The Serie A Thread

[LAM09 6,744]

Only 4 points between winners Juventus & 2nd-placed Roma. Juventus fans considered it a good season; Roma fans considered theirs to not be all that great. Amazing how the 2 mindsets have changed in just a year.

'Juventus can't be topped; Serie A is a one-horse race' - etc. Lol. I'd agree that Juve are the only team with enough power to do well both in the league and in Europe, but they won't win every league title for the next decade. There's 3 or so teams who'll get in there too, maybe Lazio, Napoli & Roma.

No team had fewer losses than Napoli; and Juventus have only 1 win more than Roma, 2 more than Napoli.

Next season's going to be twice as exciting as this one. This was a building season for every league bar La Liga.

Roma failed in the CL playoff, got knocked out the EL relatively early, got knocked out of the Cup by Lazio & are just in 2nd (have to beat Genoa to guarantee CL football). Known as the nearly men

Several reasons for them to be disappointed despite having the best duo in Serie A right now in Salah & Dzeko.

[BlueLyon 9,359]

Grande Totti

That was some way to end your career, brilliant scenes at Olimpico.

I was never Roma fan or anything, but that was so sad, Totti is without doubt one of biggest names in football for many reasons. Kudos for staying at Roma and becoming such an icon. 

Football will never be the same again without the likes of Totti or JT. 

[11Drogba 2,000]

Serie A is becoming interesting again.

[Vesper 28,802]

‘I wish all the black players would get out of this league’:

Former Chelsea striker Demba Ba calls for mass exodus from Serie A after Romelu Lukaku suffered vile monkey chants at Cagliari

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/sportsnews/article-7426233/Former-Chelsea-striker-Demba-Ba-calls-mass-exodus-Serie-Romelu-Lukaku-abuse.html?ns_mchannel=rss&ico=taboola_feed

 

the top black/part black Serie A players

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the rest of the black Serie A players (to show how many would all have to leave to do a complete boycott) including loaned out players

 

[Atomiswave 6,072]

Also one of the reasons Rudi is having a blast here, we have always had plenty black players, you could instantly see he was much easier at ease.

[NikkiCFC 7,950]

Kudos to Sinisa Mihajlovic Bologna coach. He's fighting leukaemia and his Bologna side is second at the table after Conte's Inter. 

[Vesper 28,802]

James Horncastle’s Serie A Team of the Year

https://theathletic.com/1759043/2020/04/21/horncastle-serie-a-team-of-year-immobile-ronaldo-juventus-inter-lazio-atalanta/

It’s that time of year when players and journalists alike typically start voting for the end of season awards.

Here, The Athletic has picked its Serie A Team of the Year. The criteria is simple enough. No more than three players per club and if you haven’t started 10 league games, you’re not getting in.

Andiamo!

Wojciech Szczesny (Juventus)

The Pole’s name rarely comes up in debates about the best goalkeepers in the world. Maybe his reputation as a joker makes it hard for people to take him seriously. Still, it’s odd Szczesny doesn’t receive greater recognition when you consider how much his career has kicked on since moving to Italy almost five years ago. “First I had the best goalkeeper in the world (Alisson) as my back-up. Now the best goalkeeper of all time (Gianluigi Buffon),” he laughs. In all seriousness, keeping Alisson out of the starting XI while on loan at Roma and succeeding Buffon at Juventus is, frankly, an astonishing achievement.

The 30-year-old signed a new contract in February and there are no questions about his place in the team. Giorgio Chiellini’s six-month absence with a knee injury and Juventus’ transition to a completely different way of defending under new coach Maurizio Sarri mean Szczesny has been busier than usual. Fortunately he has stepped up, protecting leads and keeping Juventus in games.

StatsBomb data shows the former Arsenal man leads the league in “goals saved above average”, with 0.32 per 90 minutes. All told, an average goalkeeper would have let in six more goals this season, and the stop he made from Allan in August, which started a counter-attack ending in the opening goal a 4-3 win against Napoli, set the tone for an excellent year. 

Davide Faraoni (Hellas Verona)

This was one of the trickiest selections to make. Right-back is a bit of a problem position for Italy. Alessandro Florenzi has played there a lot in recent years without ever looking entirely comfortable and, after losing his place at Roma, didn’t have time to make an impact with Valencia following a January loan move.

Antonio Candreva’s return to form in a wing-back role under Antonio Conte (with seven Serie A goal involvements at Inter this season) perhaps gives him the stronger case for inclusion. In the end, though, the decision became a toss-up between Faraoni and Napoli’s Giovanni Di Lorenzo, who is now starting for Italy on the right. Why settle on the Verona wing-back? Well, for a team that doesn’t score much, Faraoni’s impact (three goals and three assists) on their remarkable return to the top flight has been greater than Di Lorenzo’s on Napoli.

His tandem with Darko Lazovic has been one of the strengths of Ivan Juric’s team and, according to StatsBomb, Faraoni is second among right-sided players for counter pressures in the opposition’s half. Di Lorenzo, on the other hand, has often had to play on the left because of injuries to Mario Rui and Faouzi Ghoulam, not to mention centre-back in Kalidou Koulibaly’s absence.

Watching Faraoni back in the big time is nice for those who remember him coming through at Inter — where he appeared in the Champions League — at the twilight of the treble-winning era almost a decade ago. Traded to Udinese in 2012 as part of a deal involving Samir Handanovic, and then to Watford, who were down in the Championship at the time, the majority of his career has been played out in the second tiers. Keep this up, though, and he could go to the Euros.

Stefan de Vrij (Inter Milan)

Quiet and unassuming, it perhaps shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise that De Vrij slips to the back of people’s minds when they argue over the best centre-backs in Europe. In Italy, the most talked-about Dutchman is Matthijs de Ligt, an entirely understandable state of affairs given the captain’s role he played during Ajax’s run to the Champions League semi-finals a year ago and his £74.7 million move to Juventus last summer.

In Europe, Virgil van Dijk is the defender most associated with the Netherlands. Widely renowned as the world’s best, another colossal transfer fee (£75 million), and his transformative effect on Liverpool mean the name De Vrij fades into the background.

It doesn’t help, perhaps, that the best-known moment of his career so far was giving away a penalty while playing for Lazio in a de-facto Champions League play-off against Inter — after the news had broken that he’d be joining them that summer. That was unfortunate, but the 28-year-old has put it behind him with assured displays at the heart of Inter’s back three.

The Feyenoord academy graduate has no single stand-out attribute. Unlike Leonardo Bonucci and David Luiz, the other high-profile centre-backs Conte played through the middle at Juventus and Chelsea respectively, De Vrij doesn’t spray diagonals and turn defence into attack with a pass. He does step up and play tidily with midfielder Marcelo Brozovic, though, and his anticipation without the ball, cutting out passes to strikers, is the hallmark of an intelligent defender.

Excellent in both Milan derbies, his record of two goals and three assists makes De Vrij the league’s most dangerous attacking centre-back after Atalanta’s superb Rafael Toloi. As free transfers go, Diego Godin and Nemanja Vidic did not match expectations at Inter. De Vrij, by contrast, has exceeded them and he will likely be the club’s next captain once Handanovic retires. 

Francesco Acerbi (Lazio)

The outstanding centre-back in the best defence in the league, Acerbi’s story continues to inspire.

Twice diagnosed with testicular cancer, he returned to play 149 consecutive games in Serie A and finished qualifying for the Euros as Italy’s starting centre-back beside captain Bonucci. The 32-year-old, who replaced De Vrij at Lazio, has matured — Acerbi used to turn up for training still drunk from the night before at the start of his career — and has belatedly fulfilled the potential that led Milan to sign him as Alessandro Nesta’s successor in 2012.

A one-man wall in the Rome derby in January, when Acerbi also popped up for Lazio’s equaliser, he scored a long-range screamer against Torino in October which must be a candidate for his club’s goal of the season. Chiellini’s knee-surgery absence and Koulibaly’s rough year for Napoli have all led us to focus a little more on Acerbi and his key role in Lazio’s unexpected title challenge.

