"Soccer will lose the younger generation." That's Aurelio De Laurentiis, Napoli's 76-year-old owner, speaking from his Beverly Hills residence on Easter Sunday — and he's not just venting. He has a blueprint.
The Italian movie mogul and Serie A's most outspoken chairman wants to cut matches to 50 minutes, abolish red and yellow cards entirely, loosen the offside rule, and strip small-market clubs out of the top flight. Whether you agree or not, there's a thread of logic running through almost all of it.
The 50-minute game — and why he's not entirely wrong
De Laurentiis wants to replace the current 45-minute halves with 25-minute periods of pure playing time — no added time, no drawn-out VAR delays, no theatrics. "You cannot stay down on the field and play around like an actor," he says. Feign injury? You're off.
The sin-bin would replace cards altogether. Yellow offence? Five minutes out of the game. Red card equivalent? Twenty minutes on the sideline. His argument is that suspensions in future matches punish teams more than they punish the specific act — a player can cynically foul to stop a counter-attack knowing the real cost only comes next week. In-game consequences would change the calculus immediately.
On offside, he wants the millimetre-by-millimetre calls scrapped. That one's hard to argue with. A toenail ruling out a goal has never pleased anyone except the defending side.
Whether FIFA or UEFA would touch any of this is another matter entirely. But the underlying problem he's diagnosing — that modern football is slow, stop-start, and increasingly hostile to short attention spans — is real. Broadcasters are already watching younger viewers drift.
The Super League idea, the small-clubs question, and Conte
De Laurentiis wants Serie A cut from 20 to 16 teams, with any club that can't claim at least one million supporters shown the door. "When the team go on DAZN or on Sky, how many people will watch? 3,000? 4,000?" His version of the league would feature Juventus, Inter, Milan, Napoli and Roma as permanent fixtures — everyone else auditioning for the remaining spots.
It's a cold view of football. Clubs like Sassuolo, built from a town of 40,000 people, have earned promotion the same way Napoli clawed back from Serie C. De Laurentiis waves that away. "Napoli has 100 million supporters — it is different."
On a European Super League, he's more nuanced than the 2021 breakaway version — he rejected that format because it named clubs rather than selecting based on league finish. His preference is a full pan-European competition: roughly 20-25 clubs from the top five leagues playing each other across a season. The details are vague, but the instinct is for fewer meaningless group-stage matches and more games that actually shift the needle commercially.
On Gianni Infantino's expanded Club World Cup, he's unambiguous: "You will kill my money. Because I invested in that guy and you are squeezing him just to put money in your pocket."
As for Antonio Conte — who just delivered Napoli their fourth Scudetto — De Laurentiis is bullish about keeping him. He compares Conte's management style to the drill sergeant in Full Metal Jacket, and means it as a compliment. "When you defend, probably you win. If you just want to attack, probably you lose."
- Conte has one year left on his contract
- The Italian federation presidency is currently vacant, complicating any national team approach
- De Laurentiis says he needs a decision by April or May to find a replacement if Conte goes
Kvaratskhelia's January sale to PSG — which Conte opposed — cost Napoli one of their best players mid-title run. De Laurentiis says the player's camp threatened to invoke FIFA's Article 17, allowing players under 28 to exit a contract after three years for minimal compensation. He's pushing to have that rule changed. It won't be the last time a club finds itself on the wrong end of it.
"The agent is only a vampire who sucks money from everywhere," he says. Then again, De Laurentiis sold Kvaratskhelia in January and still won the league. Hard to argue with the outcome, whatever the process.
