FanPage.it reports an investigation into the counterfeit shirt trade in Naples that reveals that fakes shipped from Hong Kong now clone the NFC chip sewn into SSC Napoli’s centenary shirt, pass the club’s own authenticity check and show the buyer the same congratulatory screen as a genuine 150 euro garment. The reporting, by Gennaro Marco Duello and published on 1 and 2 September 2026, puts a price on the fraud: a counterfeit with a working chip costs about two euros more to produce than one without.
SSC Napoli is the Serie A football club of Naples. Its centenary shirt went on sale on 6 July 2026 at 150 euros through official club stores, made by EA7, the sportswear line of Giorgio Armani, and designed by Valentina De Laurentiis with a nod to a championship shirt of the 1980s. The anti-counterfeiting measure was the part the club led with: an NFC chip embedded in the “Authentic” patch.
What the patch was supposed to prove
Near Field Communication is a short range wireless standard operating at 13.56 MHz, readable by almost any modern smartphone held within a few centimetres of the tag. Enable NFC, hold the handset against the patch, and the phone opens a link. On a genuine shirt the screen read “Complimenti, hai acquistato una Maglia Authentic. Sei un vero Tifoso Azzurro”, which translates as “Congratulations, you have bought an Authentic shirt. You are a true Azzurri fan”. The tap also unlocked content reserved for owners: historical match footage, unreleased images and messages from players. Tap a fake and nothing happened at all.
The claim made at launch is worth recording precisely, because it is the claim the later reporting destroys. SpazioNapoli, covering the release on 6 July 2026, wrote that the chip “communicates directly with the club’s servers, guaranteeing a higher level of security compared to traditional systems”, and that it redirected automatically to the official store rather than behaving like a simple QR code. Owners of counterfeit shirts, the piece said, would never reach those privileges. AreaNapoli and CalcioNapoli24 ran the same framing.
Twenty euros buys a working authenticity chip
Two months later the separation had gone. According to the Fanpage.it investigation, counterfeit centenary shirts produced in Hong Kong reproduce the NFC tag closely enough that they not only survive the check but return the identical congratulatory message from the club. The price list is the detail that lands. A plain counterfeit without NFC sells for 15 to 18 euros. An “authentic” counterfeit with a working chip sells for 20 euros, for buyers prepared to accept a shipment from Hong Kong. On the street in Naples the same shirt changes hands at around 45 euros.
Canale 8 reported the same finding, describing fraudulent versions that are indistinguishable from genuine merchandise and that display identical authentication messages when scanned. The broadcaster closed on a play on an Italian saying, “fatta la maglia, trovato l’inganno”, a twist on the proverb that no sooner is a law made than the way around it is found.
A static tag is a barcode you cannot see
Fanpage.it notes that Certilogo still works and remains the reliable check on these shirts. That is the technical crux of the story. Certilogo is an Italian product authentication service that issues a unique code per individual garment and validates it server side against a database, which also watches for duplicate codes and for scan patterns that look wrong, such as the same code being checked from twenty countries in a week. The value sits in the database, not in the label.
The NFC patch, on the evidence available, does something much simpler. It appears to resolve to a URL that returns a generic congratulation to anybody who asks. An NFC tag of this kind holds an NDEF message, the standard container format that carries the payload, in this case almost certainly a web address. Anyone who taps a genuine shirt can read that payload with a free phone app and write the same bytes to a blank NDEF tag costing a few pence. There is no cryptography in that exchange, no secret unique to the individual item, and no server side test of whether the tag presenting the URL is the tag that was originally issued.
So a static NFC tag is a barcode you cannot see. It is perfectly good at delivering content to a buyer and completely useless as proof of provenance, because the thing it proves is only that someone wrote the right URL onto a chip.
The chips to do this properly have existed for years
This is precisely the failure mode that modern NFC authentication was designed to remove, and the components are ordinary commercial product. Tags with per tap cryptographic signatures generate a different code on every single read, derived from a counter and a key that never leaves the silicon. The server checks the signature against its own copy of the key, confirms the counter has advanced rather than repeated, and only then returns a verdict. Copy the URL from such a tag and the clone fails on the second tap, because a replayed code is a code the server has already seen. At volume these chips cost cents, not euros.
Encrypted authentication platforms such as Veribli work on the same logic, pairing a per item credential with a back end that verifies it, rather than leaving a fixed payload sitting in the open on the garment. Whatever the supplier, a brand should be asking two questions before it puts the word “Authentic” on a patch: is the tag signing anything, and is anyone monitoring duplicate and anomalous scans.
Napoli either did not specify a tag of that class or specified one and left the feature switched off. Either way the conclusion is not that NFC fails against counterfeiters. It is that the club marketed a static tag as proof of authenticity, and the counterfeiters read the brief.
The same trick with a QR code in 2023
None of this is new. In 2023 the Guardia di Finanza, Italy’s financial police, seized more than 18,000 counterfeit Napoli items in a warehouse at San Giuseppe Vesuviano, near Naples, sourced from Turkey. The fakes reproduced the 2022-23 special edition carrying the EA7 logo and the D10S inscription, the tribute to Diego Maradona, and each one carried a working QR code that pointed at Armani’s official website to create the impression of certification. Sold openly as counterfeits at around 40 euros each they represented over 800,000 euros of goods, and passed off as genuine they could have fetched up to 85 euros each. Sixteen people were reported to the authorities. Same trick, earlier technology, three years ahead of the NFC version.
What has not been established
Several things remain open and are worth stating plainly rather than assuming. Nobody has publicly established which chip SSC Napoli used, or confirmed by testing that the tag is genuinely static rather than carrying a rolling parameter that the club is failing to validate. The mechanism described above is inferred from the reported behaviour, not demonstrated. Neither SSC Napoli, EA7 nor Certilogo has commented publicly on the Fanpage.it findings as of September 2026.
What is established is the outcome. A supporter in Naples in September 2026 can hold a phone against a patch, read a message from the club congratulating them on their authentic shirt, and be holding a 20 euro copy from Hong Kong. More on the technology and where it works properly is in our NFC coverage.