Acerbi won the nation’s hearts last October when he decided to stay behind and get a taxi back to their hotel when the national team’s visit to a children’s hospital came to an end. “I’m not going anywhere until I’ve seen everyone,” he said. For that gesture alone, Acerbi is one of the first names on The Athletic’s team sheet.

Robin Gosens (Atalanta)

As with Faraoni on the other side, Gosens is a wing-back, however, it’d be criminal to overlook him on a technicality. Theo Hernandez has generated a lot of hype, and deservedly so, as AC Milan’s second-top scorer, but our left flank belongs to the less-glamorous Gosens. Perplexingly, he remains uncapped at international level, with the Netherlands hoping to persuade the dual national to choose them over Germany.

The 25-year-old has scored or assisted 12 times in 22 appearances, the highest total for a defender in the league. Gosens has flourished since Leonardo Spinazzola’s 2018 departure and, with Papu Gomez and Duvan Zapata drifting across to combine with him, Atalanta possess the best left side since the peak of Ghoulam, Marek Hamsik and Lorenzo Insigne at Napoli. No wing-back in Italy is as big a threat in the air as Gosens. His late runs and well-coordinated far post finishes have allowed him to make impacts on the biggest games of the season against Juventus, Inter Milan and that historic night away to Shakhtar Donetsk, when Atalanta qualified for the knockout phase of the Champions League despite having no points at the group stage’s halfway mark.

Transfer interest in Gosens should be high, though prospective buyers are doubtful of Atalanta players’ ability to replicate the same high-performance levels outside of Gian Piero Gasperini’s unique system. For now, Gosens is committed— he extended his contract until 2024 in January.

His ambition remains to play for Schalke, the team he supports, at some point in the future.

Luis Alberto (Lazio)

Napoli’s Fabian Ruiz is the Spanish player repeatedly linked with a move from Serie A to one of the giants of La Liga. How Alberto doesn’t attract the same attention remains a mystery. Capped just once by Spain, the 27-year-old is back to his best this season and deserves a share of Ciro Immobile’s goal bonuses. Almost half of his 10 assists have been for the league’s top scorer and the connection between them is one of Lazio’s principal strengths.

Alberto’s scoring contribution of 0.52 per 90 minutes (14 goal plus assists in 25 appearances) is the highest among Serie A midfielders. He is the perfect playmaker for Lazio’s counter-attacking style and those defence-splitting first-time passes after a team-mate has won the ball figure in every centre-back’s nightmares. Nobody in Serie A makes more “deep progressions” (defined as passes, dribbles and carries into the final third) than Alberto, who goes down as one of the best bargains of recent years. Lazio paid just £3.5 million in 2016 to lure the Andalusian away from Liverpool (for whom he never started a Premier League game).

Honourable mentions go to Juventus’ Rodrigo Bentancur and Roma’s Lorenzo Pellegrini, the Italian player with the best vision in the league.

Sofyan Amrabat (Hellas Verona)

The blossoming Mario Pasalic misses out here because we already have our full complement of Atalanta players (sorry for the spoiler). Stefano Sensi would likely have been my pick had he not missed so many games through injury at Inter. Radja Nainggolan’s renaissance with Cagliari and that November performance against Fiorentina (a goal and a hat-trick of assists) left me conflicted, too. But Amrabat has been the revelation of Serie A’s season.

He could barely get off the bench at Club Brugge last season, arriving from Belgium to very little fanfare for £3.1 million. Within six months, a queue was forming to sign him.

Verona had a deal with Napoli but Amrabat instead chose Fiorentina, whom he will join next season for £17.5 million.

The Dutch-born Moroccan has dominated in midfield and is the face of coach Juric’s aggressive, pressing style. Excellent in transition, Amrabat drives his team forward. The 23-year-old is a decent dribbler too, making the prospect of seeing him line up with Gaetano Castrovilli next term a particularly tantalising one. 

Josip Ilicic (Atalanta)

One of the silver-linings the current lockdown provides is the chance to re-watch Ilicic this season. You should all go and do it once you’ve finished reading this article.

Until then, trust me when I say his YouTube supercut stands up to anything produced by your typical Ballon d’Or contenders.

Back-heeled goals. Curlers from outside the area. Top-corner volleys on his wrong foot. Feints sending the goalkeeper and three defenders the other way. Lobbing the keeper from just inside the opposition half. Braces in back-to-back 5-0 wins against Milan and Parma. A hat-trick in a 7-0 demolition of Torino. The four he scored in Atalanta’s Champions League last-16 second leg win in Valencia.

The Slovenian has been involved in more goals than any player in Serie A in 2020. More than Cristiano Ronaldo. More than Zlatan Ibrahimovic. His scoring contribution (goals and assists) is a league-high 1.15 per 90 minutes. He averages more shots and key passes (7.43 per game) than anyone else in Italy.

Hand Ilicic the Player of the Year award and put him on the front cover of FIFA 2021 already.

Alejandro Gomez (Atalanta)

The man known as Papu brought the “Floss” dance to football and made a platinum-selling record, so when it comes to popular culture, nobody on this list comes close.

Not even Ronaldo.

Aside from being my favourite person and player in Serie A, the 32-year-old Argentine gets in on merit with 10 assists and a football IQ that’s off the charts. Papu can find the top corner from 25 yards, as he did against Parma, or slalom through defences and nutmeg full-backs, as he did for the goal he scored against Milan, when the former Catania playmaker let go of a shot that risked decapitating goalkeeper Gianluigi Donnarumma.

What really stands out about Papu, though, is his talent for teleportation. You think he’s playing left-wing when actually he’s in the No 10 role. Make the necessary adjustments and next thing you know he’s pulling the strings from deep in midfield. Nobody knows who should pick him up and there’s true genius in his observation that the referee’s always in space, so follow him and you will be, too.

Papu’s compatriots Lautaro Martinez (Inter) and Paulo Dybala (Juventus) provided fierce competition for this spot. As the face of a team that keeps punching above its weight and exciting fans in Italy and in Europe, renouncing Papu simply wasn’t an option though. He is football.

Cristiano Ronaldo (Juventus)

Remember that night in November when Juventus were drawing 0-0 with Milan and Maurizio Sarri decided to take off Ronaldo 10 minutes into the second half? The 35-year-old memorably walked straight down the tunnel, and had showered, changed and left before his team-mates returned to the dressing room to celebrate a 1-0 win secured by a gorgeous goal from his replacement Dybala.

That all feels like an awful long time ago now, the tension a thing of the past.

No doubt he had heard people wondering whether his body was breaking down. When Ronaldo came back from the international break that immediately followed that Milan game, he did not stop scoring. Ronaldo scored in each of his next 11 league appearances, matching a record set by Gabriel Batistuta and Fabio Quagliarella. For a team with the league’s fourth-most prolific attack and one that has rarely blown opponents away, his ratio of 21 goals in 22 league games has often been the difference between Juventus drawing and edging a win.

Sarri is as dependent on him as he was on Eden Hazard at Chelsea. Ronaldo, a five-time Ballon d’Or winner, has been involved in 48 per cent of Juventus’ goals this season. Although a third of his goals have been penalties and a number of others were tap-ins, his towering header away to Sampdoria and the stunning solo goal he scored in Verona served as reminders that reports of his decline following Milan were greatly exaggerated.

Ciro Immobile (Lazio)

No debate here. From a goals-to-games point of view, Immobile’s 27 goals in 26 league games make him the most prolific striker in Serie A since Antonio Valentin Angelillo’s 33-goal season for Inter in 1958-59. If he scores another 10 from Lazio’s remaining 12 fixtures, the Italy international will set a new single-season scoring record for the division. The six-goal cushion Immobile enjoys over Ronaldo makes him comfortably the favourite to win another Capocannoniere title.

