De Laurentiis Speaks Plainly in Rome; V-League 2026 Stays Silent

On the evening of 23 September 2026, in a hall in Rome, Aurelio De Laurentiis collected an award from the Foreign Press Association, took the microphone and said he had once wanted to shoot the president of FIFA. He paused for exactly one beat, laughed, and praised the World Cup organisers. The room laughed with him. One sentence, two edges, and nobody could sue anybody.

People call me a troublemaker. I call it seeing the run before it happens. In Rome that night there was a football owner playing exactly the game I play: saying out loud what the majority only thinks, then backing the sentence with evidence that sits where nobody bothers to look.

The Napoli that De Laurentiis bought in 2026 was a corpse. The club was bankrupt, dumped into Serie C, and the San Paolo stadium still belonged to the city of Naples. Nine years later that club finished second in Serie A in 2026-13, had the 2026 Coppa Italia in the cabinet, sold Edinson Cavani to Paris Saint-Germain in July 2026 for around 64 million euros according to the French club’s announcement, and spent part of that money to bring Gonzalo Higuaín in from Real Madrid and put Rafa Benítez in the dugout. An owner who walked from the third tier to a position where selling one striker can fund an entire squad.

Why an Italian story is our story

Italy in 2026 had three cracks that outsiders like to file away as internal Italian business. Most Serie A stadiums belong to city authorities, not to clubs. Without owning the ground, a club has no hospitality boxes to sell, no restaurants, no shops, nothing to sell a spectator except the ticket itself. The hard-core groups in the curva control part of the ticketing and most of the atmosphere, and in exchange they hand the club singing and loyalty every Sunday. FIFA decided that the 2026 World Cup would be played in winter, and Europe’s domestic leagues had to bend their calendars and absorb the damage.

Inside that frame, De Laurentiis threw two punches at once. He said the Europa League and Europe’s second-tier competitions exist so that officials can collect re-election votes, that Napoli’s Thursday nights only send the squad home with heavy legs. He declared that Napoli would build a family-style stadium where hard-core ultras would have no place. And when he spoke about those groups, he named all three of Italy’s major organised-crime syndicates.

What he is attacking is not fan morality. It is asset ownership.

Read it closely and the line is plain: De Laurentiis is against the curva because the curva does not generate money, while a family stand does — and both facts come back to one thing: he does not own the ground his team plays on.

I sat through three Napoli home games from the 2026-13 Serie A season again. The San Paolo was full, loud and beautiful in the way an old opera house is beautiful: everything poured into the singing, while the facilities had rotted. A club that finishes second in the league but cannot decide anything about its own stadium has revenue that depends on the goodwill of a city council. To change the revenue structure, the owner has to change the asset structure. Selling Cavani for 64 million euros and buying a coach and a new striker is how a man thinks who treats a club as an asset rather than a free stage.

His argument against FIFA and UEFA runs along the same road. If governing bodies sell tickets, sell broadcast rights, sell competitions they do not own, then clubs are tenants. And a tenant does not get to set the rent on his own home.

This is where Vietnamese football sits right inside the story.

The 2026 V-League closed with Hà Nội T&T as champions. All season we talked about professionalisation, about centralised broadcast rights, about sponsorship money. Try answering one simple question: how many V-League stadiums are owned by the clubs themselves? Hàng Đẫy, Chi Lăng, Thống Nhất — those names belong to the state, and the clubs pay rent season by season. A club that rents a ground, sells cheap tickets and lives off sponsorship contracts from a handful of companies is not yet a football business. It is a football team with a sponsor. The two are worlds apart, and the difference shows in what the money is called in the ledger: revenue or luck.

Hà Nội T&T did not need a golden generation to win the 2026 V-League. What they need, and what the whole league needs, is a generation willing to play the football other people are afraid of — starting with having the nerve to ask who owns the ground they play on.

In meeting rooms, Vietnamese football plays a possession game. Meet, draft, revise, meet again, wait. I call it an inverted anti-tiki-taka: not keeping the ball to wait for an opening, but keeping the ball so that nobody has to be responsible. The Italians hit the opponent’s shin. De Laurentiis made an accusation that can be checked, named the body, named the problem, and accepted the backlash.

Where I might be wrong

I want to write this part before somebody writes it for me.

“A family stadium” is a very elegant verbal trap. In Naples, by 2026, De Laurentiis’s new-stadium project had been talked about for years and was still on paper. Without a new ground, the family stand is only a slogan used to attack the hard-core groups — who, whether we like it or not, remain the club’s most loyal audience. If a V-League club copies the Italian owner and copies only the anti-fan half while dropping the asset-building half, the outcome is obvious: an already empty stand gets emptier, the singing dies, and no hospitality box rises out of a project that lives on paper.

Nor am I certain whether naming the mafia in a stadium argument is recklessness or calculation. In Italy it brings two things at once: public cover and the hostility of people who used to sing for the team every Sunday. My read leans towards a premeditated political bet rather than an impulsive remark. But if there is a league where a packed stand is still the only thing that sells, his whole argument collapses. I have to admit that, even when it weakens my own piece.

Checkpoint

I am writing two lines here to judge myself later. Over the next five seasons, Napoli will not win Serie A — I will come back to verify on 31 May 2026. If I am wrong, I will write my own 1,200-word retraction, the way I used to write back at journalism school.

And here, by the end of the 2026 season, if no V-League club has published matchday revenue covering thirty percent of its own wage bill, then every speech about professionalisation is just singing in a stand with nobody listening. Vietnamese football may not need a new stadium today. But it does need to know what it is renting, from whom, and what it is paying with.