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David Amoyal: Koulibaly & Paredes - the tale of the domino effect
Chelsea and Liverpool continue to shop in Italy, let’s take a look at the situation surrounding their targets starting with Koulibaly who has been at the top of Conte’s wish list to bolster the defense all summer. While many ask me on a daily basis why Napoli is so difficult to negotiate with, it’s important to note their job isn’t to make other clubs better (personally I wish more Serie A clubs tried as hard to keep their best players as the partenopei).
Napoli made a small fortune once Juventus activated Higuain’s 90 million euro exit clause, this is in addition to the substantial guaranteed revenue that comes from being in the Champions League- so there is really no need to sell Koulibaly from a financial stand point. Aside from revenues, Napoli’s fan base was (not surprisingly) very upset over Higuain leaving to join their bitter rivals, so president De Laurentiis has an incentive to keep his best players.
Napoli also has both some short and long term concerns at Koulibaly’s position. Tonelli who arrived at the beginning of the summer window, suffered an injury that will likely keep him off Napoli’s Champions League squad list. Albiol has an expiring contract and will likely return to Spain next season, and with Koulibaly set to play in the Africa Cup next winter, Maksimovic’s potential arrival (which is far from likely anyway) may not mean Koulibaly will join Chelsea anyway.
Seen the difficulty in signing Koulibaly, it’s not surprising that Chelsea has worked on signing alternatives. The Blues made a substantial offer to Milan for Romagnoli, but he’s also off the market. The rossoneri invested over 25 million euro in the center back just last summer, and he’s one of the few building blocks on their squad. With the new investors set to close the deal to buy the club from Berlusconi later this year, it’s very unlikely they would sell such an important player for the future.
The easiest solution for Chelsea, is to cut out the middle man and just sign Nikola Maksimovic from Torino. The Serbian center back has been essentially frozen out the squad and is very available for around 30 million euro, a fairly good value for a player just entering his prime and who already established himself in Italy- in addition the granata have already signed Rossettini and Castan to help replace him. Maksimovic is an excellent passer out of the backline, he could allow Conte to use the 3 5 2 formation against certain opponents.
Just like we could look at Maksimovic as potentially having a domino effect on Koulibaly, the same can be said about for Amadou Diawara with Leandro Paredes, who is a target for Liverpool, Leicester and Milan. Paredes spent last season on loan at Empoli, where he really strived playing in the regista role (ball distributor in front of the defense in Pirlo’s style) he then participated in Roma’s summer retreat so coach Spalletti could evaluate him in person.
Clearly Spalletti liked what he saw- Paredes started the first Serie A match of the season after coming in the second half of the preliminary round of the Champions League. If that weren’t enough, in his post game interview after the win against Udinese last Saturday, Spalletti asked Di Marzio to take Paredes off the market since he’s the king of transfers.
While Liverpool is clearly interested in Paredes, a player they scouted in person a few times last season, Roma no longer has the opportunity to sign the player that made the most sense to replace him. Diawara has many of the same attributes as Paredes- he’s a very complete midfielder who has already established himself in Serie A despite his young age, but he will now start the next chapter of his career at Napoli.
While Roma hasn’t been afraid to sell players at the right price in recent years (Lamela, Benatia, Romagnoli), they really need Paredes to help offset Pjanic’s loss. Certainly Roma has quite a few quality midfielders, especially now that Bruno Peres’ arrival opened the door to Florenzi playing less at right back, but Strootman is coming off another serious knee injury and De Rossi will likely have to play at center back on occasion.
Had Liverpool acted sooner, they may have had a good chance to sign Paredes- but with Diawara off the market it will be very difficult- they could go after Inter’s Gary Medel instead. Milan can probably say the same about Paredes, since they had a great opportunity to sign him when Roma was about to redeem the rights to El Shaarawy from them last June.
At this point odds are that both Koulibaly and Paredes will stay with their current teams. While many think there won’t be a scudetto race with Juventus being so dominant so they may as well cash in and sell them, Roma and Napoli will need to keep their best players to give themselves a chance to at least finish in second place, which comes with significant guaranteed Champions League revenue.
See you next Tuesday for another round of Transfer Talk…
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