It would be the third of the 30-year-old’s career, putting him on the same total as Giuseppe Meazza, Michel Platini, Beppe Signori and Gigi Riva. Only Gunnar Nordahl, with five in the 1950s, has more.

Predecessor Pippo Inzaghi says Immobile has been Serie A’s best forward for years and, although 10 of his goals have come from the spot this season, Immobile has won three of those penalties himself. Punishing teams from 12 yards is a skill, too, and in that regard, he is currently only one short of matching the record (11) Roberto Baggio established in 1998.

Immobile still needs to convince wider audiences he is an elite striker after flopping at Borussia Dortmund and Sevilla. He’ll get the opportunity to set them straight at the Euros and in next season’s Champions League.

[Vesper 28,802]

Josip Ilicic, the Prince of Slovenia, is Serie A’s Player of the Year

https://theathletic.com/1765473/2020/04/24/josip-ilicic-atalanta-serie-a-player-of-the-year/

It’s late July, almost the end of pre-season, and Atalanta’s players are helping to pack up the equipment from a training session in Zingonia. The team’s midfield dynamos Marten de Roon and Remo Freuler grab one of the chairs from the sidelines. It’s hardly a two-man job but Josip Ilicic is sitting in it as if he were on a throne. “I’m the Prince of Slovenia, the Prince of Slovenia,” he jokes as his footmen lift him into the back of a truck. “We do all the hard work,” De Roon quipped on Instagram, his resentment feigned.

Nine months later, the Dutchman and his team-mates still have no problem waiting hand and foot on Ilicic. After all, if anyone deserves the royal treatment in Serie A this season, it’s him.

You have to bow to his majesty. When the 32-year-old audaciously chipped Salvatore Sirigu from just inside Torino’s half in January, Papu Gomez got to his knees and shined his left boot in appreciation. In Valencia, where Ilicic became the first Serie A player to score a four-goal poker in the Champions League since Andriy Shevchenko, Papu was at it again, gate-crashing his post-match interview so he could plant a big kiss on his cheek.

Coronating him The Athletic’s Serie A Player of the Year won’t come as too big a surprise to anyone at Atalanta. “Josip is playing the best football in Italy,” De Roon told Le Cronache di Spogliatoio. “He’s among the best in the world. I don’t want to make a comparison with (Cristiano) Ronaldo but he is at a very high level.”

To give you an impression of how high, consider the following: over the last two years, only Lionel Messi and Sergio Aguero have scored more hat-tricks in Europe’s top five leagues than Ilicic, who is neither a striker, nor a player for a big club like Barcelona or Manchester City. In fact, the Slovenian might not be playing at all had he succumbed to the life-threatening illness he contracted before the start of last season.

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One of the hardest hitting reports about the tragedy wrought by the coronavirus came at the end of March when a crew from Sky News managed to film within the Papa Giovanni XXIII hospital in Bergamo. It’s a place Ilicic has seen from the inside, too. He was admitted as a patient here at the end of July 2018.

The former Palermo and Fiorentina playmaker had been suffering from a fever for a while and as the days passed, rather than improve, his condition deteriorated. “He had a neck like a melon,” Atalanta’s coach Gian Piero Gasperini recalled to La Gazzetta dello Sport. While his team-mates were away in Bosnia, the country where Ilicic was born, hammering Sarajevo 8-0 in the Europa League preliminaries, Ilicic underwent a series of tests to establish what the problem was. The results revealed a bacterial infection of the lymph nodes.

“The infection frightened us all,” Gasperini said, and it left Ilicic fearing for his life. “Some people who had the same problem ended up in a coma,” he explained to Il Corriere dello Sport. The sudden death of his former Fiorentina team-mate Davide Astori, who passed away in the team hotel before a game in Udine in 2018, understandably made a profound impression on Ilicic. “I couldn’t sleep,” he said. “When I got sick, I feared something similar could happen to me. I thought to myself, ‘What if I don’t wake up tomorrow? How will I deal with not being able to see my family?’.”

Afraid to go to bed, he didn’t think about football, nor did he watch games on TV. His focus narrowed. “I had one thing fixed in my mind: staying alive and being with my family. There was a point where just being able to walk and run like a normal person again would have been enough for me.”

Ilicic’s anxiety eased as a course of antibiotics finally took effect. The swelling of his neck reduced and the infection gradually dissipated. He is acutely aware of how lucky he got. “In my case, the infection was limited to my neck. It can spread throughout the body and has done in other patients. If I think about them…”

Emerging from hospital a changed man, Ilicic no longer sweats the small stuff. “In the past, I used to get angry about the silliest things — now I’ve learned to appreciate the good things in life.” For Ilicic, that means family. The four match-balls he’s brought home since his recovery are for his two kids to play with in the back garden. It’s tempting to suggest something clicked on the pitch too as one of the most mercurial talents of the last decade in Serie A finally stopped blowing hot and cold.

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Delio Rossi had a reconnaissance mission for his son, Dario. He sent him to Slovenia to watch Palermo’s next opponents in the Europa League, the winners of Maribor and Hibernian, and as Rossi flew back to Sicily in July 2010, he couldn’t wait for the debriefing. Dario had been blown away by a no-name 22-year-old, some kid called Ilicic who’d scored twice in an emphatic 3-0 win.

An agent from Slovenia had flagged him up to Palermo’s sporting director Walter Sabatini — the guy who brought Alisson, Javier Pastore, Erik Lamela and Marquinhos to Europe — but Dario’s enthusiasm really captured his imagination. Sabatini watched the game back himself and called Palermo’s combustible owner, Maurizio Zamparini. “I told him we need to sign him right away,” Sabatini recalled.

As it turned out, Maribor had only just signed him themselves from relegated Interblock Ljubljana. Ilicic was staring another stint in the second division in the face when Zlatko Zahovic’s number flashed up on his phone. For an Argentine, it would be a bit like Maradona calling. Zahovic is renowned as Slovenia’s greatest ever player, even if his tirade after the 2002 World Cup — “You’re a prick of a coach and you were a prick of a player,” he told Srecko Katanec, “I could buy you, your house and your family” — is as famous as his presence on the Valencia squad that reached the Champions League final in 2001, not to mention the four league titles he won with Porto and Benfica in Portugal.

Phoning Ilicic in his new role as Maribor’s sporting director, Zahovic didn’t want to see him fade back into the wilderness. No doubt he’d heard the stories about Ilicic having an unsuccessful trial with a Moldovan side and how close he’d come to quitting the game altogether. It would have been a loss to football. Zahovic persuaded him to give it one more crack. He organised the transfer from Interblock for €80,000 and all of sudden, Ilicic found himself back in the game.

He didn’t last long at Maribor, though. A handful of appearances and that was it. Not because he wasn’t very good. The problem was Ilicic was too good. His fifth and final game came against Palermo and he didn’t disappoint, backing up the show he put on against Hibs with another goal. Sabatini and Rossi leaned on Zamparini some more and Zahovic’s 80 grand turned into €2.3 million in the blink of an eye. It was a bargain for Palermo too who, after narrowly missing out on the Champions League the year before and cashing in on Edinson Cavani, would reach the Coppa Italia final for the first time since 1979 with Ilicic and Pastore weaving their magic.

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Dawn broke in Arenzano and Gasperini remembers being desperate. “I couldn’t sleep,” he said. “All our transfer targets were slipping away.” It was the off-season of 2017. Atalanta had just finished fourth back when fourth wasn’t enough to qualify for the Champions League and Gasperini wanted to go again. “We needed a touch of imagination,” he thought. Ilicic was practically off the board, his name all but scrubbed out. Sampdoria had wrapped up a deal with Fiorentina and he was heading to Genoa. But Gasperini hadn’t given up hope.

