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Moise Kean: The Old Lady has her wonder kid back after tough Everton spell
James Horncastle
13 - 16 minutes
Gonzalo Higuain knew where to look. He trudged across to the stands at the Drive Pink Stadium and mimicked the Gladiator mask celebration trademarked by his old Juventus team-mate, Paulo Dybala. Pipita’s friend and compatriot had come to watch him play for Inter Miami against Orlando City at the end of June. Left out of Argentina’s squad for the Copa America, Dybala was in Florida to work out at the Foot Doctor’s clinic while on vacation.
Sat next to him at the game was Javier Pastore, who enjoyed the long-distance goal Higuain had just hit every bit as much as Dybala. In the row behind them, Moise Kean, was all smiles too, taking in the atmosphere during this reunion of sorts as another Juventus alumnus and fellow Mino Raiola client, Blaise Matuidi, also turned out in pink.
On that balmy night in June, Kean could not have predicted he would be hooking back up with Dybala so soon in Turin. Juventus have always retained an interest in the striker who first joined the club as a 10-year-old. One of the conditions of his sale to Everton in 2019 was a right to match offers the Merseysiders received for him, a condition that always left the door open for him to return to the Allianz Stadium.
In the end, Cristiano Ronaldo’s decision to head “home” to Manchester United allowed Kean to do the same as Juventus looked to replace last season’s Capocannoniere and the goals he guaranteed. On the same day as Jorge Mendes informed the Old Lady of Ronaldo’s decision to separate with her, the executive team met with Raiola, originally to discuss the future of Juventus’ wing-back Wesley, and accelerated Kean’s homecoming.
Earlier this year, Kean opened up to La Gazzetta dello Sport about his reluctance to leave Juventus two years ago. “Honestly I was a bit disappointed,” he said. “Juve gave me everything. I grew up there. If it wasn’t for the club I wouldn’t be where I am now. Later on I realised this is just how it is in a footballer’s life and I made peace with it. I had to go my own way, become a man. It was the right thing to do. Juventus will always have a place in my heart.”
While aspersions were cast on his attitude at the time of his move to England, Juventus sold him for financial motives. After failing to deliver the Champions League in Ronaldo’s first season, the cost of the Portuguese combined with the signing of Matthijs de Ligt led Chief Football Officer Fabio Paratici to balance the books. Paratici’s efforts to sell Higuain were scuppered as Milan and then Chelsea returned him to sender. The appointment of Maurizio Sarri as Max Allegri’s successor only hardened Higuain’s resolve to stay under the Mole Antonelliana as it was under the smoking Tuscan that he had played his best football at Napoli, breaking the single-season goal record in Serie A.
Kean playing for Everton against Huddersfield Town in the Carabao Cup second round (Photo: Robbie Jay Barratt – AMA/Getty Images)
Unable to cash in on one Argentine, Paratici tried to profit on another with talks between Juventus and Tottenham over Dybala reaching an advanced stage only for image rights and the player’s unwillingness to leave to cause the move to break down. In the end, Juventus had to cover their costs in a different way. Kean’s last goal in black and white came in Ferrara where he instinctively directed a ball from Joao Cancelo into SPAL’s net. Ultimately both were sacrificed on the altar of Premier League wealth.
As a homegrown player, born in Vercelli and raised in Asti just an hour’s drive from Turin, the €27.5 million Everton paid for Kean was almost all profit. He joined a club supposedly on the up. Kean was one of four players Everton spent more than €20 million on in a summer in which they went big in the transfer market following the sales of Idrissa Gueye, Nikola Vlasic and Ademola Lookman. Expectations around Goodison Park were high but the team went backwards. Kean arrived a week before the season started at Selhurst Park with a 0-0 draw at Crystal Palace and was then involved as Everton went on a concerning four-game losing streak in the Premier League.
