With the celebration of promotion to the top flight now over, it is time for Parma and its leaders to look ahead and prepare for the championship to come. I’ve talked about this before, but the upcoming summer will be particularly hot for the Crusader leaders, who will have to make sure not to repeat the mistakes made in the first transfer market of the Krause era, which then resulted in relegation to Serie B – and we have all seen how the recovery has proven to be more difficult than expected. Some directions seem to have already been drawn up: we will start from confirming the backbone of the team that won the cadet championship, with some additions. We already talked about it in an editorial yesterday (READ HERE), in which we took stock of what could be the quantity of new purchases: it must be said that the market sometimes follows its own paths, with possible changes in progress, but it can be a basic idea. The question, however, is: what type of profiles will Parma go for?
When I read the opinions of other fans, I often come across opinions that are a bit science fiction, in the sense that they don’t take into consideration all the factors available. In a nutshell: I think it is highly unlikely that Parma will buy a dozen players outright for 15 million each. I think, however, that a balance will be sought between players who already know the Italian championship – and a little experience at Serie A level can’t hurt this squad – and new bets that will probably come from abroad. I know that the words “betting” and “foreign” will make some people turn up their noses, but nowadays it is an inevitable aspect of the Serie A transfer market, and almost all teams are forced to resort to it if they want to self-finance or in any case try to rise in level. After all, it is the practice that today they call player trading (which ultimately simply indicates the buying and selling of players, so as not to anglicize everything), which consists in the ability to fish elsewhere at reduced costs and then realize significant capital gains.
In short, it is certainly nothing new, it has been done for years and it is a reasoning that is the basis of many teams. Let’s also look at Thiago Motta’s much praised (rightly) Bologna. The rossoblu have certainly spent quite a bit in the last two years, but a large part of these investments have been directed towards bets that the less nerdy fan would never have thought of: I challenge myself to draw the Fergusons (2 million from Aberdeen), the Theate (7 million, from Ostend), the Aebischer (3 million, from the Young Boys) but also, to stay in Italy, young people like Calafiori (4 million) or Fabbian (5 million) who had not managed to demonstrate much until at that moment (the defender) or who had not yet played in Serie A (like the former Reggina). And Zirkzee himself (8.5 million) had been taken to grow behind Arnautovic, but not everyone would have expected an explosion at these levels. Of course, these are just examples, not to mention that Bologna itself has also stumbled upon attacks that have not yet succeeded (I’m thinking of Karlsson paid 11 million who had little impact): the gist of the matter is that, to reach certain levels, The work of scouting is fundamental in reaching little-known players and then knowing how to valorise them.
The other point is that you need to know how to do it correctly, trying to understand the right context to do it, as well as obviously taking the right profiles. When Krause took over Parma, probably the main problem was accelerating a clear transition towards the future, effectively inserting young foreigners too hastily into a context that had reached the end of its cycle. Starting instead from a consolidated base, even if coming from a lower category, if nothing else the context appears significantly different, at least from this point of view. Here, however, I go back to before, and I reiterate that experience is needed for the category, to create that famous right mix between young rampants and old foxes to have a squad capable of doing well in the top flight. For technical, athletic and moral evaluations – and therefore finding the right names to contract – I don’t have the arrogance nor the means to name the players needed by Parma. Once again, however, this market will really serve to understand whether the mistakes of the past have been fully understood.
