Naples champion of Serie A: the first scudetto without Diego Maradona came with players from 17 different nations

Napoli’s lightning march in Serie A did not give their pursuers much hope. On Sunday he lost his first match point with the poignant draw for Salernitana in Naples, but this Thursday he did not miss the away match at Udinese and the Southern Italian team returned to command football, something that hadn’t happened since the match Diego Armando Maradonamore than three decades ago. He did it with a record, as a team had never been crowned so early. And he did it hand in hand with one Babel tower built by veteran Luciano Spalletti with the players of 17 nationalities.

Napoli took a 16-point lead over Lazio, who had postponed the party by at least a few hours on Wednesday. So he became the first champion of the five major European leagues. Twenty-five wins, five draws and three defeats place the team with the highest number of goalscorers (69) and the one with the fewest goals scored (23) of the 20 participants in Serie A in this privileged situation.

This solid pace was replicated in the Champions League, in which he won zone A shared with Liverpool, Ajax and Rangers, although it was eventually broken in the one-on-one fratricide against Milan in the quarter-finals. It was the second stain of this brilliant season, having already fallen in the second round of the Italian Cup at the hands of the modest Cremona, whose adventure continued until the semifinals.

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 Kvaratskheliaa footballer unknown to the general public until the middle of last year and who has dazzled in recent months: he has 14 goals and 16 assists in 38 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 22-year-old left-back parted ways with the Russian club in March last year, just days after the war in Ukraine broke out. The manager of the Georgian national team, the French Willy Sagnol, has contacted colleagues and managers of European clubs to offer it. 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 DiLorenzo (player of the team led by Roberto Mancini and Euro 2021 champion), the Cameroonian Andre Frank Zambo Anguissathe Polish Piotr Zielinski and the Nigerian striker Victor Osimhen, top scorer of the current tournament (he has 22). 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 is to stay in the top flight to waiting for his chance on the bench of a team that wins the Scudetto and plays 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 684 minutes of work. Some of them have been decisive, such as the one that earned the victory against champion Milan at the Giuseppe Meazza stadium in September. However, his polenta and his optimism weren’t enough to displace the Nigerian Victor Osimhenwho had a remarkable season with 22 whoops, none from penalties, making him the top scorer in the contest.

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 in payroll, Napoli once again touched the sky with their hands, something they had done only twice, both guided 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, finally, with Diego omnipresent, it was given to him.