suddenly the same family owned them: the older De Laurentiis in charge of the former, and his son, Luigi, given control of the latter.
It was not, needless to say, a universally popular move. Though Bari’s fans were broadly welcoming — “They saw we were serious people,” Aurelio De Laurentiis said — there was dissent in Naples. “Get out of our city,” read one banner, slung from railings in the city the night the Bari purchase was announced.
De Laurentiis insists that owning another team will not draw his focus from his first love. “Napoli is Napoli, Bari is Bari,” he said. His son, meanwhile, is adamant that the expertise he and his father have gleaned on the Tyrrhenian coast now can be applied on the Adriatic.
“We started from zero,” Luigi said of Bari. “We had to create the brand, starting with a new crest, and then do all of the things necessary for a team: a season-ticket campaign, a website, the marketing, the social media, the jerseys, finding sponsors.”
The rationale, the younger De Laurentiis said, is obvious. “Bari has a national appeal; we are the only team in our division being broadcast nationally,” he said, the result of a partnership with the streaming service DAZN. Apulia itself has seen a boom in tourism in recent years; the opportunity, the younger De Laurentiis said, was too good to ignore.
The plan, needless to say, is to restore Bari to the top flight, even if that would create a battle with the game’s authorities over whether two teams in the same competition can have the same ownership.
“Bari is a recognizable brand,” Luigi said. “It is not Frosinone. It has played in Serie A. It has a long list of famous former players.”
It is not the sort of team, in other words, that Aurelio De Laurentiis would denounce as a sparring partner, a club whose only purpose is to pad out the standings and to pick up a paycheck. De Laurentiis might compulsively court controversy. He might prod and poke and provoke his rivals, and soccer’s authorities. He might do it all in the name of entertainment. He is, though, as good as his word. Bari is putting his money where his mouth is. He thinks soccer needs to change. So he is trying to change it.
Follow Rory Smith on Twitter: @RorySmith.
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