Napoli sign new five-year kit deal with Kappa

Tired of Napoli wearing shirts that are too tight, with boring alternates and too-crazy third shirts? Good news! Napoli just signed a new deal with a different kit manufacturing company, Turin-based Italian outfit Kappa. The deal, as currently reported, is a five-year contract worth €8 million per season.

Financially the deal is ... OK. It's certainly an upgrade on the previous Macron deal, which was believed to be worth around €4 million per season. But even though it's the fourth most valuable such sponsorship in Italy, it's well behind the top three -- Juventus (€30 million), AC Milan (€30 million), and Inter Milan (€20 million) -- and well behind the recent pace of deals for teams on the rise in Europe, which have been upwards of €15 million per season and sometimes more.

Their kits also tend to be rather boring, and are often on the same too-tight scale that a lot of Macron's kits have issues with. In Serie A, they currently make the kits for Cagliari, Torino, and Sampdoria -- though Sampdoria are changing sponsors next season -- and other notable European clubs they have on their roster include Wolfsburg, Borussia Mönchengladbach, Toulouse, and Leeds United. Go around and look at their kits. There's nothing exciting there, and they're all marred by a not-great company logo on top of it.

For Napoli fans in America, the news is worse, because it's next to impossible to get a kit for any of those other teams mentioned. Kappa have basically no presence in the United States, and that's unlikely to change for Napoli. That means the club will be basically cut off from a major potential source of revenue, which makes an already mediocre deal look a little worse.

This certainly isn't a bad deal for Napoli. It's better than what they had from a financial perspective, and that always helps. But it's also not a particularly good deal for the club, and if they want to start competing with the big boys, they need to start getting more good deals.