He had coached Ilicic at Palermo and wondered if the prospect of a reunion might be enough to get him to change his mind. “I decided to call (Giovanni) Sartori (Atalanta’s sporting director). I told him, ‘Look, Ilicic is on the verge of signing for Samp. The medical’s been booked. Are you able to speak to him?'” When Ilicic heard Gasperini was interested, the Slovenian turned as quickly as he turns defenders. “He lit up and said, ‘Mister, if you want, I won’t go to Samp. I’ll choose you.'” His decision did not go down well with Samp. They had watched Gasp torment them for years in the Derby della Lanterna. Even after leaving as manager of Genoa, he couldn’t help but get one over their city rivals.

From a neutral viewpoint, switching Florence for Bergamo felt like another sideways move in Ilicic’s career path. The big boys weren’t tempted to take a punt even for fee (€5.75 million) that, for them, hardly constituted a risk. He was on the cusp of turning 30 and perhaps the prevailing sense was if he hadn’t already realised his potential, he never would in Italy. Delio Rossi said: “We’re talking about a pure talent but he’s a very lazy player who, in his head, doesn’t think he has to train a lot to play well on a Sunday.” After Fiorentina lost to Milan a few months before Ilicic left the Stadio Artemio Franchi, Paulo Sousa said: “I take players performing at anything below their best as a personal defeat. And if Ilicic isn’t able to do what he did last year, it’s because he’s let himself go mentally. I’m guilty.”

A world-beater one day, anonymous the next. Ilicic has long disputed the notion his seasons were as up and down as the Tuscan countryside. “This reputation for inconsistency started in Florence where, by the way, I was top scorer for three years. And if I was inconsistent, when I’m a 10 or a midfielder, not a 20-goal striker, what’s everybody else!? At Fiorentina, I hit the woodwork seven times in seven games. Imagine if the ball had always gone in. You just need a bit of luck.” And the right coach.

As we discussed after that unforgettable night in Valencia, Gasperini’s man-management — pretending not to hear Ilicic when he asks to be taken off or making him think he will when in fact he won’t — is one of the reasons behind the belated blossoming of a unique talent.

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“I’m really privileged to get to work with him,” Slovenia international Jure Balkovec tells The Athletic. “I don’t know how to describe it because every training session is a joy.”

As a left-back, Balkovec knows the conundrum every defender faces when Ilicic is cutting in from the right-hand side. “If you give him a little bit of space, even just for a second, when it’s one-on-one, even if you know he’s left-footed… as with Arjen Robben, when everyone used to say show him onto his other foot and he always went with his left and found the space to shoot, it’s the same with him. Even if you know he’s left-footed, he’ll somehow find a way to open up space for his left foot.”

His skill as a dribbler is unusual for someone of his size. Ilicic is 6ft 3in and, as De Roon once commented: “Messi is small and quick. (Josip) can change direction like him but he stands at 190cm.”

At every international get-together, Balkovec tries to soak up what he can from Ilicic. He takes free-kicks for Empoli whenever there is a foul on the right-hand side and his desire for self-improvement has led him to stay back after training with Slovenia to practice with Ilicic. “I remember one time, out of six, he scored five goals. Even (Jan) Oblak couldn’t save them. I scored two or three and Josip joked, ‘Maybe I’ll let you take one in the game’.”

For Balkovec, Ilicic has the best technique of any Slovenian player ever. “I remember Zlatko (Zahovic),” he says. “I was still very young but little things, I remember. Maybe, from this point of view, it’s difficult to tell. Still, Zlatko managed to score a lot more goals and this is an advantage. But maybe from the point of view of flair and skill, for me, Ilicic is better.”

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Lobbing a keeper from 50 yards, as Ilicic did against Torino, ordinarily makes the goal of the season list. But Ilicic wasn’t all that impressed by it. “They were badly-positioned,” he observed. “I kicked it and that was it. It was more luck than skill.”

As goals go, he continues to judge everything by the Maradona-esque solo effort he scored against Samp in his Palermo days, the one where he dribbled from inside his own half, slaloming past four defenders and slotting home.

His standards are impeccably high but when a highlights reel of Ilicic’s career is cut, there will be plenty of moments from this season. The braces, the hat-tricks, the poker. The back-heeled goals, the volleys on his “weaker” foot and my personal favourite the Jedi-like feint that sent Lecce’s goalkeeper and three other opponents the wrong way in another game in which Atalanta scored seven.

Ilicic has scored and assisted 20 times in 19 starts this season. He has dominated. Ilicic isn’t just the Prince of Slovenia — he is the undisputed King of Serie A.

[Vesper 28,802]

Ronaldo is chasing a butterfly and goals are flying in. Is Serie A feeling OK?

https://theathletic.com/1942434/2020/07/22/cristiano-ronaldo-ciro-immobile-serie-a-goals-juventus-lazio/

Of all the things we think we know about Cristiano Ronaldo, who knew he was a lepidopterist?

The 35-year-old went butterfly catching again on Monday night but couldn’t quite get it in the net. Ronaldo, just a goal away from matching the most prolific season in Juventus’s illustrious history, headed a cross from Paulo Dybala against Lazio’s crossbar for what would have been a hat-trick, allowing “il Farfallino” to fly from his grasp. Felice Borel, Juventus’s ‘Little Butterfly’, will elude him for another 72 hours at least. However, away to Udinese on Thursday, Ronaldo will likely reach Borel’s 31-goal tally from 86 years ago.

“I’m not thinking about records,” the Portuguese said afterwards. Perhaps because too many are falling around him. Ronaldo’s two goals on Monday were his 50th and 51st strikes in his 61st game in Serie A. It’s the quickest half-century in the history of the league, faster than Andriy Shevchenko, who got there in 68 — however, the former AC Milan striker would no doubt contend that penalties weren’t as common in 2001, nor were defenders focused on anything other than blunt-force obstruction.

The numbers are quintessentially Ronaldo, regardless of his 35 years — an age when strikers of bygone years were either way past their peak or retired. Nothing out of the ordinary then. Ronaldo was five goals behind Ciro Immobile in the scoring charts when lockdown happened. This week, he went ahead of the Lazio man for almost half an hour until a Leonardo Bonucci foul allowed Immobile to draw level from the penalty spot. Serie A hasn’t had two players break the 30-goal barrier in the same campaign since Gunnar Nordahl (34 goals for Milan) and Istvan Nyers (30 for Inter) in 1950-51.

Over the next fortnight, the pair have a shot at breaking the single-season scoring record (36 goals) that Gonzalo Higuain wrested from Nordahl (35 goals in 1949-50) with a hat-trick on the final day four years ago.

Nordahl’s milestone stood for what felt like an eternity. It was considered sacred, impossible to pass. Sixty-six years went by. Catenaccio emerged and became entrenched, influencing generations of coaches to set teams up to concede a goal fewer, instead of score a goal more, than their opponents. Arrigo Sacchi and Zdenek Zeman then appeared and challenged the defensive orthodoxy, infusing Serie A with a more attack-minded approach and leaving a legacy that continues to serve as a source of inspiration to an up-and-coming and progressive new wave of coaches. Their exposure to other cultures and different ideas is greater than ever before.

Serie A has been opening up for a while but the notion of it returning to the free and easy goalscoring days of the 1950s causes consternation and arouses curiosity. In 2015-16, it featured more goals per game (2.96) than any of Europe’s other top-five leagues as Higuain earned himself a Serie A-record €90 million move to Juventus on the back of that 36-goal season under Maurizio Sarri for Napoli. The numbers then regressed and the Bundesliga, with its madcap transitions and gegenpressing storms, reclaimed its status as the most goal-heavy of Europe’s prestige divisions, a title it has held every year but one since 2015. However, the Italians are now pushing the Germans hard once again.

Where the Bundesliga averaged 3.21 goals per game over the last year, Serie A is the only other top flight above three per game (3.03) — and that rate has accelerated since the restart a month ago. To put that into further perspective, there have been 128 (one-hundred and twenty-eight!) more goals in 2019-20 so far than by the same stage of last season.

