The
Naples Foot-Ball & Cricket Club was founded in late 1905 by engineer Amedeo Salsi and English sailor and amateur footballer William Poths, with the help of the Neapolitan engineer Emilio Anatra and Poths's associate Hector Bayon. Salsi was the first president of the club. Originally the club was intended to be the football section of the multi-sport
Reale Club Canottieri Italia (Royal Italian Rowing Club), though it separated before playing its first match. In 1906
, "Cricket" was removed from the club name, becoming simply Naples Foot-Ball Club. The club played its matches at the Campo dei
Bagnoli, in a peripheral area of the city, difficult to reach. In September 1906, Naples became the first central-southern team to join the FIF (precursor to the
FIGC). Since Naples was the only southern club affiliated with the FIF, it would have to bear very large travel expenses to play in the national division, since all the teams registered in the tournaments were from Northern Italy, unless Naples were to move their headquarters north, which would have been of great disadvantage for the players, who had other jobs and played football only for fun, rather than as a profession. At the beginning of 1908 Naples and SS Napoli, recently affiliated to the FIF, applied for the establishment of a Seconda Categoria (second tier) level Campania regional championship organized by the FIF to which they could register. The FIF decided to establish for the first time the Terza Categoria (third tier) Campania championship, in which Naples joined with several other Neapolitan clubs, thus making their debut in a competition organized by the FIF. Naples won this competition in the first season by defeating Audace in the final, and defeated Audace in the final again in 1909 and were promoted to the Southern division of the Seconda Categoria. In 1910, Naples won the first and only Coppa Città di Napoli and defeated Bari 8–2 on aggregate to win the Seconda Categoria Southern Championship for the first time in 1910. but soon afterward a split took place within Naples FBC; the players of foreign nationality left the team to form a new sports club,
Unione Sportiva Internazionale Napoli. The new club would be a true sporting club with sections in other athletics besides only football. They would be defeated by Internazionale Napoli in the southern final the following year. In 1915 they were again set to play Internazionale Napoli for the title of Southern Italian Champions but the competition was suspended before completion due to
World War I. After the war, Naples saw much less success in the newly restructured top flight, the
Prima Divisione Lega Sud. This was in part due to more teams competing in the south, including
Puteolana and
Savoia. They merged with Internazionale Napoli in 1922 to form
FBC Internazionale-Naples, today known as
S.S.C. Napoli. Because of this, some club members founded a new club claiming to be the successor to Naples FBC immediately after the merger, first called Speranza Naples and later taking the name Naples FBC. This club folded in 1926. == Honours ==