"Soccer will lose the younger generation." That's Aurelio De Laurentiis, 76-year-old movie mogul and Napoli owner, sitting at his Beverly Hills residence on Easter Sunday — and he's already mid-flow before you can ask a question.
His solution? Burn down pretty much everything and start again.
Twenty-five-minute halves. No red cards. No yellow cards. No small-market clubs eating up broadcast inventory. A European Super League. And while you're at it, reform the offside rule so referees can stop chalking off goals by the width of a toenail.
The 50-Minute Game — Madness or Genius?
De Laurentiis wants matches cut to 50 minutes of tracked, in-play time — no stoppage-time padding, no time-wasting theatrics allowed. "You cannot stay down on the field and play around like an actor!" he says. Feigning injury means you're off the pitch immediately.
In place of cards, he proposes a sin-bin system: five minutes off the field for a yellow card offence, 20 minutes for what would currently be a red. His logic is sound, actually. Players routinely take tactical yellows to stop dangerous attacks, knowing the real punishment arrives in a game they haven't played yet. A sin-bin hits them now, in the match that matters.
Whether 25-minute halves would kill the sport's rhythm or save it from a generation raised on TikTok and FIFA is a genuine debate. But the frustration driving his thinking is legitimate — broadcast ratings for bloated, stoppages-heavy matches aren't exactly trending upward.
The Super League Argument, and Why Small Clubs Shouldn't Bother Showing Up
He wants Serie A reduced from 20 to 16 clubs, with a one-million-supporter minimum threshold for entry. Clubs from towns of 50,000 people? Out. "When the team go on DAZN or on Sky, how many people will watch? 3,000? 4,000?" He has a point about broadcast value, even if the idea of stripping promotion rights from smaller communities is politically radioactive.
Beyond that, he's pushing a pan-European league — not a Champions League replacement but a full-season competition pulling the top five from England, four from Spain and Germany, five from Italy, three from France. The remnants would restructure their domestic divisions accordingly. He had conversations with Real Madrid's Florentino Perez ahead of the 2021 Super League announcement, though Napoli weren't included in the original selections — something De Laurentiis openly resented.
- Italy: Juventus, Inter, AC Milan, Napoli, Roma
- England: five clubs (unspecified)
- Spain: four clubs
- Germany: four clubs
- France: three clubs
He also threw out the idea of bringing three to five major MLS clubs — "the best of New York, the best of Boston" — into a reformed Champions League. Whether that's visionary or chaotic depends entirely on what you think football is for.
On Kvaratskhelia's January exit to PSG, De Laurentiis is unapologetic. He claims the player's camp was prepared to invoke FIFA's Article 17 — which allows players under 28 to exit after three years for a nominal fee — leaving him with little practical choice but to sell. Conte hated it. The title got won anyway.
"The fans want to win and they think players will honour their jersey forever. But it's not true. They honour only the money."
He's been in football long enough to know that's not cynicism. That's just the job.
