Extremely low attendance expected against Slovan Bratislava

When Napoli played Sparta Prague in their first home match of this Europa League campaign, barely 10,000 fans showed up. Thanks to a poor start, discouragement from the Champions League playoff loss, and an opponent few fans recognized, Napoli suffered one of it's worst all-time attendance marks at their home stadium.

The lowest attendance mark of the Aurelio De Laurentiis era of the club was also a Europa match, when just 9,500 people showed up for the last group stage match in 2012 when Dutch side PSV came to Italy. Napoli had, like this season, already secured qualification to the knockout rounds, but their play in the group stage was... not great, to put it mildly. Napoli then went on to get whipped 5-0 on aggregate by Viktoria Plzen in the round of 32.

Today, though, could set a new mark, and it doesn't look like it's going to just go under the PSV match either. As of early yesterday, only 5,000 tickets have been sold for the Slovan Bratislava match, and while sales were expected to pick up in the final hours leading up to kickoff, it's unlikely that Napoli managed to sell another 4,500 tickets.

It's perhaps understandable in some ways; Slovan are not a good team. They've yet to win even one point in the group, and have scored just one goal in their five matches. That combined with apparently high ticket prices mean that interest in the match was very low, and the sales totals reflect that in a terrifying way.

Seeing the San Paolo so empty for this match won't be fun. Napoli need to figure out how to avoid this in the future, because