The Napoli soccer sports club, better known as Napoli, is an Italian football club based in the city of Naples.
Founded in 1926 as the Napoli Soccer Association, in 1964 it was renamed SSC Napoli.

The turning point came in the summer of 1984: the president Ferlaino, determined to lead the company towards great goals, on 30 June 1984 defined the purchase of the Argentine champion Diego Armando Maradona from Barcelona for a record amount of 15 billion lire. Under the technical management of Ottavio Bianchi, in 1987 Napoli won their first Scudetto, the first club in the continental South to succeed, while also winning the third Italian Cup.

The financial crisis, however, forced the club to deprive itself of its best men: Gianfranco Zola, Daniel Fonseca, Ciro Ferrara and Fabio Cannavaro, among others, were sold. In the following two years, with Vujadin Boškov on the bench, Napoli got a seventh and a tenth place.It reached the 1996-1997 Italian Cup final, being defeated at the hands of Vicenza.

The crisis reached its peak in 1997-1998, with the last place in the standings and relegation to Serie B after 33 consecutive years in the top flight. The blue club returned to Serie A in 2000, and then relegated again after just one year.