SAFE HANDS
ASD Club Napoli, a soccer school in the town of Castellammare di Stabia on the Bay of Naples, occupies a special place in the Italian football scene. And not just because local lad and penalty-kick stopper extraordinaire Gianluigi Donnarumma started out there on the road to worldwide renown and deserved acclamation as Euro 2020’s Player of the Tournament.
Club Napoli, unremarkable in its facilities yet awash with know-how, ideas and ambition, is what Italian sportswriters justifiably term a fabbrica dei portiere – a goalkeeping factory.
Since the turn of the century, no fewer than five of its alumni have gone on to enjoy solid professional careers: Antonio Mirante, who, apart from featuring for Parma, Bologna and Roma, was also a back-up for the national team; former Napoli custodian Gennaro Iezzo; Alfonso De Lucia (ex-Parma, Monza and Livorno); Donnarumma’s elder brother Antonio, a graduate of the Milan academy who later served as his sibling’s understudy; and last but absolutely not least, Gianluigi himself, more commonly known as “Gigio”.
“It’s amazing that a town of 60,000 inhabitants has produced so many Serie A goalkeepers,” declared Iezzo in an interview on a Neapolitan radio station back in 2015, the year Gigio made his top-flight bow for Milan at the incredibly tender age of 16 years and 242 days. “It’s a fairy story that Gianluigi went in the space of two years from the Club Napoli academy to a Serie A spot with Milan.
“Of course, Donnarumma had the talent and the physical attributes. But