This is only the third occasion that Serie A has finished match day 34 with more than 1,000 goals in the bank.

At times, it feels as if Atalanta have scored half of them, what with Gian Piero Gasperini and his merry band of Bergamaschi firing seven past Udinese, Torino and Lecce, six past Brescia and five past Parma and Milan. The merciless, never-sated goal-aholics seem to have forgotten the old Italian rule about resisting the urge to run up the score out of respect for your poor opponent. They just keep on keeping on.

Atalanta are now only five shy of becoming the first team since Nordahl’s Milan and Nyers’ Inter to punch through the glass ceiling of 100 league goals in a single campaign. They have a trio of players in double figures, as do Roberto De Zerbi’s Sassuolo who, together with Atalanta, provide the thrust of this shift in style in Serie A.

De Zerbi moved up in the world to the Neroverdi even when Benevento went down because of the strength of his ideas and courage of his convictions. The same will happen with Fabio Liverani, whose Lecce side will succumb to relegation with Europe’s worst defence. Presiding over a team which conceded 76 goals (and counting) in a season would ordinarily be the kind of stigma that stopped a coach from ever getting another job in Italy. But times have changed and Liverani’s bold approach is set to be rewarded. Expect to see him rock up at one of the mid-table clubs with more talent on offer and lofty aspirations of making the Europa League.

Of course, the choice Juventus made last summer is the most symbolic of all.

“Sarrismo” entered the Italian dictionary two years ago when he was still coaching Napoli, under the definition of a style of play “founded on speed and an offensive propensity”. This time around, we have only seen flashes of that. Juventus, whose identity is about keeping games tight and winning them 1-0, are about to become the first team to win the scudetto with a defence breached more than 35 times since Milan in 1962. More teams are taking more risks at the back than ever.

Veteran strikers accustomed to man-marking and shutters-down backlines have thrived in recent years, with Luca Toni and Fabio Quagliarella topping the scoring charts despite being well into their 30s. Both have unabashedly credited those achievements with falling defensive standards and the imposition of playmaking roles on goalkeepers and defenders. StatsBomb data tells us that 11 of the top 20 players for open-play passes per game in Serie A are either full-backs or centre-backs. Gone are the days when those positions focused exclusively on shot-stopping and thwarting strikers by any means necessary.

If rule changes over the last 30 years have tended to favour attacking play and the protection of forwards in acknowledgement of football’s metamorphosis from sport to showbusiness, with goals being the game’s most entertaining aspect, the latest innovations have catalysed change at an even more radical rate. The presence of more cameras and a video assistant referee means defenders can get away with less than they did in the good old days, much to the chagrin of retired forwards such as Alessandro Del Piero and Christian Vieri, who would have loved to play in this day and age.

When it comes to refereeing, each country has its own idiosyncrasies. For instance, officials in the Premier League rarely utilise the monitor and on-field review. Referees in Serie A take the strictest interpretation possible of the already problematic handball rule. There have been 165 penalties this season, a 51 per cent increase on a year ago. Genoa and Lazio have been awarded the most (15). Inter, by contrast, have had the fewest given against them (four).

As for the top-scorer stakes, Ronaldo and Immobile have both broken Roberto Baggio’s record for spot-kick goals (11) with 12 each, vastly inflating their own individual tallies. As of two gameweeks ago, 50 penalties had been for handling offences, which can be broken down as follows: 30 for blocking a shot or a cross, eight for deliberate handball and 12 for the arm either being above shoulder height or in an unnatural position that increases the size of the player’s “silhouette”. Rather than digress on law 12 itself, we can all agree 165 penalties is a hell of a lot of penalties.

Walking away from the spot as triumphantly as Lecce’s specialist Marco Mancosu (eight penalty goals this season for him), let’s turn to how the number of goals in Serie A has spiralled even more out of control since the league came out of lockdown.

Buckle up: since then, the rate has found another gear, like Chewie heeding Han Solo’s call to jump to lightspeed in the Millennium Falcon. Before the restart, Serie A was averaging 2.91 goals per game. Since the return to play, it has hit 3.38 goals per game, the highest of any of Europe’s top-five leagues in this abnormal six-week dash to finish the season.

Italy spent longer in lockdown than those leagues and started later with more fixtures to fulfil. That has meant less time to get the players in a sufficient condition to sustain optimum performance levels for 90 minutes. As a consequence, we’ve had some thrilling turnarounds, including Lazio going 2-0 up then losing 3-2 to Atalanta, Parma suffering the same fate against Sampdoria, or Juventus taking two-goal leads against Milan and Sassuolo only to fail to win either match.

Serie A teams were already dropping points from winning positions at a higher rate than the other top-five leagues before the pandemic interrupted the season. But upon the resumption, things have escalated considerably. One-hundred points have been thrown away from winning positions. Parma have allowed their opponents to launch comebacks in five of their last seven games.

If fitness and having to play in the draining mid-summer heat constitute two factors, another is the lack of time between games, as raised by the Inter head coach Antonio Conte. The short breaks limit the hours that can be spent on the training ground, meaning injured players miss more games than usual, exacerbating squad depth issues while the extreme rotation it provokes also serves to create imbalances that make for rollercoaster games and emotions. This is manna from heaven for seasoned strikers such as Andrea Belotti, who scored in seven consecutive games for a struggling Torino side through June and July.

The five-substitutions rule is another agent of chaos.

As Parma coach Roberto D’Aversa has acknowledged, this piece of legislation has benefitted those with deeper squads such as Inter who, after playing awfully at Parma’s Ennio Tardini, threw on Ashley Young, Victor Moses and Alessandro Bastoni, all of whom were involved in the goals that turned a defeat into a late win. Sampdoria striker Federico Bonazzoli has established a post-restart reputation as a super-sub while Atalanta forward Luis Muriel, who already broke Marco Di Vaio’s Serie A record for goals from the bench in a season, didn’t need the final hour-half of games to become even looser to wreak havoc.

Coaches in Italy always like to say another game begins after the 70-minute mark but this sense is more pronounced than ever since the season resumed. Goals from substitutes have leapt from 0.36 per game pre-lockdown to 0.52 since.

As Ronaldo chases Borel, games continue to leave coaches, players and fans alike with butterflies in their stomach.

No one can say with any certainty what is going to happen, which is why even the title race still had an air of suspense and trepidation about it going into last weekend.

For the neutral, it has made for a fun campaign to follow. It may be peak summer but Serie A is raining goals.

[NikkiCFC 7,950]

Seria A suspended for 2 weeks because of Covid.

[Jase 43,479]

44 minutes ago, NikkiCFC said:

Seria A suspended for 2 weeks because of Covid.

It's not confirmed (yet)...

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/football/article-8785063/Serie-SUSPENDED-two-weeks-14-positive-Covid-19-tests-Genoa.html

[NikkiCFC 7,950]

Just give them title already...

[lucio 5,418]

Terrible day for Italian football yesterday , juventus winning at Milan and inter losing too , outrageous if juventus win the title again 

[OneMoSalah 8,777]

Dybala’s assist for Chiesa’s goal was filthy. Good to see what a bit of invention in the final third looks like, have forgotten watching us.

[Vesper 28,802]

2020-21 Italian Serie A

Hellas Verona              
Juventus                      

http://www.sportnews.to/mysports/2021/serie-a-hellas-verona-vs-juventus-s2/#!

https://www.totalsportek.com/page-5/

[Vesper 28,802]

Suning’s Chinese Super League collapse and what it means for Inter Milan

https://theathletic.com/2425092/2021/03/04/sunings-chinese-super-league-collapse-and-what-it-means-for-inter-milan/

“I’m all for challenges and Inter is the toughest of my career,” Antonio Conte recently told Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera. As someone so closely identified with Juventus, going over to their biggest rivals and accepting the brief to end the dynasty he helped build wasn’t an easy decision. 

