How Napoli’s owner used a fake contract to bring Argentina’s star to Serie A
CBS – Explaining the meaning of Diego Armando Maradona for the Napoli fans and the whole city of Naples is almost impossible. He was an icon beyond soccer. He wasn’t just the best player in the world and probably the best player of all time, he was the man who changed the history of Naples. A city where everything seems much more difficult to happen than other cities around Italy.
Imagine winning the Scudetto, or the UEFA Cup, with a team that was fighting to avoid relegation until Maradona arrived. Diego, as many citizens of the historic city in the south of Italy call him, was just something else. He represented the social redemption of thousands of people who were struggling in their lives. Many of them continued to struggle, but it didn’t matter because Maradona was there. June 1984 was the month that changed the history of this city thanks to the vision of the owner of the club: Corrado Ferlaino. CBS Sports had the pleasure to sit down and talk with the person who made this dream becoming a reality, two years after the passing of the unforgettable Maradona: “There is only one way to describe him, he was a Neapolitan Argentinian”, Ferlaino says.
Corrado Ferlaino (91) is an Italian entrepreneur who became Napoli president in 1969 and kept a role inside the club until the late 90’s. He marked an era for Italian soccer, and his image is always linked with the transfer of Maradona from FC Barcelona in the summer 1984. A story that gives us an insight of how soccer is linked to politics, but also of how the vision of a man can change the history of an entire city. Ferlaino has told this story many times, but his eyes still shine almost 40 years after the events actually happened as he remembers every single minute of those incredible days: “I have told this story so many times that every time I kind of add new details. I don’t want to say inaccurate things, so this time I will try to be as faithful as possible”.
How politics got involved
To explain the transfer of Maradona to Napoli we need to take into account the financial differences between Italian clubs such as Juventus, Inter Milan or AC Milan and others like Napoli. The Azzurri were not as strong as today and the Maradona deal seemed to be only a dream, something that only the big clubs from the North could afford. This is why this is a story that includes much more than only soccer, because it’s also a story about social and financial differences in the same country:
“Barcelona wanted to sell Maradona because, let’s say, he wasn’t really in their style, but on the other hand they didn’t want to sell him for how good he was. They were undecided between two totally opposing ideas inside the club. Then, there was a financial problem. We had to find thirteen billion of the Italian lire at the time (around $7.5 million) to buy Maradona.” Finding the money became the priority of Ferlaino those weeks, but he managed to find a way.
