Now that the dust has all but settled (pending late exits for Abdelhamid Sabiri/Christian Kouamé), this is the squad that will propel Fiorentina out of the relegation places and into safety for next year, at least in theory. At first blush, it’s pretty undwhelming: 5 new players, all on loans with obligations triggered by Serie A survival. Gone are fully 8 first-team players, including 3 summer signings.
Of the departures, only Tommaso Martinelli’s is a positive; the youngster’s already getting minutes
in Serie B to further his development. Amir Richardson leaves on acrimonious but understandable terms. Gino Infantino was never up to scratch. Pablo Marí‘s exit is a bit of a puzzler as it left the team low on backup centerbacks but maybe he wanted more minutes. Edin Džeko, Hans Nicolussi Caviglia, Simon Sohm, and Mattia Viti, however, are gone after half a season. A more damning indictment of Daniele Pradè’s work last summer I can’t imagine.
The new signings are, on the face of it, all good. Acting DS Robert Goretti added a couple of wingers to provide Vanoli with some desperately-needed flexibility. He added some goal threats from midfield to take some pressure off the hilariously misfiring pair of Moise Kean and Roberto Piccoli up front. He added a solid veteran in Daniele Rugani as insurance for the defense. He filled in a number of gaps in the squad on short notice without spending much money. And yet I don’t think Fiorentina’s better.
Brescianini and Fabbian are both intriguing young players but occupy similar areas of the pitch. They’re both big, box-crashing midfielders who are at their best as off-ball runners in the final third. That’s an important and useful archetype but I don’t think Fiorentina needed to commit two roster spots to it, especially since Rolando Mandragora fulfilled a similar function through the back half of last season that turned him into a goddamn supernova. Still, I get the idea: more goals from midfield means less reliance on the forwards.
The problem here is that all of Fiorentina’s midfielders are now box-crashing 8s except for Nicolò Fagioli. Brescianini, Fabbian, Mandragora, and Cher Ndour don’t progress the ball, particularly from deep positions. None of them is a ball-winner. None of them does the necessary donkey work of staying home, breaking up counter attacks, and feeding teammates. It’s the least glamorous midfield role and perhaps the most thankless on the pitch but that sort of player is the linchpin of every good team, the axle around which the wheel revolves.
As a result, the midfield is imbalanced. Fagioli stays deep to pick up the ball and his colleagues charge onto the last line. Mandragora occasionally drops in to help but that’s not his strength. Basically, the middle of the pitch is always wide open, inviting opponents to break into that space ahead of the Viola defense unimpeded. Think of Antonio Vergara’s opener at Napoli: yeah, it was spectacularly bad from the centerbacks, but that ball never should’ve gone straight through the middle of the pitch either.
And if, heaven forbid, Fagioli misses any time, this whole thing gets even messier. Mandragora would probably shift to the holding role and we’ve seen that experiment fail time and again. The failure to find a functional player, a station wagon or minivan, is infuriating because it’s been so obvious for so long. Danilo Cataldi, as a reminder, would’ve cost €4 million. He would fix a lot of problems in this team because he does the grunt work out of possession.
Instead, Fiorentina chased the same profile that Pradè’s chased for years: big, athletic, forward-minded midfielders who crash the box but don’t read the game well, particularly out of possession. Brescianini and Fabbian are the latest in a line that includes Ndour, Sohm, Richardson, Michael Folorunsho, and Antonín Barák. The last thing Fiorentina needed was another guy who’s somewhere between and 8 and a 10 and has flashed but not sustained promise.
Extra goals from midfield aren’t even necessary for this team. Fiorentina’s xG is 6th-best in Serie A per Understat. The problem isn’t creating more opportunities: it’s finishing them. Kean and Piccoli are 2nd and 25th in the league in xG at a 12.41 and 5.04, respectively, and have 5 and 2 goals. That’s nothing to do with the midfielders not offering adequate support or creativity. It’s an issue that Father Damien Karras wouldn’t fix, much less a sporting director.
No, the problem is at the back, where Fiorentina’s conceded 36 goals, good for 17th in Serie A. The midfield’s struggles out of possession are a big reason for that. The area in front of the defense isn’t just left open. It’s lit up like a runway at night, complete with big flashing arrows telling opponents where to go. Fixing that would go much farther in fixing the team as a whole.
You know what else would fix the defense, though? Cutting out the weekly parade of UNFORGIVABLE DEFENSIVE ERRORS. Pietro Comuzzo’s dropped some clangers but at least has the excuse of youth. I haven’t seen him repeating the same blunders, at least, so I can talk myself into believing that he’s gaining the unpleasant experience that leads to growth. Even if it’s irritating in the moment, it’s fine in the long-term. This is how you build good players.