After a 5-2 defeat by Liverpool at the beginning of December, Marco Silva was sacked and the team found itself in the relegation zone. For an 19-year-old on his first experience abroad, playing with new team-mates in a different country it was a baptism of fire, the coals of which were stoked by caretaker manager Duncan Ferguson at Old Trafford the following weekend. One-nil up against Manchester United, Ferguson brought Kean on in the 70th minute and then humiliatingly withdrew him before the final whistle. His rationale? To run the clock down. “It wasn’t because of Moise Kean’s performance,” Ferguson said, “it was just because I needed to make a substitution to kill a bit of time.”
He almost killed Kean’s confidence instead. On Monday Night Football, Jamie Carragher did not feel there was a technical basis for the decision. Kean had made more sprints and high speed runs than any player during his time on the pitch. “(Ferguson) made a mistake by not embracing Kean as he’s come off,” Carragher opined, “but going back to the decision, you can make the decision. However, there’s no doubt, me looking at the performance of Kean, I don’t think he deserved to come off.”
Results vindicated Ferguson who went unbeaten in the Premier League until Carlo Ancelotti’s appointment before Christmas. The arrival of the avuncular Italian should have provided Kean with a fresh start. “Moise is a player we tried to sign when I was at Napoli but he chose Everton ahead of us,” Ancelotti said as he prepared for his first game in charge against Burnley on Boxing Day. “He has fantastic quality and I’m sure he will be a top talent but he is 19 years old and everything is new for him here.” Alas with the Premier League calendar at its most congested, Everton still hovering over the drop zone and a pandemic around the corner, the calm linearity young players tend to require in order to settle in and develop was fibrillated in what was a year like no other.
Speaking to The Athletic in March of this year, Raiola didn’t mention Kean specifically but revealed: “I don’t believe in bringing young players to England. The competition is so competitive. The managers of the clubs, they don’t have time to develop a 17, 18-year-old. And I understand. I don’t blame them and say: ‘Oh fuck, why don’t you play my boy of 18’. I understand that he has other interests, that maybe his chairman says he has to go for top four or you have to save me from relegation because it’s a £180 million industry. So I don’t want my player to be caught in that situation. I want him to go to the right step.”
For Raiola, the right step is increasingly the Bundesliga which is where he moved Ajax starlet Brian Brobbey and of course Erling Haaland — although in the case of the extraordinary Norwegian he now believes the striker could have gone straight from Salzburg to an elite Premier League team or Spanish giant.
Kean enjoyed a successful loan spell at PSG last season (Photo: John Berry/Getty Images)
Kean meanwhile departed on loan for Paris Saint-Germain where, on the face of it, his prospects of playing the regular football he needed to hone his craft seemed slim to none with Kylian Mbappe, Neymar, Mauro Icardi, Angel Di Maria, Pablo Sarabia and Julian Draxler all competing for places up front. And yet Kean wasn’t a spectator at the Parc des Princes, twiddling his thumbs on the bench waiting for the Coupe de France to come along. He played more minutes in Ligue 1 than Neymar and was PSG’s next best scorer after Mbappe. Rather than Mauro Icardi who PSG were invested in after Leonardo spent more than €50 million to make his loan from Inter Milan permanent, Thomas Tuchel and Mauricio Pochettino relied more on the kid PSG didn’t own to make up for the shortfall in goals left by Edinson Cavani.
“I’ve settled in really well in Paris,” Kean told La Gazzetta dello Sport. “They welcomed me with open arms. I wasn’t expecting it. People are warmer here. It’s a joy to play. There are good vibes with my team-mates. It’s fun. You can only learn here. Mbappe and Neymar are two of the best strikers around. They’re young like me so we got on from the get-go. I’ve always dreamed of making it to the top and playing at the highest level. Playing with them both is great.”
Kean scored 17 goals in all competitions, including the night when PSG destroyed Barcelona at the Nou Camp. Only Haaland, Dusan Vlahovic and Aleksander Isak were more prolific among players aged 21 or under in Europe’s top five leagues.
