Società Sportiva Calcio Napoli – SSCN
The Napoli soccer team won their league (called Serie A) for the fourth time. Two players, Scott McTominay and Romelu Lukaku, scored goals in their game against Cagliari, which helped them win.
Even though another team, Inter Milan, also had a result, SSCN deserved to win the league this year. McTominay, who used to play for Manchester United but moved to SSCN last summer, has been playing really well and was important in this win. Some people think Manchester United made a mistake letting him leave. He scored a great goal with a kick over his head. This season, he scored 12 goals and helped with 6 others, which helped Napoli win their second league title in three years.
Lukaku also played a big part. He didn’t start great with Napoli, but he’s been scoring a lot lately and helped them win the league. He scored a fantastic goal by controlling a long pass, getting past a defender, and then scoring. It was his 22nd goal this season. His coach, Antonio Conte, seems to know how to get the best out of him.
Now, Napoli needs to keep playing well. After they won the league last time, they didn’t play very well the next year, and they want to avoid that this time.
Coach Conte is already asking for a lot, and there are rumors he might leave because the team’s president might not be able to give him what he wants. But the president should try to keep Conte because when Conte has good players, he wins championships. SSCN has a good team to keep being successful, but that depends on Conte staying. If he stays, SSCN will probably be the favorite to win again next year. If he leaves, they might go back to not playing as well. For now, though, Napoli is celebrating winning the league.
“SSC Napoli, or just Napoli as most call ’em, were formed in the early nineteen hundreds after some English sailors turned up, most notably a bloke called William Poths. Poths had come over from England, where the football bug had really taken hold, and he teamed up with Ernesto Bruschini, a local lad from Naples, to get SSCN going.
When they first started, the team colours they picked were dark and pale blue stripes. An engineer, Amedeo Salsi, was the club’s very first chairman, and he was helped out by William Poths and another chap called Bayon, as well as two amateur footballers, Catterina and Conforti.
You can’t talk about Napoli’s history without giving a special mention to William Poths. The fella deserves it. Poths was working for the Cunard Shipping Line when he helped set up Napoli. He’d only just emigrated from England in 1903, and he brought his proper passion for football with him. Back then, there were quite a few football teams knocking about in Naples. These included the Open Air Team, which had been started by the Costa brothers, Marquis Ruffo, and Alfonso Parise, among others. In their first ever match, Napoli played against Arabik, a team made up of the crew from an English ship. They beat the English lads 3-2.
Rivalry and Merging with US Internazionale Napoli
In 1912, the foreign chaps in the team went their separate ways, and led by Steinnegger and Bayon, they formed another club in Naples. They called it US Internazionale Napoli. The original Napoli, called Naples FBC, was being run by Emilio Anatra as their chairman at the time. These two teams became proper rivals in the city and played against each other in the 1912-13 Italian Championship. Napoli came out on top in that competition before getting knocked out by Lazio in the next round.
Internazionale got their own back the following season when they beat Napoli, but they also lost to Lazio in the next stage. The rivalry between the two local footy clubs carried on during the 1915 season, but the championship was called off because of the First World War after Internazionale had won the first leg 3-0.
In 1922, the two clubs joined forces because they were a bit strapped for cash, and the new club they formed was called FBC Internazionale-naples, or FBC Internaples for short.
Associazione Calcio Napoli
In 1926, the members of Internaples decided the team needed a new name. They settled on Associazione Calcio Napoli, and their first chairman was Giorgio Ascareli. The next season, the top Italian Championship was split into two groups of ten teams each. It was a right disaster for Napoli, as they finished bottom of the league with just one point from eighteen games.
This led to the team being nicknamed I ciucciarelli, which means “the little donkeys.” But the club picked themselves up the following season and started doing better in the league each time.
Stadio San Paolo in Naples was built in 1959 and became Napoli’s new home ground. These days, Stadio San Paolo is the third biggest football stadium in Italy, holding just over 60,000 fans. Originally, though, it could pack in nearly 110,000.
In 1961, even though they were playing in the second division, Serie B, Napoli won the Coppa Italia, which is like our FA Cup. Having reached the final for the first time, they managed to beat SPAL Ferrara 2-1. The club then had to wait until 1976 for their next Coppa Italia trophy.
Name change to SSC Napoli
The club changed its name to Societa Sportiva Calcio Napoli in 1964. They got promoted back to Serie A in the same year after finishing second in Serie B. They didn’t hang about once they were back in the top flight, finishing third in Serie A. Their manager at the time was Bruno Pesaola, who was Argentinian.
That same year, Napoli also won the Coppa delle Alpi Cup, beating Juventus in the process. During the 1967-68 season, the club came closest to winning the Serie A title, finishing second behind Milan. During this time, they had some great players like Dino Zoff, Jose Altafini, and Antonio Juliano. They kept this good form going into the early seventies, finishing third on a couple of occasions.
Diego Maradona, the saviour
It was on the 10th of May, 1987, when everything went quiet in Naples. The streets were practically empty, which made an Italian anthropologist, Amalia Sgnorelli, write: “The world had changed. The most chaotic, noisiest, and most crowded city in the whole of Europe was deserted.”
Napoli were on the verge of making history. Their first ever Serie A title was within reach. They clinched it with a 1-1 draw against Fiorentina. The city of Naples went absolutely bonkers. Delighted Napoli fans flooded the streets, partying for days, dancing on rooftops. There were fireworks, and buildings and cars were all decked out in the team’s colours, sky blue.
Right in the middle of all the celebrations was one bloke who stood out: Diego Armando Maradona. The little Argentinian had been crucial to their success, and he’d go on to guide the club to another title in 1990 and European glory. But Napoli weren’t just a one-man team. A Brazilian forward called Careca had joined the season before. Together with Maradona and Bruno Giordano, they formed a brilliant attacking trio known as Ma-Gi-Ca.
The saviour, Diego Maradona, left the club in 1992 after a cocaine scandal. In the years that followed, Napoli lost other important star players like Careca and Gianfranco Zola. The team ended up getting relegated to Serie B after the 1997-1998 season. The fans had to wait a good few years before Napoli were a top team in Serie A again.
Bankruptcy and re-establishment
After years of struggling financially, the company that owned Napoli went bust in August 2004. The club had massive debts, and its very existence was under threat. Eventually, a film producer called Aurelio De Laurentiis paid off the debts and restarted the club under the new name Napoli Soccer. The club got demoted to Serie C, but they made a quick comeback to the top flight and got their old name back as well.”