This week we can officially confirm that Khvicha Kvaratskhelia is going places. And we pose two questions: 1) What happened to the great Italian no. 9s? And 2) Does anyone, besides Napoli, want to take up the Champions League qualification spots available in Serie A this season?
By Matteo Bonetti, US Serie A expert
Kvara-mania
I’ve seen enough; Khvicha Kvaratskhelia is world class. The recently turned 22-year-old has been one of the most exciting break out stars that the Serie A has had in decades.
His goals this season have been a continuous highlight reel, and the one he scored over the weekend in Napoli’s win over Atalanta was easily up there as one of the best. With three defenders right in front of him, Kvara once again opted to create space with his signature chop to either side. A series of fakes led to him finding that space in an almost comically easy way, where he was then able to unleash a bullet of a shot into the near post.
The goal was an encapsulation of everything the Georgian does so well and the great partnership he’s formed with striker Victor Osimhen, who played the pass that setup the goal. Kvara is virtually unplayable in a one-on-one situation. As a defender, how do you mark a player who is just as comfortable going to either foot? Add to his two-footedness a vision, technique and passing skill that can unlock the best of defences, and you suddenly have one of the most feared players in Europe.
Kvara-mania has swept not just the city of Naples, but his entire nation of Georgia. Every Napoli home game has seemingly hundreds of Georgian fans in the stands. Not only are fans flying from the capital, Tbilisi to Naples on a weekly basis, but he’s filling theatres in his native homeland every single time Napoli plays.
There’s a ton of exciting wingers with fancy dribbles in Europe, but what makes Kvaratskhelia so special is his unique style. He’s a bit of a maverick on the ball. Instead of using step-overs, elasticos or rabonas, he creates space with perfectly timed body feints and chops. It’s what he does when he does find a sliver of room that’s truly impressive though. He isn’t just a one-trick pony, he’s just as clever at setting up his teammates for goals as he is at scoring them himself. 11 goals and a league high 9 assists put his total goal contributions at 20, a remarkable rate for a player who is still supposed to be so inexperienced at the highest level.
The sky truly is the limit for Kvara, and we’re all fortunate to be witnessing his rise to superstardom.
Italy’s no. 9 problem
Taking a slight turn away from Serie A and onto the Italian national team, there’s an issue here that looks more dire than usual – the Azzurri have a huge problem at the centre-forward position. There just aren’t many young Italian strikers who are doing well or getting much competitive football. With Ciro Immobile injured (and let’s be honest, disspointing any time he wears the national team colours), the hope was that there would be a next wave of attacking talent to allow the older Italian strikers to sail off into the sunset.
By far the most talented U25 striker that Mancini should theoretically call upon is West Ham’s Gianluca Scamacca, but he’s hardly played this season under David Moyes, and Roberto Mancini only wants to use players that are in form. It’s perplexing why Scamacca, a tall, skilful striker who scored 16 league goals for Sassuolo last season, would be such a non-factor for his new club after making the €36m move last summer. So far, he’s only started 11 games for West Ham and scored three Premier League goals – not enough to convince Mancini at the moment. It’s unfortunate to see a player as talented as Scamacca being used as a rotational player for a lower half of the table team, when he could be very useful for plenty of Serie A clubs fighting for the Champions League (Milan comes to mind as the ideal team for Scamacca and his quality).
So what are the alternatives? Talented second striker/winger options like Federico Chiesa, Gianluca Raspadori and Wilfried Gnonto aren’t prototypical no. 9s, so Italy’s manager has had to look to foreign leagues in the hopes of finding new players to call up who have Italian blood from generations ago. In comes 23-year-old Italo-Argentine Mateo Retegui, who at the very least has been playing and scoring. Retegui has smashed in 28 goals in 47 league games for Argentine side Tigre in the last two seasons, with his tally at nearly a goal a game in the 2023 campaign. Aside from him, an even more surprising inclusion to the Italian preliminary call-up list was Andrea Compagno, a hulking striker who moved from Italy’s fourth division to Romanian football and has been finding plenty of success scoring goals for Bucharest based club FCSB.
Italian strikers of years gone by, have usually been playing and scoring regularly in the Serie A so it remains to be seen whether these players can translate their respective domestic goal scoring exploits onto the national stage.
Does anyone want the Champions League spots?
None of the Serie A teams from second to sixth place were able to win their games over the weekend, continuing the narrative that Napoli are in a league of their own and then comes everyone else. Spots two to five are separated by only three points, and that’s without Juventus potentially getting back their 15 point deduction, which would further congest the race for the other three Champions League spots.
Inter somehow lost to struggling Spezia, Salernitana picked up their first ever point at San Siro against Milan, Roma succumbed to Sassuolo in a seven-goal thriller, while Lazio drew to Bologna. These results all scream of a league where pretty much every contender other than Napoli has been underwhelming. Are Napoli really 18 points better than second place in the table, or is it just one of those bizarre seasons where most of the results make little sense and are hard to analyse?
Just look at who the top teams are dropping points to. Only weeks ago, Roma lost to Cremonese, gifting the minnows their first win of the season. This isn’t an isolated case though, as these provincial minnows have somehow been able to steal crucial points from the top teams all season long. In the Premier League, this could make more sense as even lower half of the table sides are able to sign €50m players. In Serie A, the wage bills of some of the bottom half of the table sides mirror what you might find in the English third division. Point being, some of these games really shouldn’t be as competitive as they have been. It’s a minor miracle that these newly promoted sides (a lot of whom have not been able to buy top flight talent), can make games seem like even affairs against teams with 10x their wage bill. It’s a testament to the tactical preparation and discipline of even the smallest sides, and the overall coaching level in the league.
With all these dropped points from every team not named Napoli, the biggest race to look forward to now in the final months of the season is the one to determine the rest of the Champions League places.
(Napoli’s dominance is a reminder of all those seasons in the 2010s where Juventus’ dynasty meant there was hardly any competition for the actual Scudetto race.)
(Cover image from IMAGO)
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