As Fiorentina’s summer transfer window builds towards denouement with the future of Moise Kean, the secondary narrative couldn’t be about anything other than his putative replacement. The usual rumormongers have offered up a handful of names: Lorenzo Lucca, Joshua Zirkzee, William Osula. None of those spark joy even in conjunction with the previously-signed Mateo Pellegrino. Recently, though, a new name darkened my consciousness, one that left me sweaty and shaking. Consider this my formal plea:
Fabio Paratici, please, please, please do not sign Mauro Icardi.
If you’ve been living under a rock, Icardi looks like a great signing. He’s hit 10+ league goals in 10 seasons across 4 clubs in 3 countries. He holds an Italian passport, speaks the language fluently, spent nearly a decade in Serie A with Sampdoria and Inter Milan, and has twice been capocannoniere. He’s a free agent after his contract with Galatasaray ran out this summer following a 14-goal campaign which demonstrated he’s recovered from a major knee injury the year before. At 33, he could have another couple productive seasons, especially because he’s always relied more on his poaching instincts and lethal finishing more than his physicality.
If you haven’t been living under a rock, though, you know that Icardi is just about the stupidest signing Fiorentina could make. I’m going to list four reasons. Feel free to add your own afterwards because whoo boy can you probably come up with more.
1. The drama
Mauro Icardi is a messy, messy guy. The tabloids have fed on him like vultures for years in a way that makes me uncomfortable but he seems incapable of, for want of a better phrase, being normal. His relationship with Wanda Nara is the stuff of podcasting legend. The tl;dr is that they started hooking up when she was married to his teammate and mentor Maxi López, leading to an ugly divorce and weird custody situation that included Icardi getting tattoos of López and Nara’s kids.
That relationship ran its predictable course but not before Nara registered herself as his agent and initiated a disastrous falling out with Inter Milan. After all that, she found evidence of his infidelity and kicked off a years-long cycle of short-term breakups that reached its inevitable conclusion in an acrimonious divorce and subsequent legal battle over alimony and custody that’s led to international travel bans, alleged leaks of “intimate videos,” mutual accusations of cheating, and missed child support payments. Because the wrangling stretches across continents, it offers unprecedented legal complications and will probably drag on for years before a judge can make any sort of ruling.
That sort of off-field distraction is exactly what this young, rebuilding Fiorentina doesn’t need. I won’t crucify for Icardi for decisions he made as a teenager (i.e. hooking up with Nara in the first place) but his behavior since then has been pretty gross, indicating that he still hasn’t grown up. Dating his divorce lawyer is a unique cocktail of stupid and unethical. He’s also involved in legal proceedings with his former landlord in Istanbul over unpaid rent and damage to the property. In short, Icardi’s a one-man soap opera: depressingly amusing to observe from a distance but best kept well beyond arm’s length.
2. The Superlig tax
A former capocannoniere joining on a free from a massive Turkish club should set every alarm bell in your Viola brain ringing because it’s been all of a year since the last time it happened. Need I remind you of how it went for Edin Džeko in Florence? I don’t want to dig up the corpse of Fiorentina’s previous body of mistakes but that’s surely enough of a cautionary tale to give any DS grounds for some deep reflection.
Džeko’s always been lauded as the consummate professional, too, unlike Icardi. I won’t pretend like I predicted the disaster the Bosnian brought to the Franchi but I did note an interesting statistic: he scored 14 goals in his final Superlig season but just twice across the final 3 months of the season. Want to guess what Icardi did last year? Yep, it was 14 league goals and just one across the final 3 months. Different players, different teams, different contexts, sure, but you can only play Same, Same, But Different so many times before you have to acknowledge some patterns.
The Superlig is 7 spots behind Serie A in UEFA’s coefficient rankings, which are imperfect but reflect some sort of truth here. Of Icardi’s 14 goals last year, 2 came against teams in the top half of the table. In my mind, that tracks. Going back to his Serie A days, he always preyed on the weaker teams. That’s a useful skill; someone needs to score against the bottomfeeders, and consistently beating a stubborn low block has tremendous value. Even so, I think there’s an appreciable difference between doing it for the wire-to-wire league leader against Eyüpsor or Kayserispor and doing it for a midtable European hopeful against Parma and Udinese. That Icardi failed to find the net in 10 Champions League appearances feels quite telling.
3. The age/health curve
Modern medical science amazes me. I’m not that old and I still remember when a torn ACL meant that a player’s career arc was irreparably altered. Nowadays, Dodô’s back after 6 months and looking better than ever. Add in the advances in nutrition and fitness and guys are playing at a high level at increasingly advanced ages: Leo Messi dragging Argentina kicking and screaming into the World Cup final despite being older than me is a wild outlier but indicative of an overall trend.
That said, Icardi will turn 34 this season and has a cruciate ligament tear in his recent past. Never the most explosive athlete, he’s visibly slowed down. Manager Okan Buruk treated him with kid gloves last year, bringing him off the bench 19 times as compared to 12 starts. He played under 30 minutes in 17 of those bench appearances, too. To be clear, that’s not necessarily a medical red flag. Galatasaray had a better option up front in Victor Osimhen and thus wasn’t motivated to overburden Icardi, instead using him as a spot starter to save his legs. Even in a smaller role, though, it was clear that he wasn’t the same player he was in years past.
Counting on a 34-year-old coming off 4 years in Turkey probably isn’t wise. Playing for a team that expects to win (e.g. Galatasaray) most of its league games can hide a player’s physical limitations. There’s a reason so many older players end take a year or two at a Superlig giant, after all: they’re guaranteed a bit more time and space than they’d get elsewhere and they don’t have to do as much out of possession. They can conserve their energy for those decisive moments in the box. Grosso’s system prioritizes an extraordinarily compact and quick transitions. That means a fair bit of running for the strikers. I’m not saying that Icardi can’t do that. I’m saying that the odds that he’ll struggle to cover that much ground over the course of a season are a bit longer than I’d like.
4. Salary demands
Paratici’s made no secret of his desire to slash Fiorentina’s wage bill. Robin Gosens is the most unfortunate casualty; despite still having plenty to offer even in the twilight of his career, the DS shipped him out for peanuts to clean up the books. The Goose earned €4.6 million last year, which is less than half of the €9.4 million Icardi made in his final season at Galatasaray.
While I doubt Icardi would command similar wages, he’d still be one of the club’s highest earners by virtue of signing on a free transfer. He’d probably be closer to Kean and David de Gea in the €6 million range, which is a lot of money for someone who would probably be a rotational starter at best. He’d also probably want at least a 1+1 deal and maybe more; combine that with the aforementioned age and injury concerns and there’s the possibility of the exact sort of albatross contract that Paratici’s trying to exorcise.
I could probably come up with a couple more reasons not to sign Icardi but just thinking about him this much is exhausting so I’m quitting here. The good news is that Lazio owner Claudio Lotito isn’t spending on transfer fees this window and has directed management to find free signings, leading to reports of a move for Icardi. I’d be more than happy to see Serie A’s most ideologically repulsive club sign the guy, not least because it would remove any temptation Paratici might have to bring him to Florence.
