Football
Ben Gladwell, Italy correspondent 5y

Napoli president Aurelio De Laurentiis plans to buy English club amid stadium frustration

Napoli president Aurelio De Laurentiis has said he is in the market to buy a club in England.

De Laurentiis, who completed the purchase of lower league side Bari earlier this year, is frustrated by the situation surrounding Napoli's San Paolo stadium.

The stadium is owned by the city, and De Laurentiis wants to renovate it. He has said that, if he is not allowed to buy it, he will take the club away and build a new ground elsewhere.

He has threatened to move their Champions League fixtures to Bari and said the situation had led him to consider looking at a club overseas.

"I'm working on buying another club, probably in England," La Gazzetta dello Sport reported him as saying. "There is a project in progress."

De Laurentiis said he did not feel he could take Napoli any further given the restrictions of a stadium which he claimed had not undergone major renovation since before the 1990 World Cup.

This season, delays in installing new seats led to the club halting the sale of season tickets.

"The management of such a stadium is a huge problem," De Laurentiis said. "The city has done no more than keep it afloat.

"When I discover that PSG pay €1 million a year to rent the Parc des Princes, I realise how far behind we are.

"With 47,000 seats, they produce revenue of €100m a year. Napoli don't get beyond €17-18m because we can't do anything inside the San Paolo -- we can't do any other activities.

"The city has done nothing for the San Paolo since 1990. Nobody has assumed the responsibility and we've found ourselves with a stadium which is not only ugly but is falling apart. It even rains inside.

"There are millions of screws that are never checked so why are the city council demanding €1.8m a year in rent?

"If it were up to me, I'd buy some land in two seconds and build a new stadium, but there's a lot of considerations to make.

"All of the opportunities to do something in recent years have failed. Shopping centres are no longer working, as aren't cinemas. I wouldn't know how to make a stadium profitable seven days a week -- maybe we'd have to offer karaoke."

^ Back to Top ^