THE ATHLETIC: Victor Osimhen Is The Future

[danfo driver]

How cute are the English. Victor is the NOW and the FUTURE!

https://theathletic.com/4624377/2023/06 ... =twitteruk



To announce their new French coach, Napoli chose a Bourbon palace. As Rudi Garcia walked the halls of Capodimonte — a hunting lodge turned royal residence and now art gallery — on Monday, he would have had a chance to stop before Caravaggio’s Flagellation. Ideal preparation, perhaps, for facing a press corp yet to move on from Luciano Spalletti, the 2022-23 title-winning coach who has persuaded Napoli’s owner Aurelio De Laurentiis to let him walk away to spend the next year recharging on his farm in Tuscany.

“What are you frightened of?” Garcia was asked. Vertigo maybe? Capodimonte literally means “top of the mountain” and the banner left outside by the ultras welcomed the smooth-talking 59-year-old “to the summit” of Italian football. “Let’s defend it,” they recommended.

Garcia didn’t flinch. “I’m not scared of anything, other than the health problems we all fear,” he responded. De Laurentiis’ wish to see Napoli play in the Champions League final didn’t seem to worry him either. The film producer laboured under the misapprehension Garcia had taken a team to one before. “A semi-final” with Lyon (in 2020), Garcia corrected him. (He did take Marseille to the 2017-18 Europa League final.)

The principal concern of Napoli fans, largely projected onto them by social media, is whether or not the club will be able to resist the economic forces of the ESL (English Super League, as some have nicknamed the Premier League) and keep last season’s team together. De Laurentiis did not feel the need to reassure Garcia about the future of Serie A’s 2022-23 top scorer and striker of the year Victor Osimhen. “I didn’t say that (Osimhen is staying) to Rudi,” De Laurentiis said. He didn’t think he had to for a simple reason: “I’ve been saying that for a while now.”

In a hazelnut-coloured blazer, with his white hair slicked back as usual, De Laurentiis reminded reporters of his stance in the immediate aftermath of Napoli’s first Scudetto since 1990. Italian TV station RAI’s talk-show host Bruno Vespa had pressed him on whether Osimhen would go this summer, to which he emphatically replied: “No, never.”

On Monday, however, De Laurentiis did shift a little in his chair. His position on Osimhen has not softened.

“We have an agreement in principle over a two-year extension,” was one of the news lines he dangled. The other appeared to conflict with his repeated assertions that Osimhen will spearhead Napoli’s attack again next season. “If an offer were to come in that we can’t turn down, and it’s for the good of Napoli, then we’d see,” De Laurentiis said. “We’d assess it.”

European football’s super-rich, the game’s old and new monied class, know better than to be encouraged. To De Laurentiis, the indecent proposal in question would have to exceed the Serie A record sale of Inter Milan’s Romelu Lukaku to Chelsea two summers ago for €115million (£98.4m/$125.4m at today’s exchange rates) — a cautionary tale if ever there was one. The ballpark figure rumoured to be a starting point is close to double the €75m Napoli paid France’s Lille for Osimhen in July 2020.

As if the mooted price wasn’t already enough of a deterrent, there’s also De Laurentiis’ reputation as a notoriously hard negotiator.

The contracts he gets players to sign are meticulously drawn up and difficult to get out of. “You know my uncle Dino (the famous film producer) had a villa confiscated from a certain Federico Fellini (the multi-Oscar winning movie director)…” is an anecdote De Laurentiis likes to tell about what happens when contracts don’t get honoured.

The image-rights deals he asks players to sign gives De Laurentiis control not just in Italy but, as defender Faouzi Ghoulam recently revealed, “the universe”. Extricating yourself from them is tricky.

Napoli have, for the most part during his near-two decades at the helm, been impeccably run, operating regularly at a profit. This sturdy foundation has allowed De Laurentiis to hold onto the team’s stars even in the pandemic, when Napoli missed out twice on Champions League qualification. Unlike Inter, for instance, they are not in need of money. Vulnerability is found in players with buy-out clauses such as centre-back Kim Min-jae, who is expected to move to Bayern Munich next month. Osimhen is not one of them.

Bayern naturally held an interest in Osimhen as Robert Lewandowski’s successor when he went to Barcelona a year ago but as their chief executive Oliver Kahn explained before his dismissal last month, the prospective fee involved looked hard to justify: “For that kind of money Bayern would have to ask itself: Does the player offer guarantees? It would definitely be a big risk.”

After all, the most underrated aspect in any signing is a player’s availability.

