Why there’s almost a complete Serie A standstill on transfers (despite a few big sales)
By
James Horncastle
Aug 8, 2023
Ever heard the one about the tiger, the cow and the horse?
Nope. Me neither until
Serie A’s sporting directors got together at the Grand Hotel Rimini for their annual dinner to mark the formal opening of the transfer window on July 1.
Inter Milan’s chief executive
Beppe Marotta was holding court and, raconteur that he is, had a parable for the state of Italian football. “Football clubs are at times perceived as fierce tigers to be hunted and killed. Other times they’re seen as cows to be milked. Few people, however, look at them as pack horses pulling a cart with a very heavy load. We’re often mischaracterised,” he said.
The dealmaker behind last season’s
Champions League finalists talks a good game about sustainability, the Damascene moment coming in Covid when Inter stood on a precipice they are still only inching away from, the hand of a U.S. hedge fund, Oaktree, pulling them back from a fall into the
abyss. The debt taken out by Inter’s holding company Grand Tower stood at €329m (£283.1m; $362m) at the end of last year and will keep accruing interest until it matures in May next year when chairman Steven Zhang will either have to repay it, refinance it or lose control of the club.
The run to Istanbul, a boon in TV and prize money, did little to relieve the pack horse of its load other than negate the need for Inter to sell players for Financial Fair Play purposes by June 30. Any acquisitions, however, would still need to be funded by sales to the
Premier League and Saudi Pro League. For instance, the signing of Italy international midfielder Davide Frattesi could only go through once
Marcelo Brozovic was persuaded to leave for Al Nassr. Brozovic’s reluctance ended up eating into Inter’s profit margin as the initial fee agreed by the clubs needed re-negotiating (for less money) when the Croatia international kept raising his salary demands to soften the blow of abandoning
Milan for Riyadh.
Andre Onana’s move to Manchester United barely a year after his free transfer from Ajax was justified for its accounting benefit — the €55m constitutes one big fat capital gain. It was also framed as a fund-raising exercise for the sweeper keeper’s replacement, the signing of a back-up shot stopper as well as a star striker, originally pencilled in as
Romelu Lukaku on a permanent basis.
In the end Inter flew to Japan on tour without a first-team goalkeeper — Deki Stankovic’s son pulled on some gloves — or a partner for new captain Lautaro Martinez, although it would be remiss not to mention the exciting arrival of
Marcus Thuram who joined from Borussia Monchengladbach on a Bosman.
A new goalkeeper has since been secured.
Yann Sommer is finally on his way despite Inter trying to get Bayern to accept less than his €6m buy-out clause — which will now be paid in a two instalments — and there is confidence Marotta will find Simone Inzaghi a goalscorer by the time the league kicks off in under a fortnight. But the club is in many ways, symbolic of the state of Italian football at the moment where two of the big three are in straitened circumstances and the lack of any trickle down effect is immobilising the local transfer market.
A recent investigation by L’Espresso published new figures showing the football pyramid in Italy has consolidated debts of €5.6bn. This is why Lazio owner Claudio Lotito has
three phones. Over the years, Lotito has, along with Marotta, established a reputation as arguably Italian football’s foremost powerbroker. The pair of them sit on the council of both Serie A and the Italian Football Federation (FIGC). But Lotito doesn’t limit himself to football politics. He is a senator in the Italian parliament and has spent the last six months campaigning for an amendment that foresees a discount on debts owed to the taxman for clubs that have paid on instalment for 15 years. If passed it would save teams millions and relieve Serie A’s pack horses of some of their load.
Lotito, naturally, is also on the committee negotiating the sale of Serie A’s TV rights for the next rights cycle, although, one of the meetings to discuss the tender reportedly had to be postponed on account of his political engagements in Molise. The awareness that this season is the last of the existing TV deal together with the ongoing uncertainty over the value of the next one is one factor in the prudence we’re seeing in the transfer market.
There are other structural reasons at play too such as the tortoise-like progress on new revenue-boosting stadiums — Italian bureaucracy makes tortoises look like hares. The usual half measures and missed opportunities continue as was depressingly evident in the news that the FIGC is now jointly bidding with
Turkey for the Euros in 2032 rather than going it alone and overseeing a comprehensive reform of the country’s football infrastructure.
The rest is circumstantial. Inter’s situation has already been laid out. As for
Juventus, their new head of recruitment Cristiano Giuntoli was only allowed to leave champions
Napoli at the end of June and the club had to wait another month for UEFA to reach its decision to issue them with a one-year ban from European competition for club licensing and FFP violations, a decision that makes cost cutting and sales a priority. Napoli’s replacement for Giuntoli, the little known Mauro Meluso, hasn’t been in the job a month and aside from replacing centre-back Kim Min-jae with Natan from Red Bull Bragantino, his priority has been in keeping the team together by working on new deals for players like Victor Osimhen rather than spending for the sake of spending.