“He brings intensity to our game,” Tuchel said. “It’s his strength to bring intensity. He is an athletic player.” Kean’s sudden bursts of acceleration, his ability to get unmarked and turn in the penalty area to say nothing of his underrated heading was well suited to PSG who dominated possession and played long spells in the opposition’s half. Dribblers like Di Maria, Mbappe and Neymar drew defenders away and Kean often capitalised so it came as something of a surprise then when Roberto Mancini decided to cut him from his final squad for the European Championship. Only one other Italian centre-forward — Ciro Immobile — had played in the Champions League knockout stages and out-scored Kean during the season.
His woes at Everton had allowed the more experienced Andrea Belotti to establish himself as Immobile’s alternative through qualifying. The pandemic didn’t help either limiting get-togethers and Kean did not impress in Italy’s penultimate warm-up game against San Marino when he also picked up a slight injury.
Rather than wait for him, as he did for Kean’s PSG team-mate Marco Verratti, Mancini used his wildcard to select the in-form Giacomo Raspadori who had finished the season strongly with four goals in his last five appearances for Sassuolo. Kean’s character inevitably became subject of speculation again in part because of past transgressions like being late for a team meeting with his room-mate Nicolo Zaniolo during the Under-21 Euros not to mention the red card he picked up 20 minutes after coming on against the Republic of Ireland when the Azzurrini met up not so long after that tournament.
But no one better understands youthful exuberance than Mancini and Kean is back in the squad for this week’s World Cup qualifiers, rooming with Zaniolo at Coverciano — both of whom missed out on the national team’s success over the summer and are determined to give the team a fresh look in Qatar next winter. “It was with great regret that we left Moise at home during the Euros,” said Mancini who gave the player his competitive debut against Finland in March 2019 and watched him become the youngest player to score for Italy in more than 60 years. “We told him he’d be back,” Mancini added. “He has to play and play well and act like a professional. He’s got quality.”
Reports claim Italy and Juventus captain Giorgio Chiellini called Kean while the club were negotiating his return to Turin just to outline what would be expected of him and how different it would be compared with before. Now Ronaldo and Mario Mandzukic are gone, he will undoubtedly have to shoulder more of the goalscoring burden and take on more responsibility as the team’s only natural centre-forward along with Alvaro Morata. Deliver on that and Juventus’ future is his own.
Kean celebrates scoring for Juventus against AC Milan (Photo: Daniele Badolato – Juventus FC/Juventus FC via Getty Images)
The club has doubled down on youth this summer acquiring Kaio Jorge, Manuel Locatelli, Mohamed Ihattaren and Kean, all of whom are 23 or younger. Allegri eased Kean in gradually towards the end of his first spell at the helm of the Bianconeri. When this Athletic correspondent interviewed him during his sabbatical, we spoke about Kean in the context of nurturing young talent and Italian football’s tendency to burn out kids by declaring them the next big thing too early and loading them with far too much expectation.
Allegri takes a more careful and considered approach. “I’d put him on and he scored seven goals,” Allegri said. “But no one realised that I was playing him when there wasn’t all that much pressure and it was easier for him to score. You have to say Kean has an extraordinary way of attacking the goal but to go from that to saying he has to be the national team’s striker, well, patience is needed. There are levels. Playing against Cagliari, Sassuolo or Chievo is one thing. Playing at San Siro is another.”
Incidentally, Kean’s penultimate goal for Juventus was the winner against Milan. Since then he has led the line for a super club like PSG and scored at the Nou Camp. While Allegri will likely continue to pick and choose his moments with him at least for now regardless of Kean’s familiarity with the league, his team-mates and the inevitable pressure from fans to see him play against Napoli after Juventus’ worrying start, he knows the player is readier now than he was two years ago.
Kean has played and scored in three of Europe’s top five leagues. He has trained with Ronaldo, Neymar and Mbappe and worked under Allegri, Ancelotti, Tuchel and Pochettino. All by the age of 21.
“I am back like I never left,” Kean posted on Instagram. The Old Lady has her wonder kid back.
