His transfer to the Neapolitan club in the summer of 1975 caused a scandal, but the fans subscribed 75,000 season tickets and the club earned three billion
Beppe Savoldi has passed away, he was 77 years old and football lovers remember him as mister two billion. It was July 1st 1975 when Bologna sold Savoldi to Napoli for the sum of one billion and four hundred million lire, plus the sale of Clerici and half of the price tag of Rosario Rampanti (until then co-owned by Naples and Turin), valued at 600 million overall: a total of two billion. It was the most expensive operation ever carried out in the world of professional football until then, contested even in the Neapolitan capital itself, in a period of serious economic crisis and recession (which gave rise to trade union representatives to argue that with half of the amount spent would have been possible to reimburse the city’s garbage collectors for their back wages owed to them by the Municipality of Naples). But the purchase of Savoldi unleashed the passion of the Neapolitans who bought 75,000 season tickets, bringing three billion into the club’s coffers. In the four years spent under Vesuvius scored 77 goals overall, winning another Italian Cup and a new Italian-English cup in 1976.
Atalanta and Bologna
Savoldi has collected in Serie A 405 appearances scoring 168 goalsplacing himself in seventeenth position in the all-time top scorers rankings of the Italian top league. Top scorer of the 1972-73 Serie A and 3 times of the Italian Cup boasts the record of the attacker who managed to appear in the match the most times (12). top ten of the scorers of the Italian top flight. Extremely strong in the air, he spent his entire career in the penalty area chasing goals, which he often managed. It exploded at Atalanta where he made his debut in Serie A and ended his career in the Orobic team in 1982-83. In 1968 he moved to Bologna and in rossoblu he shows off all his scoring ability: Scores 85 goals in 201 games before moving to Napoli and then after four years in the Neapolitan shirt he returned to Bologna but he was involved in football betting and was disqualified for three and a half years, later reduced to two. But now the trend is going downhill. Only 4 appearances for the national team and one goal in 1975, his coaching career on provincial fields was also unlucky: Telgate, Carrarese, Spezia, Lecco, Massese, Saronno, Siena, Leffe and Valle d’Aosta were the stages of his career which ended in 2002.
