Misfits, Mysteries and Nearly-Men — Moise Kean

Moise Kean’s arrival at Everton in the summer of 2019 was very much in keeping with the new direction on which the Club had been trying to embark under the auspices of Farhad Moshiri as majority shareholder and his appointment of, first, Marcel Brands as Director of Football and then Marco Silva as Head Coach the year before.

After two years of largesse in the transfer market where Moshiri had sanctioned the purchase of a number of expensive recruits in their late twenties who would, ultimately, have little or no sell-on value when it came time to offload them, Brands had embarked on a drive to reduce the average age of the squad with an eye on building something lasting with players who could still command fees if and when they left.

The likes of Richarlison, Lucas Digne, Bernard and Yerry Mina had arrived in the summer of 2018 and, the following year, the rebuilding process continued when 23-year-old Jean-Philippe Gbamin and 19-year-old Moise Kean were added to the squad at a cost of almost £50m.

Though little was known about Gbamin outside of the Bundesliga, where he had spent three years at Mainz, Kean, a product of Juventus’s youth academy, was regarded as one of the hotter young striking talents on the Continent. As such, his signing by Everton was something of a coup, although, in retrospect, the £25m fee the Blues paid for the budding Italian international perhaps explained why there was little competition for his signature.

Brands had clearly earmarked Kean as a long-term investment. The striker had pressed his claims for making the step up to Juve’s senior side when he was still 16 by scoring at a rate of a goal a game for their academy side in 2015-16 and became the Serie A giants’ youngest-ever debutant the following season.

By the time he had moved to Merseyside, he had continued his development with a loan spell at Verona, become the first player born in the 2000s to score in Europe's five big leagues, and also becoming a full Italy international, earning three senior caps and scoring two goals. His promise was not lost on Juve who were prepared to take a sizeable transfer fee for their young protegé but negotiated first option to buy him back should Everton want to cash in down the road.

Kean's integration into Silva's side was measured by the Portuguese, who had to balance the imperative to get 2019-20 off to a good start with the need to blood his young new signing. Sparse displays as a late substitute meant that the Italian struggled for the amount of game time he needed in which to really settle into the rigorous demands of the Premier League.

In November 2019, with only two starts and no complete games in a Blue shirt, he was disciplined for turning up late to a team meeting while, on the field, scoring goals proved to be especially difficult in an Everton side that was struggling across the board and which had dropped into the bottom three by the first week of December 2019.

Silva paid for the poor run with his job and was replaced temporarily by Duncan Ferguson, who handed Kean the ignominy of being substituted only 17 minutes after coming on as a sub himself in an away game at Manchester United. Caretaker boss Ferguson blanked Kean as he trudged off the pitch and the teenager walked straight down the tunnel. Some pundits rounded on Ferguson for his treatment of the youngster, who had still not scored for the club.

Defending his decision, Ferguson said: “I was just doing it for fresh legs. Unfortunately, he was the one I decided to bring off. I see why he’s upset, but it’s about the team. I just needed to make a substitution to kill a bit of time. I’ve got so many strikers on the bench, I just decided to make that change. It was nothing personal to Moise Keane really.”

This was all before the striker's compatriot, Carlo Ancelotti, was hired as the new Everton manager at Christmas time, and the expectation was that, if anyone could get anything out of the Italian starlet, that man would be Ancelotti.

Kean gradually worked himself back into the reckoning at Goodison Park, scoring his first goal for Everton in a home fixture against Newcastle and adding a consolation goal in the embarrassing home defeat to Bournemouth after the season resumed following the pause for Covid-19. During the lockdown, Kean attracted unwanted headlines when video footage of a house party appeared on Snapchat showing the footballer celebrating with friends in contravention of Government guidance.

With Everton adding quality to the ranks with the likes of James Rodriguez, 2020-21 was seen as the season when Kean might blossom at Goodison Park. He made his first start of the season in a Carabao Cup second round tie against Salford City but disappointed leading the line before scoring a late penalty. He came off the bench in the next round at Fleetwood Town and notched another in a 5-2 win.

