Napoli wins 1st Italian title since ’90

Napoli won its first Italian soccer league title since the days when Diego Maradona played for the club, sealing the trophy with a 1-1 draw at Udinese on Thursday. The “scudetto” (championship) set off wild scenes of celebrations throughout Naples, inside the stadium in Udine and beyond. Maradona led Napoli to its only previous Serie A titles in 1987 and 1990. League scoring leader Victor Osimhen equalized for Napoli early in the second half. Napoli moved an insurmountable 16 points ahead of second-place Lazio with five matches still to play. Besides the 11,000 Napoli fans inside and 5,000 more outside the stadium in Udine in northern Italy, a capacity crowd of more than 50,000 watched the match on jumbo screens at the Stadio Diego Armando Maradona in Naples. “You always told me, ‘We want to win,’ and now we’ve won. We’ve won all together,” Napoli president Aurelio De Laurentiis told the crowd at the Naples stadium. De Laurentiis took over the club in 2004 when Napoli was bankrupt, restarting in the third division. The title also gives Napoli coach Luciano Spalletti the one honor he has coveted most after previously managing Roma and Inter and winning two Russian league championships with Zenit St. Petersburg.