Then there’s the nature of Inter Milan itself. One of Conte’s mentors Giovanni Trapattoni thinks this team is different from all the others. He likened coaching Inter to being on a spin cycle in a washing machine. It’s turbulent and hard to maintain your balance because there’s always a sudden tremor ready to knock you off your feet. Rising above it all is hard. 

It’s why only the strongest characters win at Inter: Helenio Herrera, Trapattoni and Jose Mourinho. Now, after runners-up finishes in Serie A and the Europa League last season, Conte is closing in on Inter’s first scudetto since Mourinho’s treble in 2010. A team that finished 21 points behind Juventus before his arrival is now seven points ahead of them. Romelu Lukaku and Lautaro Martinez can’t stop scoring, Fabio Capello thinks Nicolo Barella is one of the top three midfielders in Europe and the defence is no longer conceding. Anyone who follows Conte on Instagram will have noticed how proud he is of the flowing football they’re playing at the moment. 

It feels like Inter’s year. But this is Inter and it’s never that simple. Not a day goes by without more gossip and speculation about the financial stress that owner Suning finds itself under in China.

“They aren’t destabilising,” said Inter’s chief executive Beppe Marotta. “This is a very tight-knit group. There’s been painstaking work in this respect from Conte and when the team stick together, even the biggest problems become small.” 

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So what’s going on with Suning?

Well, the share price has halved in three years, COVID-19 hit its retail business hard, its property investments tanked, a rescue plan involving another of China’s biggest companies backfired, it has been forced to sell nearly a quarter of its publicly listed operation to the Chinese state and it has been told by the government to forget football and focus on footfall.

It has had better months.

Founded in 1990, Suning grew from flogging air-conditioning units in Nanjing to selling pretty much everything all over China. Under co-founder Zhang Jindong, the company became a conglomerate, diversifying into media, real estate, sport and technology, making him one of China’s richest men.

The core business changed its name to Suning.com in 2018 to signal a move towards online shopping. Signalling and doing are two different things, though. The company is still China’s largest bricks-and-mortar retailer with hundreds of stores, but it has slid out of the top four in terms of sales.

 

Suning’s headquarters in Nanjing (Photo: Fang Dongxu/VCG via Getty Images)

Zhang Jindong’s financial support for ailing Chinese property developer Evergrande has also been a millstone around Suning’s neck, as money it borrowed to prop up Evergrande has weighed heavily on the company.

For a time, it looked like a share-swap with Alibaba, the online giant owned by China’s most famous entrepreneur Jack Ma, might get Suning back on track but, first, the companies fell out, and then Ma ran into difficulties with the Chinese government. China is a big country but there is still only room for one boss and his name is president Xi Jinping.

This left Suning with nowhere to turn but towards two state-backed investment firms. They paid just over £1.6 billion for a 23 per cent stake in the business last month.

While interesting to Suning’s staff, customers and investors, none of this would have troubled the back pages of western newspapers if Suning and Zhang Jindong had not got involved in football.

In 2015, Suning bought Chinese Super League (CSL) team Jiangsu Guoxin-Sainty, renamed them Jiangsu Suning, handed them the company credit card so they could buy Brazilian stars Ramires and Alex Teixeira in one window, and then hired Fabio Capello as manager.

 

Ramires was a high-profile signing for Jiangsu from Chelsea (Photo: Visual China Group via Getty Images)

But that was just warming up for the 2016 purchase of a majority stake in Inter — £230 million-worth of luxury Italian goods.

And then, to tie it all together, Suning went on a shopping spree for PPTV, the streaming service it had bought in 2013, hoovering up live rights to domestic football in China and Italy, and then sealing a £523 million deal for Premier League games between 2019 and 2022. It was a remarkable sum for a new outlet to pay but few questioned it because the Chinese market is massive and the numbers do not really need to make sense to us, right?

Wrong, as Jiangsu Suning and the Premier League, now in court with Suning over the collapse of that contract, have learned and Inter may soon discover.

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What happened with Jiangsu?

Good news first: in November, they finally won the CSL, beating Guangzhou Evergrande (of whom the aforementioned ailing property developer is the majority shareholder) in the final, with Teixeira among the goalscorers.

Now the bad: three months later, on February 28, Suning’s parent company issued a terse statement to say, “from today, Jiangsu Football Club ceases the operation of its teams”. There was a “reluctant” and a “regretfully” in there, too, but that was that for the Chinese champions, their successful women’s team and youth sides.

Jiangsu FC dropped Suning from their name earlier this year when the Chinese Football Association told clubs they needed to sound more like western clubs to attract other sponsors. Suning dropped Jiangsu when the Chinese government made it very clear Suning had to spend every cent it had on saving its shops and not a penny on football.

Zhang Jindong admitted this in a video address to Suning’s huge workforce on February 19, when he said “we will close and cut down businesses irrelevant to the retail business without hesitation”. He was not kidding.

That said, the writing had been on the wall for some time. After all, Jiangsu’s players often had to wait for their pay during last season’s title-winning campaign, even going on strike on one occasion. And although it is unusual for the champions to go bust, bankruptcies are nothing new for Chinese football.

 

Jiangsu’s training ground lies deserted (Photo: Fang Dongxu/VCG via Getty Images)

“It is not the first time clubs have encountered difficulties and it probably won’t be the last,” explains Dr Jonathan Sullivan, an expert on Chinese football and an associate professor in the University of Nottingham’s Asia Research Institute.

“It seems to be a hazard of Chinese football in the professional era and I suspect it may portend a broader reconsideration of ambitions for CSL owners and closer regulation.

“The league’s development required private capital to make it work but it was always subsidiary to the state’s main ambitions for football — improve public health and deliver national pride via performances and having a presence in the international game.

“The CSL is now suffering because private capital is suffering. The extent to which COVID-19 has hurt the Chinese economy is masked by government investment, and it is likely that Suning is not the only retail business suffering.

“Given that the CSL was always a subsidiary concern in the government’s football strategy, and that stability trumps everything, it is much more important a struggling company retrench than risk potentially destabilising failures. Professional football is generally expensive, unprofitable and easily sacrificed when the going gets tough.”

Simon Chadwick, a professor of Eurasian sport at the Emlyon Business School, agrees. “The Suning episode embodies what it means to live and work in an authoritarian, centrally-planned country,” says Chadwick.

“China’s promotion of football back in 2015 was state-led: big on vision but short on implementation. This promotion was also consistent with the country’s 13th five-year plan, which emphasised the need for outbound investment. So, we saw a frenzy of Chinese entrepreneurs investing in football, at home and abroad, to curry favour with the government.

“However, midway through the plan, it had become apparent football was more of a financial burden than a revenue driver, and that signing players like Carlos Tevez was never going to be a basis upon which to build China’s football success.”

Chadwick believes the “sea change that ultimately brought us to the Suning debacle” started at the end of 2016, the year Tevez joined Shanghai Shenhua and Oscar signed for Shanghai SIPG. The government forced China’s biggest property company, Wanda, to sell its shareholding in Atletico Madrid amid concerns about too much Chinese money leaving the country.

It was also the beginning of a crackdown on celebrity entrepreneurs. Wanda’s Wang Jianlin was the man whose wrist was slapped that time and Ma is the most recent example, as the Alibaba boss is widely believed to have been detained by the authorities last year. The story was officially denied but he has re-emerged recently as a much less outspoken figure.

“No person and no business can now be bigger than the state, which is omnipresent and all-powerful,” says Chadwick.

“Suning’s retrenchment is the archetypal response to central government priorities and pressure: stick to what you know, don’t engage in overseas whimsy and always remember who’s in charge.

“As for football, the vision has clarified. China still wants to become a football superpower but sees that this is best achieved by having close relations with FIFA and staging the World Cup, which many believe will be in 2030.”

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What’s the reaction been like in China?