With Ancelotti making minimal use of him and many fans uneasy at his sulking attitude and poor body language, even when scoring his goals for Everton, speculation over his future continued until he secured a loan move to Paris Saint-Germain just before the transfer deadline in early October 2020.

Kean was given plenty of game-time at the Parc des Princes, first by Thomas Tuchel and then Mauricio Pochettino, and in 41 appearances in all competitions, the Italian scored 17 times, including three in the Champions League. It appeared as though he had done enough to earn a permanent move to PSG but, despite their cash riches, the Ligue 1 giants refused to meet Everton's reported asking price of £35m or offer anything more than another loan deal and eventually lost interest in Kean after signing Lionel Messi in the summer of 2021.

The then-21-year-old returned to pre-season training at Finch Farm and played in the 2021 friendlies but missed the opening Premier League games due to Covid-19 isolation protocols. He would start the League Cup 2nd Round tie at Huddersfield Town and score a great goal that was perhaps incorrectly ruled offside before getting shown a straight red card for a needless altercation with an opposition player.

By this point, it was becoming clear that Kean’s much-heralded move to Everton wasn’t going to work out how either party had hoped and there was heavy speculation linking him with a return to Juventus which eventually culminated in an unusual two-year loan deal back on transfer deadline day in August 2021. The agreement struck with Juve could eventually be worth around €30m when Juventus made the move permanent in 2023.

Just like Ademola Lookman before him, Kean had arrived as an exciting young prospect but left Goodison having failed to settle, either at the Club or in the northwest. And like Lookman, he would eventually find his place in Italy where he would eventually start to realise his rich potential.

It would take more time, though. He had limited success at the start of his loan spell back at Juve, scoring just two goals in 10 appearances, six of them from the subs bench but he failed to play a full game all season in 2021-22, scoring just six more goals. He was set for another loan move last January but a leg injury put paid to his chances of joining Atletico Madrid and by the summer of 2024, Juventus had decided to move him on.

In July, he joined Fiorentina in a cut-price deal worth a little over £10m and his career appears to finally be taking off. So far this season, he has scored 11 goals in 14 appearances as I Viola have ascended to third place in Serie A, one point behind leaders, Napoli. And he is back pressing his claims for his national team for whom he now has 18 caps and five goals to his name.

Though it would be tempting for Kean, now 24, to look back on his time at Everton with regret, he insists that, “Out of all the experiences I’ve had, you won’t ever hear me say I had a bad one. I find positives in all of them.

“If I hadn’t spent that year at Everton, I wouldn’t have learned the things I did there,” he explains to James Horncastle in The Athletic. “I was a bit unlucky. I went there expecting to play a bit more. I was 19. I joined from Juve and thought I was going to smash it. Unfortunately, it didn’t go like that. We went through three coaches that year and mentally… it was all new for me. I was in England, it was a new environment.

“The [other players] were so used to not seeing the sun, they were barbecuing on the beach in winter. They were in short sleeves in winter. I said to myself: ‘These people are out of their minds!’

“But England made me learn a lot about myself. I matured a lot. When I got there I didn’t play much. I used to think, ‘How am I not getting into this team, at Everton?’ Mentally, it made me evolve. I wasn’t playing and it was in dark times that I knew I had to grit my teeth and train even more.

“Then the chance to go to PSG (on loan) came along, I moved there and got everything out of myself that I could. I wasn’t playing at Everton and I knew I had to give triple. That’s how it went.”

Kean’s story is, potentially, another “what might have been” for Evertonians but at no point did it ever look and feel as though it was ever going to work out for him with the Toffees. Part of that was down to his youth and immaturity, part of it could be attributed to being a teenager in a foreign country and the culture clash he alludes to above. Much more could be explained by the chaos and instability that has been the story of the Moshiri years and has seen a succession of managers and sporting directors come and go along with many of their signings.

Rather than end up on the scrap heap, it seems this Everton misfit is finally finding his groove in his native land while the club he left behind in England is hoping to do the same in the coming years.

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