Moise Kean: The Old Lady has her wonder kid back after tough Everton spell
James Horncastle
13 - 16 minutes
Gonzalo Higuain knew where to look. He trudged across to the stands at the Drive Pink Stadium and mimicked the Gladiator mask celebration trademarked by his old Juventus team-mate, Paulo Dybala. Pipita’s friend and compatriot had come to watch him play for Inter Miami against Orlando City at the end of June. Left out of Argentina’s squad for the Copa America, Dybala was in Florida to work out at the Foot Doctor’s clinic while on vacation.
Sat next to him at the game was Javier Pastore, who enjoyed the long-distance goal Higuain had just hit every bit as much as Dybala. In the row behind them, Moise Kean, was all smiles too, taking in the atmosphere during this reunion of sorts as another Juventus alumnus and fellow Mino Raiola client, Blaise Matuidi, also turned out in pink.
On that balmy night in June, Kean could not have predicted he would be hooking back up with Dybala so soon in Turin. Juventus have always retained an interest in the striker who first joined the club as a 10-year-old. One of the conditions of his sale to Everton in 2019 was a right to match offers the Merseysiders received for him, a condition that always left the door open for him to return to the Allianz Stadium.
In the end, Cristiano Ronaldo’s decision to head “home” to Manchester United allowed Kean to do the same as Juventus looked to replace last season’s Capocannoniere and the goals he guaranteed. On the same day as Jorge Mendes informed the Old Lady of Ronaldo’s decision to separate with her, the executive team met with Raiola, originally to discuss the future of Juventus’ wing-back Wesley, and accelerated Kean’s homecoming.
Earlier this year, Kean opened up to La Gazzetta dello Sport about his reluctance to leave Juventus two years ago. “Honestly I was a bit disappointed,” he said. “Juve gave me everything. I grew up there. If it wasn’t for the club I wouldn’t be where I am now. Later on I realised this is just how it is in a footballer’s life and I made peace with it. I had to go my own way, become a man. It was the right thing to do. Juventus will always have a place in my heart.”
While aspersions were cast on his attitude at the time of his move to England, Juventus sold him for financial motives. After failing to deliver the Champions League in Ronaldo’s first season, the cost of the Portuguese combined with the signing of Matthijs de Ligt led Chief Football Officer Fabio Paratici to balance the books. Paratici’s efforts to sell Higuain were scuppered as Milan and then Chelsea returned him to sender. The appointment of Maurizio Sarri as Max Allegri’s successor only hardened Higuain’s resolve to stay under the Mole Antonelliana as it was under the smoking Tuscan that he had played his best football at Napoli, breaking the single-season goal record in Serie A.
Kean playing for Everton against Huddersfield Town in the Carabao Cup second round (Photo: Robbie Jay Barratt – AMA/Getty Images)
Unable to cash in on one Argentine, Paratici tried to profit on another with talks between Juventus and Tottenham over Dybala reaching an advanced stage only for image rights and the player’s unwillingness to leave to cause the move to break down. In the end, Juventus had to cover their costs in a different way. Kean’s last goal in black and white came in Ferrara where he instinctively directed a ball from Joao Cancelo into SPAL’s net. Ultimately both were sacrificed on the altar of Premier League wealth.
As a homegrown player, born in Vercelli and raised in Asti just an hour’s drive from Turin, the €27.5 million Everton paid for Kean was almost all profit. He joined a club supposedly on the up. Kean was one of four players Everton spent more than €20 million on in a summer in which they went big in the transfer market following the sales of Idrissa Gueye, Nikola Vlasic and Ademola Lookman. Expectations around Goodison Park were high but the team went backwards. Kean arrived a week before the season started at Selhurst Park with a 0-0 draw at Crystal Palace and was then involved as Everton went on a concerning four-game losing streak in the Premier League.