In a country where the government has the power to tell private companies to invest in football, and they do, until the government tells them to stop, and they do, would it surprise you to hear the reaction to Jiangsu’s demise has been muted by western standards?

And fans of Jiangsu are not the only ones facing the prospect of having no team to cheer this season. Tianjin Quanjian, who once signed Alexandre Pato and Axel Witsel, went bust last year and their rivals Tianjin Tigers are in trouble now.

A China-based journalist, who wished to remain anonymous, told The Athletic there has been “a lot of hand-wringing” about the situation in the Chinese press but actual criticism of the government’s football strategy is “obviously off-limits”.

The Chinese FA issued the blandest of statements following Suning’s decision to shut down Jiangsu, saying it was “sorry” to hear the news and thanking the company for its previous support for the game.

 

Jiangsu celebrate their Super League title — three months later, the team no longer exists (Photo: STR / AFP)

“Jiangsu fans are angry at Suning and there’s a lot of sympathy for them from other fans because they know it could easily — and in the case of Tianjin, definitely will — happen to their clubs,” the journalist said.

“The foundations of Chinese football are very weak, with clubs at the mercy of investors’ fluctuating fortunes. But it’s the fans who suffer most and they are utterly powerless to do anything about it.

“There have been minor shows of public anger by a smattering of fans but demonstrations are not tolerated here and won’t happen. Fans need to get creative to make their point. Some Henan fans recently mounted a campaign against the change of the club’s name by taking out adverts on electronic billboards in prominent places.”

Sullivan believes this disregard for supporters is one of the reasons the Chinese game remains so fragile.

“The history of professional clubs in China is littered with failures, mainly due to the woes or caprices of private investors,” he says. “As always, fans will just have to suck it up. The way fans have been treated in China is one of the reasons the domestic game has failed to develop and the current difficulties just reinforce that.

“Among ‘football people’ the appetite is there, the passion is there, but if you want to cultivate the broad support base you need for a league to prosper sustainably over time, you can’t continually send fans messages like this.”

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When did they get involved with Inter and what were their first big moves? 

Suning acquired a controlling stake in the Italian club during the summer of 2016 and was welcomed as an owner with the right intentions and ambition to make Inter a force again. 

When anyone buys Inter, they are expected to go on a spree and make a statement of intent. For instance, Ernesto Pellegrini went out and got his new team the Ballon d’Or-winning Karl-Heinz Rummenigge. Massimo Moratti splurged on Paul Ince, Roberto Carlos and Javier Zanetti and it wasn’t long before he broke the world transfer record for Ronaldo. 

Despite inheriting a limiting financial fair play (FFP) settlement agreement, which withheld €20 million in prize money, imposed squad restrictions and limited the number of new signings eligible to play in European competition, Suning was very much in step with this tradition and its strategy contrasted starkly with its predecessor, the ever-smiling Indonesian media mogul Erick Thohir. He had mistakenly thought giving away fan favourite Fredy Guarin to Juventus for Mirko Vucinic might make Inter fans dream again. However, it invoked uproar and a protest caused the move to collapse. He ended up buying Hernanes instead for an €18 million fee that did little to suggest the club’s new benefactor was as loaded as some of the other foreign investors who had entered European football. 

Suning, however, did not disappoint. In the last five years, Inter have had the highest net spend in Italy at €352 million, according to research by Swiss Ramble.

Super agents were conspicuous by their presence on the fringes of the new owner’s first shareholders’ assembly at the luxury Palazzo Parigi hotel in Milan. Six months after buying Teixeira and Ramires for Jiangsu in deals worth €78 million, Suning splashed out €40 million on Joao Mario then another €29.5 million on the next big thing from Brazil, Gabriel Barbosa. The pair of them aren’t bad players but flopped at Inter and their first experiences abroad were at a club in a state of flux. 

Before they’d even kicked a ball for Inter, coach Roberto Mancini was dismissed in pre-season after suggesting the team had other needs (like Yaya Toure) and Suning ended up going through four managers in their first year, perhaps unsurprisingly missing out on the Champions League. It was not a mistake they’d make twice. 

Even within the constraints of FFP, Suning showed ambition. The owner was not considered to be the problem. The drama around star striker Mauro Icardi stemmed from his biography, which turned the ultras against him, and then his wife’s forthright opinions as a TV pundit, which made his position as captain untenable. 

In the middle of it all, Inter qualified for the Champions League, leapfrogging Lazio on the final day of the season with a memorable come-from-behind victory over the Rome side at the Stadio Olimpico. It persuaded Suning to reward coach Luciano Spalletti with a new three-year contract. At the club’s Christmas party, Steven Zhang, European football’s youngest president, proudly told his audience: “Finally we have an ability to talk about reaching and touching the silverware that we’ve been thinking about, that Inter have been missing so much. Every single game… every single event… we’re going to win it.”

The US-educated Zhang, who turned 29 last year, was regularly on the ground in Milan before the pandemic hit. A modernising force, he recognised Inter’s potential as a lifestyle brand (the club is about to announce a new logo) and entertainment studio. Zhang set up Inter Media House, seeing value in football clubs as unique content providers.    

Suning’s project was about to go to another level. Inter were moving into new offices in the stylish, regenerated Porta Nuova district of Milan. The training ground at Appiano Gentile was in the process of being upgraded and a partnership was struck with Milan to work on a new stadium. Giuseppe Marotta, the chief executive credited with re-establishing Juventus at the top of the Italian game, joined the executive team. Inter were beginning to look like the complete package, every inch a “super club”. 

Marotta’s arrival gave them a chance of appointing Conte, as close as you get to a sure thing when it comes to turning a contender into a champion. Spalletti delivered Champions League football again, but he was sacked nine months into his new deal. Unless the Tuscan took another job or came to a settlement in the meantime, he’d remain under contract at Inter. That decision is listed as an exceptional charge on their accounts at the eye-watering figure of €25.8 million.

And Conte doesn’t come cheap either. He is not on Diego Simeone money. No one is on Diego Simeone money. But Conte is the highest-paid coach in Serie A, with his reported €11 million salary apparently being as much as what Juventus’ Andrea Pirlo, Atalanta’s Gian Piero Gasperini, Roma’s Paulo Fonseca and Milan’s Stefano Pioli all earn put together. 

But Conte was not Inter’s only star signing. Unshackled from their FFP settlement, the transfer strategy that summer was aggressive. Some deals had already been arranged, such as the one for free agent Diego Godin, who arrived on big wages from Atletico, and Valentino Lazaro, bought for €22 million from Hertha Berlin.

If that purchase has largely been forgotten about, it’s because it paled in comparison with the others that were completed over that window. Inter made Cagliari midfielder Nicolo Barella their club-record signing, an honour he didn’t hold onto for very long, as Romelu Lukaku then signed from Manchester United for €74 million. 

 

Lukaku has been a huge success at Inter (Photo: Marco Luzzani – Inter/FC Internazionale via Getty Images)

A system change, but above all, a culture change, led to Icardi, Radja Nainggolan and Ivan Perisic being put up for sale. Raising funds for them was a challenge. After originally fretting that the €110 million clause in Icardi’s contract was too low, he ended up being loaned to Paris Saint-Germain, who then negotiated his permanent transfer down to half that figure. Perisic moved to Bayern Munich and won the treble — but has since returned — and Nainggolan, after being bought for €38 million plus Nicolo Zaniolo, was loaned to Cagliari in consecutive seasons for personal reasons (his wife is Sardinian and was undergoing treatment for breast cancer). 

Conte left the impression Inter had done a lot in the market but still weren’t ready to contend. After Inter went to Borussia Dortmund, played superb football for an hour then faded and lost just as they had done in Barcelona, he memorably said it was hard to expect more of the team when the club was buying him players from Cagliari (Barella) and Sassuolo (Stefano Sensi). So the club went Christmas shopping in the Premier League. Along with Ashley Young from Manchester United, Inter organised the rental of Victor Moses, who was reunited with his old Chelsea boss.

