Why I love Napoli

Welcome to the refreshed The Siren’s Song! To celebrate the new look and feel of our sports communities, we’re sharing stories of how and why we became fans of our favorite teams. If you’d like to share your story, head over to the FanPosts to write your own post. Each FanPost will be entered into a drawing to win a $500 Fanatics gift card. We’re collecting all of the stories here and featuring the best ones across our network as well. Come Fan With Us!

Napoli are a team of passion. A team of emotion. A team, occasionally, of frustration, and sometimes, of joy. Whatever the feeling is, though, one thing unites us all: we are all Napoli fans.

But why? What about the team ignited this passion, this feeling, this need to be a fan of Napoli? All of our stories are different, and all deserve to be told.

For me, the journey began in 2010. Despite the admonitions of many friends that I was being a fool, I found myself watching more and more Serie A because I just found the Italian game to be fascinating. But it wasn’t one of the Milan teams that drew me in, it wasn’t Fiorentina or Roma or Juventus — it was this crazy little team in blue with a spiky-haired midfielder and a wild, balls-to-the-walls style, and the more I saw them, the more I wanted to see them.

That team was Napoli, that midfielder was Marek Hamsik, and that style was thanks to Walter Mazzarri. They were just so different, so fun, that I couldn’t help but fall in love. I was already a fan of Liverpool — blame my best friend in high school who lived there as a child for that — but this team grabbed me in a way no other had. In a real way, Napoli are why I do the work that I do, and I love them even more for that.

Sure, the ride has been rough at times over the years. They haven’t won a league or European title of any sort, and they go through spells when they’re the most frustrating thing in my life, but I still love this team. And when things are good for Napoli, it is great to watch it as a fan.

I know things haven’t been consistently great around the site. Life managed to make this an incredibly difficult season for me to work on it — sometimes for good reasons, sometimes for bad ones — and working mostly alone meant that the site suffered for it. For that I deeply apologize, but that’s mostly behind us now. The summer is here, and there’s a lot of good things on the horizon for Napoli.

But before we get to all that, tell us — why are you a fan of Napoli? There’s no bad stories here, only meaningful ones for us, and we want to hear them!

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