Presenter and speaker of Radio Sportiva, editorialist and market man of Tuttomercatoweb, he is on RAI with the historic program 90° Minuto
Days, weeks, talking about the refoundation of Italian football. About how and how much the clubs of our Serie A should focus on our talents. Entire broadcasts and discussions spent finding the right recipe. The limit to foreigners. Let’s close the borders! Let’s put limits on Italians on the pitch. Enhance the youth teams. And so on, and talking, and hot air, and empty words, and concepts left there, on a cloud. Because then the reality is different and this transfer market, less than ten days from the start of the 2024/2025 Serie A and just over twenty from the end of the negotiations, tells the exact opposite. The clubs of our top division always (and almost only) look abroad, the players of the National team have less and less space and those of the Under 21 must go to B, abroad or will have to start as reserves in Serie A. A sad reality.
The Chiesa case, emblem of the Italian national team
Federico Chiesa, among the references of the last few years of our football movement, is a separated person at Juventus but no one has so far put him at the top of their list of objectives. Not Roma, not Napoli, who also consider him a player at the top of their list. It’s also Chiesa’s fault, of course, who will also have to understand that to relaunch himself, to return to the front page as a protagonist, he too will have to make sacrifices. Because it’s not enough to think that it’s all the clubs’ fault: Juventus has invested a lot in him, both in terms of transfer fee and salary. Now the story is at a turning point and to give it to his career, even in blue, Chiesa will have to deal with reality. A national team with… Very little market. Some examples. There is an extraordinary need for right backs in Italy and so why has no big team invested in Raoul Bellanova of Turin? Why will Giacomo Raspadori have to continue to be a reserve at Napoli? Another case that tells the story of our football is Andrea Pinamonti. Best Italian striker of the last Serie A, he is still in Serie B with Sassuolo who will have to rationalize that the prices asked for players after the relegation can no longer be the same as last year. But why is no one investing in him?
Long live Calafiori at Arsenal. But what happens to the other youngsters?
Riccardo Calafiori who at twenty-two years old goes to be a starter at Arsenal is extraordinary news for the Italian national team. A price too high for the Serie A clubs, let’s not hide it, the point is rather another. It is that Roma is thinking of selling Edoardo Bove, that Tommaso Baldanzi is a reserve in giallorosso, that Cesare Casadei is always in the stands of Chelsea, that Matteo Prati is at Cagliari, that Fabio Miretti will be an alternative to Juventus, that Cher Ndour will continue not to play at PSG, that only Empoli has believed in the young Azzurri forwards (Lorenzo Colombo, Sebastiano Esposito), that Fiorentina is desperately looking for reinforcements in midfield and that Alessandro Bianco will be the reserve of the reserves. Shall we move on? Niccolò Pisilli will hardly see the field at Roma, Hellas Verona with its extraordinary scouting will not consider Daniele Ghilardi among the starters (the hope is that Diego Coppola will be), that Francesco Camarda will only play in C, that Roma would have a screaming left back like Cristian Cama but he is a 2007 class (and in Italy, imagine that…), that Leonardo Mendicino will continue in the third division with Atalanta and so on… This is who we are. So many proclamations and then nothing changes so that nothing changes.