Napoli: cause for optimism?

by Robert  Tressell  |   23/05/2023  12 Comments  [Jump to last]

Obviously the most pressing thing for Everton right now is a home win. It’s hard to look beyond all that but, like a pungent smear of deep heat, here’s a counter-irritant to take your mind (even briefly) off the pain of waiting. Consider instead, the position of Napoli.

This unfashionable, traditional club has just managed to achieve something spectacular after a period on the periphery since the late 80s.  It has won the Scudetto. 

I have a soft spot for Italian football because it was on Channel 4 when I was growing up and we didn’t have Sky (still don’t). For anyone who’s not so fussed, the reason this is relevant to us is that Napoli’s title-winning squad construction has been extremely cost-efficient.   

Players like Frank Anguissa (once of Fulham), Leo Ostigard (never quite a first teamer with Brighton after spells on loan with Stoke and Coventry) and Tanguy Ndombele (a flop with Spurs) have had strong seasons for the Champions. They are accompanied by Min-jae Kim, the excellent South Korean centre-back bought from Fenerbahçe who we’ve been linked with since he was playing in China.

Most notably though, they have managed to find themselves two absolutely world class young attackers in the form of Victor Osimhen (a £75M signing from Lille) and Khvicha Kvaratskhelia (an £11M signing from Dinamo Batumi in Georgia). 

These two have fired Napoli to the title – with a supporting cast of good, but not great players.  How did they get here?

For a good few years now, the Napoli squad has been overhauled and improved by signing players in two ways:

·       Try before you buy loans: Bakayoko (Chelsea), Anguissa (Fulham), Raspadori (Sassuolo), Simeone (Verona) and Ndombele (Spurs)

·       £5M to £20M deals: Min-jae Kim (Fenerbahce), Oliveira (Getafe), Anguissa (Fulham), Ostigard (Brighton), Kvaratskhelia (Dinamo Batumi) and Politano (Inter).

The “try before you buy” loans have helped them dial down some of the risk inherent in buying players.  By the time they were shelling out about £16M for Anguissa, they’d seen him in action and knew he was a good fit for the team (as well as good value).  That’s worked out better than buying the ostensibly similar Bakayoko, who has faded badly since starring in the excellent Monaco side from a few years ago.

The £5M to £20M deals come off the back of bigger spending in previous seasons which didn’t really get them anywhere.  What the big spending taught them is that the sorts of players they were spending about £20M to £35M on weren’t actually any better than cheaper counterparts.  They were just buying the same standard players from selling clubs with better bargaining power.

Hopefully that just reinforces what I’ve always believed.  By adopting some fairly sensible principles (not unlike what Moyes used to do), it’s not so hard to construct a steady side where players are all at a decent level. The way many clubs go about this is quite formulaic.  However, as we also saw under Moyes, you can only go so far with this.

What gets you above the ordinary is a bit of magic; a couple (or more) of real difference-makers.

Victor Osimhen first came to prominence for Nigeria at an U17 World Cup in 2015 – which prompted a move to Wolfsburg that didn’t work out and a loan spell in Belgium with Charleroi where he exploded into life with 20 goals in 36 games.

Charleroi exercised an option to buy and sold him on immediately to Lille where he really started to shine on a bigger stage.  But it meant his £75M move to Napoli (their one big splurge) was just over a year after being sold by Wolfsburg for only £3.5M.

Khvicha Kvaratskhelia had a similarly weird career trajectory. After showing promise as a youth in Georgia, he got a loan move to Lokomotiv Moscow and then Rubin Kazan paid £600k for him. He did well there and was one of the regulars in YouTube highlights reels for a couple of seasons, dribbling past entire teams and looking like George Best in his pomp (including at international level for Georgia). 

The curiosity was that, despite the obvious talent, he seemed to have little or no end product.  In a league where Oumar Niasse and Aiden McGeady had decent stats, Kvaratskhelia got just 9 goals and 18 assists in 73 games.

He was linked with us; he was linked with everyone. But weirdly the Ukraine war intervened and somehow Georgian club Dinamo Batumi found £8M to buy him in March 2021. He scored 8 in 11 games there before moving to Napoli just 4 months later.  Since then, he's been brilliant.

This is obviously all lovely stuff for Napoli but doesn’t do a lot for us.  Well, I guess so.  But, actually, from my perspective at least, it’s this sort of stuff that keeps the hope alive - believing that the players are always out there to turn us around. 

As much as the playing squad needs all sorts of attention this summer – I hope that the club does what it can to seek out players who, like Osimhen and the man now known as Kvaradona, can elevate an ordinary team into the extraordinary.  Players of really high potential, even if their careers might take a few peculiar twists and turns before they realise that potential.  It’s not unlike what Martinez tried with Deulofeu and Lukaku.  With a bit of imagination, we can do it again.  

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