Lotito, as already mentioned, is always juggling a lot of things. These include Lazio’s transfer window after the departure of his long-term sporting director Igli Tare. Satisfying a coach as particular as Maurizio Sarri, who turned down the chance to sign
Manchester United midfielder
Fred, has not been easy although the money received from Al Hilal for
Sergej Milinkovic-Savic, another former winner of the Serie A midfielder of the year award along with Brozovic, is finally being reinvested. They have signed Valentin Castellanos (from New York City),
Daichi Kamada (from
Eintracht Frankfurt) and Gustav Isaksen, with 200 fans welcoming the FC Midtjylland winger at the airport on Monday.
Roma find themselves bottom of the spending tables after an outlay of nothing at all. General manager Tiago Pinto faced a race against time to bring in €30m by June 30 in order to be FFP compliant and worked a minor miracle in doing so through the sale of six different non-essential players rather than a single starter. Incoming business has been limited to the free transfers of Houssem Aouar and Evan N’Dicka, not to mention the loan of
Rasmus Kristensen. “Twenty years ago I would have kicked up a fuss,” Jose Mourinho explained to Il Corriere dello Sport. “Twenty years ago I would have been pissed off about it.” Now he makes light of it. A
team photo taken in Portugal showed Mourinho and his beloved centre-back Gianluca Mancini keeping space enough between them for the new striker Roma hope to be able to afford now that Roger Ibanez is leaving for Al-Ahli.
It’s telling that of the three Serie A teams that reached European finals last year only Fiorentina, who opened their magnificent new state of the art training ground this summer, are a picture of health. They are looking to offload Luka Jovic and Arthur Cabral with the Brazilian set to replace Goncalo Ramos — who has agreed a deal with
PSG — at Benfica. Last year’s biggest spenders, Monza, are picking up the tab for all the loans that needed making permanent upon the promoted club’s survival in the top flight and must also reckon with the death of benefactor Silvio Berlusconi whose son, Pier Silvio, the head of one of the broadcasters participating in the auction for the league’s TV rights (Mediaset), has called the figures Serie A want for them “crazy”.
Stealing a march on everyone so far are the usual suspects, the
Brentford and
Brighton of Serie A, Sassuolo and
Atalanta. Sassuolo tend to have something Roma want and use that as leverage to get the best young players from one of the best academies in one of the best catchment areas in Italy. Examples include Lorenzo Pellegrini, Matteo Politano and Frattesi who, this summer, has been sold to Inter. Packaged into the deal at Sassuolo’s request was Samuele Mulattieri, the best young striker in Serie B last year.
As for Atalanta, missing out on Europe altogether in 2022 and the departure of recruitment alchemist Giovanni Sartori led some people to predict the end of an era. Instead the club goes from strength to strength. While the continuity stemming from the retention of a coach like Gian Piero Gasperini these past seven years undoubtedly helps and the fearlessness he shows in promoting youth from Italy’s most fertile academy is the kind of alignment clubs dream of, the broadening of Atalanta’s horizons by adding expertise to the front office through Lee Congerton is plain for all to see in the 400 per cent return achieved on
Rasmus Hojlund in just under year. The biggest sale in Atalanta’s history enabled the club to sign El Bilal Toure from Almeria (one of the stepping stones in
Darwin Nunez’s career) and then beat Inter to the signing of Gianluca Scamacca.
No one, though, has been more active and agile than AC Milan with president Paolo Scaroni joking that the club’s chief executive
Giorgio Furlani has done a deal every week since the window started. The early sale of
Sandro Tonali to
Newcastle, a record for an Italian player, allowed Furlani to triple Milan’s transfer budget and swiftly execute a plan designed with his chief scout Geoffrey Moncada, the data team established by Hendrik Almstadt and the RedBird brains-trust featuring Luke Bornn and Billy Beane. Milan have spent the summer wasting no time in correcting the mistakes made by Paolo Maldini and Ricky Massara last summer, moving far quicker and applying the now Furlani trademarked modus operandi of signing several players like Christian Pulisic, Yunus Musah, Samuel Chukwueze, Noah Okafor and Ruben Loftus Cheek for €20m a piece rather than one for €80m.
On paper, Milan and Atalanta have upgraded the most. How that translates on the pitch remains to be seen. To adapt the Marotta line, we should not put the cart before the horse. After all, Milan and Atalanta have ground to make up. But both have been slick and effective in a sluggish and otherwise excruciating market while other teams in Serie A continue to flog a dead horse.
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