De Laurentiis, Infantino and the Crack That Cannot Be Plastered Over in European Football

In Rome, on 23 September, Aurelio De Laurentiis walked up to receive a lifetime achievement award from the Foreign Press Association. He did not deliver a thank-you speech. He said he had once wanted to shoot Gianni Infantino. The room laughed. Then his tone changed entirely, and he added: but I have to admit, the recent World Cup was well organised.

It was a classic reversal device, and it worked. But if you stop at the laughter, you miss the most valuable part of that evening. After the joke, the owner of Napoli put three issues on the table that European football is trying hard not to look at directly: the power of FIFA, the real value of Europe's second-tier cups, and the place of hard-core supporters in a stadium that has been turned into a commercial product.

I have followed Napoli since my years in Valencia, rewinding footage from the seasons when Valencia won La Liga under Rafa Benítez to see how he rotated an entire squad without anyone noticing. Twelve years of watching this industry is enough to teach one thing: statements like these always carry a map behind them.

A president who rescued a club from bankruptcy

De Laurentiis bought Napoli when the club was bankrupt, more than two decades ago. Under his ownership, Napoli have won two Serie A titles and five domestic cups. That record matters because it creates something very few football presidents possess: the right to speak.

Nobody listens to a president who has just failed. They listen to a man who has proven he can run a club. And when a man like that stands on the podium of the Foreign Press Association, what he is aiming at is not in the room. It is in the entire media system behind the room.

This is a rule I learned over years in the trade: a press award does not confer power, but it confers a microphone. And a microphone, in an industry where every argument travels through media, is an asset.

My way of reading data comes from seasons like those. A title does not live in the matches people remember. It lives in the matches people forget — the fourth game in ten days, where the midfield is rotated through three positions and nobody writes a single line. De Laurentiis is the same. What mattered that evening was not the joke, but the moment he chose to make it.

Infantino and the plan to sell shares in the World Cup

The hottest point is that Infantino faces calls to resign after exploring a plan under which private investors would buy shares in the World Cup and other competitions.

Read that sentence again, slowly. Shares. In the World Cup.

This is the kind of proposal that a decade ago would have been treated as a joke in the corridors of the federations. Today it exists for real, and it is powerful enough to trigger a leadership crisis at the most powerful body in world football.

De Laurentiis does not attack Infantino head-on. He says he wanted to shoot him, then praises him. But the praise is placed so that it becomes a trap: if the World Cup was well organised, then the problem is not organisational competence. The problem lies in the power structure above.

That structure, in his words, sits beyond any oversight by a legislative body, does whatever it wants, and cuts off anyone who raises their head.

That is a heavy sentence. It is not aimed at an individual. It is aimed at a model: sports bodies granting themselves absolute self-governance, where no parliament, no independent regulator, can reach them. He even pointed to a documentary series about FIFA's problems, and to what happened at UEFA in the past. He anchors his argument in the historical record, not in emotion.

For someone who works by reading data, this is a notable line of reasoning. He does not say FIFA is corrupt. He says FIFA has no oversight mechanism. One sentence can get you sued, the other cannot. And the way he chooses each word shows a man preparing for a long game, not for a headline.

Europa League, Conference League and the question nobody wants to answer

He also questioned the purpose of the Europa League and the Conference League. In his view, these competitions exist to collect votes for re-election.

This is where I want to pause longest. Behind that sentence sits a very concrete political economy.

Europe has three tiers of cups. The Champions League distributes most of the broadcast money. The Europa League and the Conference League split the remainder among mid-tier clubs. Sporting-wise, these two competitions give teams like Napoli a path to silverware. Structurally, they keep a network of national federations satisfied, because every European qualification slot is a distributable political benefit.

De Laurentiis does not say this in the language of an economist. He says it in the language of an owner. But both versions tell the same story: money and votes travel the same road.

One detail stands out: Napoli is not among the biggest beneficiaries of the current distribution order. That is why his question about the two second-tier cups is not rhetorical. It is a proposal to renegotiate.

