The trick, with Aurelio De Laurentiis, On FootBall

Film in His Blood, a Football Revolution in His Plans

The trick, with Aurelio De Laurentiis, is to sit and to wait. He tends to take the scenic route through a conversation; his answers come wrapped in anecdotes and parables, laced with riddles and rhetorical questions.

There are times when you wonder if he has taken one detour too many, become so distracted by his own tangents that he has lost his thread. Listening back, it is hard to pinpoint how, exactly, a question about the Champions League’s revenue distribution leads to a brief but powerful homily about the dangers of the ‘Ndrangheta, the Calabrian mafia, but it does.

It is, though, no great ordeal. De Laurentiis might be most famous now as owner of S.S.C. Napoli, the Italian soccer team he rescued from oblivion and painstakingly restored to Europe’s head table, but he is still, at heart, a film producer, a showman. He knows how to weave together a story, how to craft a compelling pitch. And when he gets to his destination, as he always does, it is invariably worth it.

De Laurentiis is, after all, never knowingly short of ideas on how to revolutionize soccer, never without a sacred cow to slaughter, never without a tradition to overhaul. He has, at various times in the recent past, suggested cutting games from 90 minutes to 60 and advocated the effective abolition of UEFA, European soccer’s governing body, instead handing power directly to Europe’s biggest clubs....

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