Napoli and a Tower of Babel that dreams big before its best chance to win the first Scudetto without Diego Maradona

Talking about a Scudetto condemned when the equator of the season has just been crossed is risky. However, Napoli’s lightning march in Serie A does not give their pursuers much hope. From the departure of Diego Armando Maradonamore than thirty years ago, the Campania region team it has never been so clear-cut as these days to win the title in Italy. And meanwhile this Tower of Babel built by the veteran Luciano Spalletti with the players of 17 nationalities it is also still competing in the Champions League.

This Sunday’s victory at Spezia (3-0) allowed the Neapolitans to keep their 13-point lead over Inter, their backup, with a goal from Lautaro Martínez, who remained with the Derby with 21 matches played della Madonnina against Milan. This difference is the largest who has built a leader in the five major leagues in Europe and the second most comfortable in the 42 races that are taking place in the Old Continent, surpassed only by 14 units that Young Boys takes him to St. Gallen in Switzerland.

Eighteen wins, two draws and one defeat place the team with the most goalscorers (51) and the one with the fewest goals (15) in this privileged situation out of the 20 participants in Serie A. Of the last 17 matches in the national tournament, released victorious in 16. Against Inter he stumbled only on 4 January at the Giuseppe Meazza, in the first match played after the break imposed by the World Cup in Qatar.

This solid run was repeated in the Champions League, in which they won zone A, which they shared with Liverpool, Ajax and Rangers. They were the highest scoring team (scored 20) out of the 32 that participated in the group stage. It goes without saying that among them were such superpowers as Real Madrid, Bayern Munich, Manchester City or Paris Saint-Germain. They will face Eintracht Frankfurt in Germany on 21 February for the first leg of one of their round of 16 matches.

In this brilliant season, the only stain so far has been the elimination in the round of 16 of the Italian Cup: 15 days ago he was surprised by the modest Cremona (last in Serie A and only team that hasn’t won in the tournament yet), who defeated him on penalties at the Diego Maradona stadium after a 2-2 draw.

Unlike what happens more and more frequently in European football, the key to success does not seem to lie in the wallet. Although the leadership led by the film producer Aurelio De Laurentiis He has spared no resources since 2004, when he took over a bankrupt club that was part of Serie C1, never able to compete in that sector with Juventus and Inter. And, much less, with the English giants, Real Madrid or PSG.

For his second season at the helm of the team, Spalletti had to face a reconstruction after the farewell of some fundamental men in recent years: the captain and the crest Lorenzo Insigne (chose to go to Toronto FC of Major League Soccer), the Belgian dry mertens (top scorer in club history, with 148 goals in 397 games over nine seasons), the Senegalese Kalidou Koulibaly (Chelsea paid him 40 million euros), the Spaniard Fabiano Ruiz (He was taken from Paris Saint-Germain) and the Colombian goalkeeper David Ospina.

For this reconstruction De Laurentiis, Spalletti and sporting director Cristiano Giuntoli had a clinical eye. The most powerful blow, from what he showed in this first half of the campaign, was the Georgian Khvicha Kvaratskheliafootballer unknown to the general public until the middle of last year and who has dazzled in recent months: he has 10 goals and 14 assists in 22 games between Serie A and the Champions League. And the fans call him Kvaradona, a clear allusion to the best footballer of all time..

After two and a half seasons with Rubin Kazan, the 21-year-old full-back parted ways with the Russian club in March last year, just days after the war broke out in Ukraine. Georgian national team manager Willy Sagnol of France contacted colleagues and European club officials to offer him. they all rejected it, which is why Kvaratskhelia ended up signing with his country’s Dinamo Batumi. In the month of July, Napoli bought him for 14.8 million euros. Today, several very large teams are watching him and his representative, Christian Emile, assures that by mid-year it will be worth 100 million.

The other great success was to pay Turkish Fenerbahçe the 20 million euros foreseen in the release clause of the contract Kim Min Jae. The defender of the South Korean national team (with whom he played the World Cup in Qatar) arrived to fill the void left by Koulibaly’s game and today he forms a granite central defense with the Kosovar Amir Rrahmani. In September he was chosen as the best player of the month in Serie A by the organization of the tournament.

Kvaratskhelia and Kim fit perfectly into a structure that still stood up to the captain. John Di Lorenzo (player of the team led by Roberto Mancini and champion of Euro 2021), the Cameroonian Andre Frank Zambo Anguissathe Polish Piotr Zielinski and the Nigerian striker Victor Osimhen, top scorer of the current tournament (he has 16). And players have also entered who, without being owners, are making a good contribution this season like the French Tanguy Ndombelé (arrived on loan from Tottenham) and the striker James Raspadori (on loan from Sassuolo).

Among those men who joined last summer and who are making a strong contribution to the Neapolitan team is John Simonwho earned this opportunity after signing the best of his six seasons in Italy: he scored 17 goals for Hellas Verona and was the fourth top scorer in the league behind Ciro Immobile (27), Dusan Vlahovic (24 ) and Lautaro Martínez (21).

The change is drastic: the attacker goes from being the undisputed owner of a team whose goal was to stay in the top flight to waiting for his chance on the bench of a team that aspires to win the Scudetto and play in Europe. Gio assimilated it very well: He has eight goals (three in Serie A, four in the Champions League and one in the Italian Cup) in just 525 minutes of work. Some were decisive, like last Sunday’s or the one that earned a victory against champion Milan at the Giuseppe Meazza in September.

Simeone is one of four Americans (the others are the Brazilian john jesusthe Uruguayan Matthias Olivera and the Mexican Hirving Lozano) in a team of 26 members where eight Italians live with colleagues from 16 nations: there are also representatives of Germany, France, Portugal, Poland, Norway, Slovakia, Kosovo, North Macedonia, Georgia, Nigeria, Cameroon and South Korea. Against Roma on Sunday, the only starters born in the peninsula were goalkeeper Alex Meret and captain Di Lorenzo.

With this collection of passports on their payroll, Napoli are chasing a crown they have won only twice, both led by the magic of Diego Maradona (in 1987 and 1990), in a oligopolistic league who in his last 20 seasons distributed the titles between Juventus (eleven), Inter (6) and Milan (3). They have finished as runners-up four times in the last decade (in the 2012/13, 2015/16, 2017/18 and 2018/19 seasons), but have always ended up relegated from Juve. This time he seems to have the trophy at hand, even if there are still 17 dates to go.