After a 5-2 defeat by Liverpool at the beginning of December, Marco Silva was sacked and the team found itself in the relegation zone. For an 19-year-old on his first experience abroad, playing with new team-mates in a different country it was a baptism of fire, the coals of which were stoked by caretaker manager Duncan Ferguson at Old Trafford the following weekend. One-nil up against Manchester United, Ferguson brought Kean on in the 70th minute and then humiliatingly withdrew him before the final whistle. His rationale? To run the clock down. “It wasn’t because of Moise Kean’s performance,” Ferguson said, “it was just because I needed to make a substitution to kill a bit of time.”
He almost killed Kean’s confidence instead. On Monday Night Football, Jamie Carragher did not feel there was a technical basis for the decision. Kean had made more sprints and high speed runs than any player during his time on the pitch. “(Ferguson) made a mistake by not embracing Kean as he’s come off,” Carragher opined, “but going back to the decision, you can make the decision. However, there’s no doubt, me looking at the performance of Kean, I don’t think he deserved to come off.”
Results vindicated Ferguson who went unbeaten in the Premier League until Carlo Ancelotti’s appointment before Christmas. The arrival of the avuncular Italian should have provided Kean with a fresh start. “Moise is a player we tried to sign when I was at Napoli but he chose Everton ahead of us,” Ancelotti said as he prepared for his first game in charge against Burnley on Boxing Day. “He has fantastic quality and I’m sure he will be a top talent but he is 19 years old and everything is new for him here.” Alas with the Premier League calendar at its most congested, Everton still hovering over the drop zone and a pandemic around the corner, the calm linearity young players tend to require in order to settle in and develop was fibrillated in what was a year like no other.
Speaking to The Athletic in March of this year, Raiola didn’t mention Kean specifically but revealed: “I don’t believe in bringing young players to England. The competition is so competitive. The managers of the clubs, they don’t have time to develop a 17, 18-year-old. And I understand. I don’t blame them and say: ‘Oh fuck, why don’t you play my boy of 18’. I understand that he has other interests, that maybe his chairman says he has to go for top four or you have to save me from relegation because it’s a £180 million industry. So I don’t want my player to be caught in that situation. I want him to go to the right step.”
For Raiola, the right step is increasingly the Bundesliga which is where he moved Ajax starlet Brian Brobbey and of course Erling Haaland — although in the case of the extraordinary Norwegian he now believes the striker could have gone straight from Salzburg to an elite Premier League team or Spanish giant.
Kean enjoyed a successful loan spell at PSG last season (Photo: John Berry/Getty Images)
Kean meanwhile departed on loan for Paris Saint-Germain where, on the face of it, his prospects of playing the regular football he needed to hone his craft seemed slim to none with Kylian Mbappe, Neymar, Mauro Icardi, Angel Di Maria, Pablo Sarabia and Julian Draxler all competing for places up front. And yet Kean wasn’t a spectator at the Parc des Princes, twiddling his thumbs on the bench waiting for the Coupe de France to come along. He played more minutes in Ligue 1 than Neymar and was PSG’s next best scorer after Mbappe. Rather than Mauro Icardi who PSG were invested in after Leonardo spent more than €50 million to make his loan from Inter Milan permanent, Thomas Tuchel and Mauricio Pochettino relied more on the kid PSG didn’t own to make up for the shortfall in goals left by Edinson Cavani.
“I’ve settled in really well in Paris,” Kean told La Gazzetta dello Sport. “They welcomed me with open arms. I wasn’t expecting it. People are warmer here. It’s a joy to play. There are good vibes with my team-mates. It’s fun. You can only learn here. Mbappe and Neymar are two of the best strikers around. They’re young like me so we got on from the get-go. I’ve always dreamed of making it to the top and playing at the highest level. Playing with them both is great.”
Kean scored 17 goals in all competitions, including the night when PSG destroyed Barcelona at the Nou Camp. Only Haaland, Dusan Vlahovic and Aleksander Isak were more prolific among players aged 21 or under in Europe’s top five leagues.