Neither of them, however, got a photoshoot at Milan’s world-famous opera house, La Scala. That was reserved for Christian Eriksen, who was welcomed as the playmaker Inter had lacked since the days of Wesley Sneijder.

 

Eriksen was brought in on huge wages as Inter’s marquee signing (Photo: Vincenzo Lombardo – Inter/Inter via Getty Images)

The €27 million that Inter committed in fees doesn’t seem all that high — except the Dane could have been signed for free when his contract with Tottenham Hotspur expired at the end of the season. The fee on top of the wage package Inter agreed, making Eriksen one of the highest earners at the club and, by the same token, in Serie A, was considerable for a player nearing his thirties who had no obvious role in Conte’s scheme. In the meantime, the pandemic engulfed Lombardy before any other major European region. 

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What’s been the impact of the pandemic? 

Stadiums closed, which was a problem for Inter, whose average gate of 65,800 at San Siro was the biggest in Serie A. For this season, the club estimates a negative impact on match-day revenue and cash in the region of €60 million. Sky Italia withheld the final €130 million installment of last season’s TV money from the league. 

Other stresses included the non-renewal by some sponsors of existing contracts or renegotiations and renewals at less advantageous figures. Inter’s longstanding and iconic shirt sponsor Pirelli will not feature on next season’s jerseys for the first time since 1995, with the club seeking a more lucrative deal than the one that paid €11 million last season. The failure to increase revenues from sponsorships and advertising as envisaged in the club’s prospective plans, and the increase in the collection times for payments due to the adverse economic context in which Inter’s customers operate, has also compounded matters. 

A €102 million loss was posted in their latest financial results, one of the biggest in European football, and there aren’t many levers left for Inter to pull to ease the strain on their accounts, which include a lot of debt that is due to mature in 18 months.

“The project stopped in August,” Conte recently said as the €40 million deal struck with Real Madrid for Achraf Hakimi was done at the end of June. Almost all the other incoming business Inter conducted afterwards was free or for nominal fees. Other clubs were able to dump some of their high earners, but Inter’s wage bill, which has increased by €74 million in the last four years, went up slightly again. Alexis Sanchez’s move from Manchester United was made permanent and other well-paid veterans like Arturo Vidal and Aleksandar Kolarov rocked up at San Siro. 

Raising funds through sales was trickier than it’s ever been before, with the market undergoing a severe contraction. As Greg Carey of Goldman Sachs told the Financial Times’ Business of Football summit last month: “A lot of the clubs use the transfer window to basically replenish their cash flow. Well, nobody has any money right now.” 

Take the case of Eriksen. The Dane has suddenly and unexpectedly become an integral part of Conte’s team but was on the transfer market barely a year after touching down in Milan and was pretty much unmoveable. Finding buyers willing to match big wages and pay the kinds of fees that prevent you from absorbing a loss on a player is nearly impossible at the moment. A firesale would not work and besides, a significant part of Inter’s value lies in having a competitive team that can compete at the highest level. That helps explain why Martinez revealed this week he has an agreement in principle to sign a new contract. Rather than selling stars, the best bet is to find a way of keeping them while moving on high-earning non-contributors instead. But that can take time as those guys often can’t find as good a deal elsewhere. 

What else has happened?

Well, in January, a notice appeared on the website of CONI, the Italian Olympic Committee and governing body of Italian sport, to say Eriksen’s agent is taking Inter to arbitration. And then there was a report in Corriere dello Sport alleging tension between Real Madrid and Inter over the first instalment of Hakimi’s transfer, which in turn led the Spanish giants to release a statement describing the story as “completely false”. Inter’s reaction to that and another story this week about an alleged missed bonus payment on Lukaku’s transfer from Manchester United is to insist they will respect all agreements.

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What might happen next for Inter? 

After Zhang initially called reports of Suning selling the club “entirely baseless”, the stance has softened. At the end of a conference call to announce Inter’s latest financial results on February 26, the last item on the agenda was an update on the search for a new partner. “As part of ongoing capital structure and liquidity management, the business and our ownership are in talks to provide solutions in this respect.” 

One of them, as reported by the Financial Times, is the rush to raise $200 million in emergency cash. Another would be to give up a controlling or minority stake in the club just a couple of months before Inter could be crowned champions. “Suning has confirmed its commitment to the ongoing financial support of the club with or without additional external support, but it is also sensible and prudent to look outside,” the call concluded. “With that in mind, Suning appointed key advisers in Asia to find suitable partners, be that with an injection of equity capital or otherwise. Talks with key potential partners in this respect remain ongoing.” 

Is there interest in buying Inter? 

The London-based private equity group BC Partners was in talks with Inter but the exclusivity period to agree a deal has expired. After carrying out due diligence on the club’s accounts, BC is at an advantage in that any other prospective investor would need time to conduct its own examination of Inter’s affairs and that would take precious time. 

But private equity’s interest in the club divides opinion. One industry expert tells The Athletic: “I don’t really see how they can make it work from a returns perspective. The numbers just don’t work. How can you pay €700 million or a billion, whatever the price they want is, for something that is loss-making in the hundreds of millions? How can you make a return and assume that you can get this sold at two or three times the money? This is what private equity requires for an investment to be approved. You have to show a case to your investment committee that shows you can double or triple the money in four or five years.” 

Others are more bullish and see huge potential in Inter, which is another reason Suning would perhaps be reluctant to let go of the club. An experienced M&A adviser The Athletic spoke to even counters that the club could be worth €3 billion over the same timeframe. There is a view Serie A clubs are undervalued compared with the Premier League and a pathway to profitability exists at Inter under more disciplined management. 

But how?

This ultimately comes down to where you think the industry is headed. Serie A’s president Paolo Dal Pino aims to double the league’s revenues and its clubs will vote on whether or not to sell a 10 per cent stake in a new entertainment company, valued at €1.7bn, to a private equity consortium fronted by CVC, Advent and FSI, who argue they have the expertise to help Italy’s top flight achieve that goal. 

The likelihood of that proposal winning approval has recently been thrown into doubt amid concerns that 1) the partner would have too much influence compared to its equity stake and 2) a clause in the term sheet could damage Serie A revenues since it relates to “unexpected changes in format”.

This has been presented in some quarters of the Italian media as a “European Super League clause” even though it does not specifically refer to it. The clause could just as easily relate to another entirely hypothetical scenario like, let’s say, the north of Italy breaking away from the south or the return to some pre-unification land of independent city-states. 

Whether it’s a Super League or not a Super League, you’re going to have a suped-up, even more lucrative Champions League, whatever format it will be. As a three-time winner and one of the world’s biggest clubs, Inter would be well-placed to be a founding member of any new competition.

Another way to look at it is geographic. Milan is a very modern and dynamic city — the third wealthiest city in Europe and the Italian capital of fashion, media and finance. The place has transformed since the Expo in 2015 and if you’re one of the world’s leading architects and you don’t have a project in the city, something is wrong. In AC Milan, Inter have a stable, well-run partner with whom to build a new stadium and the city’s corporate community has the resources to pay for naming rights, season tickets and hospitality boxes for the events it would showcase. 

That’s all in the future, though, and a Super League has been talked about for decades without happening. For now, it’s hard for Inter’s players and fans to focus on anything other than the present, particularly when the scudetto is within grasp. “When you’re at a club like Inter, aside from anything else, you’ve got to keep your mind on the pitch,” Conte said after the weekend’s win over Genoa. “I can only influence what I’m able to influence. It’s useless wasting energy on what we can’t. We must stay focused on what we can determine.”

 

Edited March 5, 2021 by Vesper

[NikkiCFC 7,950]

Vlahovic is very promising striker.

I usually dont fall for Serbian players but this one looks better than Jovic for me.

11 goals in last 16 Seria A games.

190cm and strong. It is huge difference between Haaland and all others but if we do not get him this one is the one to watch.