Napoli finally ended their long wait to win the Serie A on Thursday, May 5, after securing a draw against Udinese.
Sandi Lovric gave Udinese the lead during the match, but Nigerian football star Victor Osimhen’s 22nd league goal of the season gave Napoli all they needed to secure the title after waiting for 33 years.
During his goal celebration, Osimhen broke his face mask and he had to play without it for a few minutes while it was repaired by Napoli staff members on the sideline.
Napoli won their third Serie A title with 80 points after 33 rounds, 16 points ahead of second-placed Lazio. The last time the southern city won the championship of the topflight league was in 1990, when late Argentinian legend Diego Maradona played for the club.
They still have five more games to play against Fiorentina, Monza, Inter Milan, Bologna, and Sampdoria before the end of the season.
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 before he embraced Naples Mayor Gaetano Manfredi.
De Laurentiis took over the club in 2004 when Napoli was declared bankrupt, restarting in the third division.
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