America as a mirror, Europe as a patient

Elsewhere, De Laurentiis said the United States is still a shining beacon, while Europe is in crisis.

That line was skimmed over quickly in the wire copy. It deserves to be read as a statement about models, not about football. The United States has a sports system built on concentrated ownership, revenue shared through collective agreements, and a governance mechanism that can be bound by commercial law. Europe has a pyramid, where power is split between national federations and bodies such as UEFA and FIFA.

A club president saying America shines and Europe is in crisis is saying something very specific about where he wants European football to go. And it is not ideologically neutral: it leans towards a model where owners hold more pricing power and collective intermediaries hold less.

The owner says it plainly: I do not want hard-core fans

De Laurentiis says he is against ultras. He wants a family-friendly stadium. He said plainly that hard-core supporters had no place in that vision. Then he linked them to organised crime: the Mafia, the 'ndrangheta, the Camorra. And he called on police chiefs and government ministers to step in and get the situation under control.

This is a heavier statement than any criticism of FIFA. It converts an internal matter between club and supporters into a public-order matter. And once an issue is pushed into the public-order frame, the door to dialogue tends to shut very quickly.

Italy has wrestled with the power of curva groups since the 1970s, through repeated security crackdowns, through ticketing rules and stadium-entry identification. Each crackdown empties the stands a little more, and each time, revenue rises a little. It is a trade-off that club boards often choose, but few spell it out as bluntly as De Laurentiis.

I read this differently. A family-friendly stadium is a business model before it is an ethical statement. Tickets cost more. Tourists, food, retail, commercial zones, stadium tours. That model works well in England and in the United States. It delivers steadier revenue than a block of supporters buying cheap season tickets and singing for ninety minutes.

The problem is this: a club needs both. Revenue needs customers. Atmosphere needs a stand.

In the transfer window, people read the numbers sheet; I read a novel about greed. Here too, except the novel is written about the stands, not the transfer room.

When a president names his own supporters after organised-crime syndicates, he is doing more than describing a security problem. He is redefining who counts as a customer of this club.

Where I could be wrong

I could be wrong. De Laurentiis may simply be a straight talker, and the overlap between his personal position and his club's interests may be nothing more than an overlap. Plenty of football presidents genuinely believe what they say, even when it benefits them.

And to be fair: he rescued Napoli from bankruptcy and delivered two league titles plus five domestic cups. A man with that record has the right to question the structure that produced it.

But three positions in a single evening — FIFA lacks oversight, the two second-tier cups are not worth it, hard-core stands have no place — do not contradict each other. They serve one logic: reduce the power of collective intermediaries, and hand more pricing power to the club owner.

I should also be clear about the quality of the information. The original report does not state the year of the event, does not identify which World Cup is being referenced, and most of the accompanying information points carry no attribution. For someone whose trade is storing data, that is a gap that must be flagged, not filled with guesswork.

People fear controversy; I fear a match that does not make me think. De Laurentiis forced an entire industry to think that evening.

What I will be tracking

Over the next twelve months, three things belong on the watch list.

First, the fate of the plan to sell shares to private investors. If it passes, even partially, the ownership model of world football has changed. Once a league's shares belong to an investment fund, revenue distribution stops being an internal meeting between federations. It becomes a shareholder relationship, with contracts, courts and the right to sue.

Second, UEFA's response to questions about the value of the Europa League and the Conference League. If a reform proposal emerges — adjusted entry slots, redistributed money, a revised calendar — that will tell us De Laurentiis read the timing correctly.

Third, and this worries me most: the relationship between Napoli and the supporters behind the goal. That confrontation carries a price, and the price rarely shows up on the balance sheet. It shows up when the stands go quiet.

I do not write to be agreed with; I write to open doors that others have locked. The door De Laurentiis opened that evening leads into two rooms at once: FIFA's boardroom, and the stand behind the goal at Napoli's stadium. European football will have to walk through one of them, or close both.

If the man demanding a more transparent FIFA is also the man who wants to clear out his own hard-core stand, then who is really reforming?