‘You must never give up’: underdogs Napoli reach glorious summit again

This was not the stadium where Napoli had hoped to seal their Serie A title but after a 33-year wait you can make any place feel like the promised land. There are more than 500 miles of road between the Stadio Diego Armando Maradona and Udinese’s Dacia Arena, and thousands of supporters travelled them to be present when their team crossed the finish line.

They were made to suffer a little while longer, watching Napoli fall behind to a brilliantly taken goal by Sandi Lovric. But when Victor Osimhen swept an equaliser home through a crowded penalty area at the start of the second half the celebrations began in earnest. One point was all Napoli needed.

The striker ran to the nearest pocket of away fans and hammered his palms on the barrier, so hard that he appeared to break the protective face mask he had torn off to celebrate. A giant flag of Maradona’s face looked down from behind the goal. Teammates raced over from the bench in yellow bibs with a phrase printed on them: “I will be with you, and you must never give up.”

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Those words, taken from a terrace favourite song of Napoli’s supporters, captured the moment. The Partenopei’s final few steps toward this Scudetto have been clumsy, with only four wins in nine Serie A games since the start of March. They were trounced 4-0 by Milan in that stretch and eliminated by the same team from the Champions League.

The Serie A schedule was flipped on its head to allow them to become champions at home to Salernitana on Sunday, but they fluffed their lines against relegation-threatened opponents. Still, it was only a temporary delay. Some fans followed them here, others stayed behind to watch the game on big screens at their home ground. At both ends of the country, they celebrated a 1-1 draw that made Napoli champions of Italy for the third time.

This title has not been in doubt for a long time. Napoli could afford their recent setbacks – domestically at least – because of the preposterous pace they set at the start of this campaign. Luciano Spalletti’s team arrived at the winter World Cup with 15 wins and two draws from 17 matches. Even after they lost their first game back away at Inter, they responded by reeling off eight victories in a row.

Numbers alone could never do this team justice. Napoli were ruthless but they were also magic to behold: a shape-shifting sea of blue that flooded through any gaps that opponents left unsealed. They were Khvicha Kvaratskhelia, slaloming left and right to hypnotise three Atalanta defenders. They were Victor Osimhen, never letting the ball hit the floor as he juggled down a cross and roofed it beyond Roma’s Rui Patrício.

Who saw this team coming? Not the Napoli fan who interrupted Spalletti’s squad presentation event in July, screaming at him to “wake up!” The perception was of a team at the end of an era. Lorenzo Insigne, Dries Mertens, Kalidou Koulibaly and Fabián Ruiz were all being allowed – in some cases forced – to leave, and it was not clear yet who would replace them.

Kvaratskhelia would turn out to be the great revelation, arriving from Dinamo Batumi in Georgia. He had been playing for Rubin Kazan at the start of 2022 before Fifa ruled that foreign players in Russia should be allowed to break their contracts after the invasion of Ukraine.

His partnership with Osimhen has been irresistible. The Nigerian’s talent was no secret but his first two seasons since joining from Lille in a club record €70m deal were interrupted by a shoulder dislocation and an eye socket fracture. A hamstring injury at the start of this campaign, thankfully, was quicker to recover from. He has missed seven games yet remains Serie A’s top scorer.

Napoli’s sporting director, Cristiano Giuntoli, deserves his share of the credit. He acted decisively to land Kvaratskhelia, who had been on several clubs’ radars before the invasion, but just as essential were other signings he made this summer: the centre-back Kim Min-jae from Fenerbahce as well as the forwards Giovanni Simeone and Giacomo Raspadori.

This Scudetto, though, has been a collective effort above all. How could we tell the story of this triumph without mentioning the midfield orchestrator Stanislav Lobotka, Piotr Zielinski’s endless assists or André-Frank Zambo Anguissa’s telepathic knack for reading an opponent’s intentions? Could Napoli have won it all without the unerring consistency of their captain, Giovanni Di Lorenzoat right-back, or Hirving Lozano surging forward ahead of him?

Spalletti is the man who knitted them all together, a manager for whom this moment feels overdue. He won a league title with Zenit Saint Petersburg in Russia in 2010 but in Italy, despite being credited as one of the great tactical innovators of a generation, he had never gone beyond the two Coppa Italia triumphs and a Supercoppa he claimed at Roma a decade and a half ago.

He is, at 64, the oldest manager to win Serie A, and at times he has confessed to being dazzled by his own team. After a win over Sassuolo in February he highlighted a moment when Napoli lost possession from a corner and every single player tore back at full speed to prevent a counterattack.

“In 25 years of management I’ve never seen anything like it,” he said at the time. It had been even longer than that since anybody saw Napoli become champions of Italy. A 33-year wait has come to an end.