The latest news from the Fiorentina org chart isn’t too exciting. Recruitment expert Nicolás Burdisso may be on his way out, with AS Roma hoping to bring him back to the capital. With Vincenzo Italiano reaching one foot out the door and the still-shocking death of Joe Barone, it seems pretty clear that the Viola have reached the end of a cycle and will restart it over the summer.
That turmoil is matched by the looming roster churn. In retrospect, it makes sense. With Italiano on the way out, ensuring that the club can build a squad, particularly in midfield, for the new manager makes a lot of sense. In hindsight, then, it should give us, as fans, a feeling of slight reassurance: the brass knew in January that this season was the conclusion of a (very brief) era, and that a reset was coming in June. There’s clearly some sort of rough script for the future that everyone’s following, even in the aftermath of Barone’s passing.
It’s hard to imagine what it’ll all look like, though. The rumors about candidates for the sporting director role—Eduardo Macià (in what would be his second stint at the club) and Empoli’s Pietro Accardi—are entirely speculative at this point; given their deeply different approaches (Macià loves cheap veterans while Accardi focuses on the academy system and youth purchases), I wouldn’t set too much store by either at this juncture.
Locking down a sporting director has to be Fiorentina’s primary objective, as whoever fills that role will need to work with Rocco Commisso, Alessandro Ferrari, and Mark Stephan to appoint a new manager, and with that manager and Daniele Pradè to identify and add targets in the transfer window, which looks set to be the busiest we’ve seen in years.
A regime change of this scale always means a big reshuffle in playing personnel, and it sounds like everyone’s available for the right price, including Nico González. Arthur Melo, Giacomo Bonaventura (depending on how many minutes he plays), Christian Kouamé, Andrea Belotti (dry loan from AS Roma), Alfred Duncan, and Gaetano Castrovilli are all out of contract this summer, while the club’s unlikely to pick up the purchase options for Maxime Lopez and Davide Faraoni. As things stand, 8 senior players are set to depart for nothing. Assuming Fiorentina has to sell to raise some funds, it’ll be even more.
In these circumstances, it’s easy to imagine half the starting XI on opening day next season being new signings, which isn’t ideal. Continuity is reflected in chemistry is reflected in on-field performance. Take a look at the recent Scudetto winners: Inter Milan, Napoli, and AC Milan all signed a couple of difference makers, yes, but mostly kept their rosters intact. Just as important, they all had managers who’d been around for at least a couple of seasons.
Fiorentina, of course, won’t have those luxuries, but the Scudetto wasn’t ever the goal anyways. The hope for this massive reset is that it provides a stable platform on which the club to build sustained success. However, the sheer chaos wrought by so many sweeping changes means next season could be a difficult one, the type that most fans see as a step backwards.
In fairness to the Viola administration, it’s made some good decisions in the past: Italiano and Burdisso have been extremely successful. Some of the transfer acquisitions have been smashing success—Nicolás González, Giacomo Bonaventura, Lucas Beltrán, Arthur Melo—and the fees received for sold players have been impressively high. That combination offers hope for a quick rebuild.
Of course, fans can also reasonably point to some pretty poor decisions in those same areas: Vincenzo Montella was a disastrous coaching appointment; purchases like Aleksandr Kokorin, Abdelhamid Sabiri, and Josip Brekalo have been worse than useless; big money splashes like Franck Ribery, Sofyan Amrabat, and Jonathan Ikoné have been desperately uneven; and those big fees received haven’t been reinvested into the squad, although perhaps the completion of the Rocco B. Commisso Viola Park will redirect the funds back to the team.
If nothing else, it feels like we, as fans, are back to square one. While Commisso has pledged to stay the course and shrugged off rumors of an impending sale, we simply don’t know what comes next. Maybe our dreams come true and whichever pieces fill the empty spaces in the administration are the ones that turn the Viola into a new Atalanta, a heavyweight in the league and a regular in Europe. Maybe it all ends in a Cecchi Gori-esque catastrophe. The one thing we do know is that Fiorentina will persist, and that will be comfort enough.