As Juventus have found with Paul Pogba the second time around, it doesn’t matter how good the World Cup-winning midfielder is on paper if you can’t get him out on the pitch. Osimhen has been brittle in his three years in Italy, even though he has progressively become more dependable.

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In his first season, he dislocated a shoulder and was 17th on the team for minutes in all competitions. In his second, he ranked 10th in this regard and has worn a mask since sustaining a fractured eye socket and cheekbone during it. This past season, Osimhen’s first with over 15 league goals, he was up to eighth in minutes but missed nearly half of Napoli’s Champions League games (four of 10), including the first leg of the quarter-final defeat away to AC Milan. The second leg of that tie, incidentally, was the only time Osimhen completed 90 minutes in the 2022-23 Champions League.

One of the questions it begs is: How many more goals would the Nigerian have added to his tally of 31 in all competitions had he been as available as Napoli’s captain Giovanni Di Lorenzo, who clocked up 1,000 more minutes than him? The flip-side, at least per StatsBomb data, is Osimhen outperformed his xG in Serie A by a decent margin (17.59 to his 24 non-penalty goals).

Can he repeat what he did last season under a different coach from Spalletti, whose style of play helped Francesco Totti, Edin Dzeko and Mauro Icardi win the Capocannoniere title as top scorer in Serie A under him? And how much of Osimhen’s upswing in goalscoring was down to the signing of Khvicha Kvaratskhelia, the league’s 2022-23 MVP responsible for all those goal-creating actions and six direct assists in the league.

None of this is to diminish Osimhen’s ability and the potential he is yet to express as a 24-year-old. He’s already dealt with the albatross of a big fee and has some great attributes. He’s the fastest centre-forward in Serie A and his height (185cm; 6ft 1in) and telescopic reach mean there are no lost causes as far as he is concerned. He can get to most balls whether they are skilfully placed or roughly hoofed his way.

But you would still advise caution.

The trend in taking top strikers out of Italy is not a good one at the moment.

We can go back to Ciro Immobile’s spells at Borussia Dortmund and Sevilla, and Icardi’s soap opera at Paris Saint-Germain (salvaged on one level by an excellent 2022-23 loan season at Galatasaray). Lukaku lost his way and has only recently got back on track (if you excuse, that is, the misses in the recent Champions League final).

Meanwhile, Dusan Vlahovic has endured a difficult first full season at Juventus. This was the player billed as Serie A’s answer to Kylian Mbappe and Erling Haaland, someone vaunted far higher than Osimhen as recently as a year ago.

It’s a reminder that fit, fitness and fee are key.

Vlahovic’s value now is hovering around what Juventus paid for him 18 months ago (€75million); a sizeable amount particularly for a player whose groin has played up a lot over the past year. But the Serbia international looks relatively cheap compared with Osimhen who, let’s not forget, will probably be playing in the Africa Cup of Nations (AFCON) for most of next January — and possibly into February.

Osimhen missed the previous AFCON at the start of last year through injury, but were he to go to this one and take Nigeria to the final on February 11, any Premier League club who bought him would have to do without their prospective marquee signing during the most congested period of their season.

Pause for thought it doth give. Particularly at a time when Premier League clubs seem more concerned about financial fair play than ever, which, as the richest league in the world by an absolute mile, only serves to underline the lack of sustainability in this mad industry.

Last but by no means least, there’s an opportunity cost element to all of this too.

Let’s say Osimhen were to cost €145million. That’s €145m you can’t spend elsewhere.

Arsenal are minded to allocate a chunk of their summer spend to West Ham midfielder Declan Rice. Premier League clubs who are after a striker have other needs too. In Manchester United and Chelsea’s case, that’s a goalkeeper, a position that used to be undervalued until the Alisson and Kepa Arrizabalaga deals of recent years set new benchmarks. Real Madrid have to keep some of their budget back in the event Mbappe becomes available again.

Perhaps, in that domino-toppling latter scenario, it’s possible to see De Laurentiis selling to a state-backed club such as Paris Saint-Germain, as he did when Edinson Cavani went there a decade ago, not least because Luis Campos, the Parisians’ recruitment consultant, was the guy who signed Osimhen for Lille from Belgium’s Charleroi in 2019.

Whether going back to Ligue 1 this summer, or next, would appeal to Osimhen is unclear, particularly when his stated ambition is to one day play in the Premier League.

But let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves.

Unless a Qatari takes over Manchester United — or so much cash from the Saudi Pro League washes into European football it causes the economics to change all over again — the smart money, at least for now, is on Osimhen staying in Naples.