“He brings intensity to our game,” Tuchel said. “It’s his strength to bring intensity. He is an athletic player.” Kean’s sudden bursts of acceleration, his ability to get unmarked and turn in the penalty area to say nothing of his underrated heading was well suited to PSG who dominated possession and played long spells in the opposition’s half. Dribblers like Di Maria, Mbappe and Neymar drew defenders away and Kean often capitalised so it came as something of a surprise then when Roberto Mancini decided to cut him from his final squad for the European Championship. Only one other Italian centre-forward — Ciro Immobile — had played in the Champions League knockout stages and out-scored Kean during the season.
His woes at Everton had allowed the more experienced Andrea Belotti to establish himself as Immobile’s alternative through qualifying. The pandemic didn’t help either limiting get-togethers and Kean did not impress in Italy’s penultimate warm-up game against San Marino when he also picked up a slight injury.
Rather than wait for him, as he did for Kean’s PSG team-mate Marco Verratti, Mancini used his wildcard to select the in-form Giacomo Raspadori who had finished the season strongly with four goals in his last five appearances for Sassuolo. Kean’s character inevitably became subject of speculation again in part because of past transgressions like being late for a team meeting with his room-mate Nicolo Zaniolo during the Under-21 Euros not to mention the red card he picked up 20 minutes after coming on against the Republic of Ireland when the Azzurrini met up not so long after that tournament.
But no one better understands youthful exuberance than Mancini and Kean is back in the squad for this week’s World Cup qualifiers, rooming with Zaniolo at Coverciano — both of whom missed out on the national team’s success over the summer and are determined to give the team a fresh look in Qatar next winter. “It was with great regret that we left Moise at home during the Euros,” said Mancini who gave the player his competitive debut against Finland in March 2019 and watched him become the youngest player to score for Italy in more than 60 years. “We told him he’d be back,” Mancini added. “He has to play and play well and act like a professional. He’s got quality.”
Reports claim Italy and Juventus captain Giorgio Chiellini called Kean while the club were negotiating his return to Turin just to outline what would be expected of him and how different it would be compared with before. Now Ronaldo and Mario Mandzukic are gone, he will undoubtedly have to shoulder more of the goalscoring burden and take on more responsibility as the team’s only natural centre-forward along with Alvaro Morata. Deliver on that and Juventus’ future is his own.
Kean celebrates scoring for Juventus against AC Milan (Photo: Daniele Badolato – Juventus FC/Juventus FC via Getty Images)
The club has doubled down on youth this summer acquiring Kaio Jorge, Manuel Locatelli, Mohamed Ihattaren and Kean, all of whom are 23 or younger. Allegri eased Kean in gradually towards the end of his first spell at the helm of the Bianconeri. When this Athletic correspondent interviewed him during his sabbatical, we spoke about Kean in the context of nurturing young talent and Italian football’s tendency to burn out kids by declaring them the next big thing too early and loading them with far too much expectation.
Allegri takes a more careful and considered approach. “I’d put him on and he scored seven goals,” Allegri said. “But no one realised that I was playing him when there wasn’t all that much pressure and it was easier for him to score. You have to say Kean has an extraordinary way of attacking the goal but to go from that to saying he has to be the national team’s striker, well, patience is needed. There are levels. Playing against Cagliari, Sassuolo or Chievo is one thing. Playing at San Siro is another.”
Incidentally, Kean’s penultimate goal for Juventus was the winner against Milan. Since then he has led the line for a super club like PSG and scored at the Nou Camp. While Allegri will likely continue to pick and choose his moments with him at least for now regardless of Kean’s familiarity with the league, his team-mates and the inevitable pressure from fans to see him play against Napoli after Juventus’ worrying start, he knows the player is readier now than he was two years ago.
Kean has played and scored in three of Europe’s top five leagues. He has trained with Ronaldo, Neymar and Mbappe and worked under Allegri, Ancelotti, Tuchel and Pochettino. All by the age of 21.
“I am back like I never left,” Kean posted on Instagram. The Old Lady has her wonder kid back.
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