Bad news for Manchester City, Chelsea, PSG and any other club trying to sign Edinson Cavani? Napoli, or more specifically, its outspoken president Aurelio De Laurentiis, don’t mind selling him, but only for a certain price no one has met so far.
Cavani, 26, has been with the team for the last three seasons, scoring 104 goals in 138 matches, helping the team reach the Champions League twice, compared to the zero times they’ve been to the competition before his arrival. He has been the best scorer in the Serie A by far over that time period, and has been linked with moves to Manchester City and Chelsea for the last couple of seasons.
But according to De Laurentiis, it’s only going to take a very special offer, the kind of offer that triggers his release clause (which he claims is at €63 million) to make him leave the team. He is signed until 2017, which makes Napoli quite confident they have the leverage in negotiations for prices, while Cavani himself hasn’t expressed any desire to leave the club and make more money elsewhere.
It might be that there are limits to what he can achieve with Napoli, who might be operating wisely in terms of finances over the last few years, but do not have the spending power the big clubs in Europe do, and are even falling far behind Juventus in that regard, but it seems the entire Serie A can’t compete with Juventus on the pitch and financially.
Maybe at some point, Cavani will be sold; possibly even this summer, if the offers keep coming and the Uruguayan striker himself starts asking to try his luck outside the South of Italy. But Napoli are on a good course for the past few years, for the first time since the Maradona era. There is no impassable mountain range of big teams anymore, standing in the way of Italian glory, with Inter going through their worst season in a very long time, while Milan are still far away from what they used to be not too long ago.
Napoli have cemented themselves as the second best club in Italy at the moment, and keeping Cavani is instrumental to making that a bit more permanent, hopefully becoming somewhat of a mainstay in the Champions League in the next few years, while challenging for the league title, or at least staying in the title race a bit longer, also in the cards for the club, only if Cavani stays.