What I can’t forgive is a defender making the same mistake time and again, and by gawd that’s Marin Pongračić’s music. He’s been his usual catastrophic self and at 28, he is who he is. The grabbiness and fouling are thin covers for his lack of physical force. Worse than the athletic shortcomings, though, are the mental ones. His tunnel vision means he loses track of what’s happening around him, allowing runners in behind. Add to that his inexplicable weakness in the air and the frequent mistakes in possession and you’ve got a recipe for disaster. His brief patch of form—no mistakes, powerful forays forward—has vaporized and he’s back to what he’s always been.
Vanoli’s given up on Ranieri and rumor has it that the captain nearly left in the window. I’d prefer Ranieri to Pongračić but I can see the argument against based on athleticism and technical ability. What’s clear is that the Viola need another starting central defender in the worst way and instead grabbed a reserve in Rugani. I don’t think Rugani’s as bad as he’s often depicted—meme players are usually victims of lowest common denominator jokes and narratives—and is fine as a 4th centerback. If the season hinges on the 4th centerback, too many other things have gone wrong.
And what if those things keep going wrong? Let’s zoom out for a second and look at the financial side. It may seem like Fiorentina’s avoided committing money to this team by structuring all of its January acquisitions as loans that will be triggered should the club avoid relegation. If the worst happens and the Viola spend their centenary year in Serie B, at least they won’t be burdened with all these expensive new signings, giving them the flexibility to spend as necessary to bounce right back.
That part’s definitely good. But what if these bozos do what I think they won’t? What if they shuffle off the trapdoor and stay up? I’d argue that’ll hamstring the team next summer. Survival means paying a total of €48ish million in transfer fees for that quintet. I’m no accountant and haven’t seen the numbers but I imagine that would comprise a large portion of the budget, which is all well and good if those players significantly improve the team.
The early returns are pretty negative. Solomon’s had moments but his inability to displace Fabiano Parisi is at least a yellow flag. Brescianini’s shown a pulse. Fabbian less so. Harrison looks like he’s somewhere between the Fiorentina versions of Valentin Eysseric and Kevin Mirallas. Rugani is Okay, Fine, I Guess. Individually, none of them are enough to sink an already sinking team.
Maybe they all prove themselves as valuable squad pieces over the next 3 months. More realistically, 1 or 2 of them contribute and the others ride the pine. And then Fiorentina will pay nearly €50 million to have them all on long-term contracts, tying up salary and roster spots that need to be spent elsewhere. If this take ages like fish under the August sun, I’ll try to remember and mock myself for it and praise Goretti and company for their foresight. That’s the hindsight paradox, after all: it’s easy to make predictions from the future, when you don’t need them, and nigh impossible to make them when they’d be helpful.
Another paradox: the only way to get out of the acute danger is to spend, and spending creates more acute danger in the following year. This treadmill of mediocrity is exactly where Fiorentina got stuck in the first few years of Rocco Commisso’s ownership and I see those same wheels grinding into motion again: papering over cracks with short-term decisions that lead to more cracks until the whole thing’s on the verge of collapse.
Trying to rebuild a fundamentally broken team halfway through the season isn’t possible in the best of times and this isn’t the best of times. There’s only so much I can criticize about the January window when its failure was set up by previous failures in previous windows. Harm mitigation, not rebirth, was probably the best possible outcome.
Has any harm been mitigated? Well, Edin Džeko is a legendary player and remains a powerful personality but he’s also washed. That’s a combination that can destabilize a mentally-fragile team, especially one lacking continuity. That’s Fiorentina to a tee. There were so many arrivals and departures last summer that there was a clear leadership void. Luca Ranieri’s demotion from captain is the most obvious example but Stefano Pioli undermined this group beyond description and Vanoli’s task in building it back up approaches the impossible.
That off-pitch stuff spills onto the pitch. Nicolussi Caviglia, Sohm, and Viti are all fine players but, within the toxic context of this year’s Fiorentina, none of them stood a chance after their feckless starts. Once the narrative is so firmly established around a player, it’s nearly impossible to change it. I wish them all luck in their future endeavors but recognize that it simply couldn’t work out in Florence, at least in part due to circumstances beyond their control. That goes double for Richardson.
At the end of the day, though, they all had to go. Maybe Pablo Marí did too, as a respected veteran with a close tie to Raffaele Palladino. I don’t question Marí’s professionalism but, as a Raffaele Palladino guy, he can’t be blamed for eying the Viola management askance over the past few months, especially once he’d been benched for players he outranked last year.
For a team that has plenty of talent on paper, maybe the solution was shipping out the most troublesome guys on the roster and smudging the entire Viola Park with palo santo. As the toxic fumes dissipate, everyone will inhale. In this reading, the three straight defeats are just residual noxious gases on their way out and everything will eventually be okay. Goretti and company had better hope so because there aren’t many levers left to pull other than the one that opens the trapdoor under Fiorentina’s feet.
