You can marry the wrong woman, but woe betide a sporting director who signs the wrong striker. It’s a code Lecce’s general manager Pantaleo Corvino lives by. “Otherwise you get angry,” he told the Lecce pack. The trouble is goalscorers are hard to find. “Everyone’s out looking for one and there aren’t many around,” he observed.
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The prices are out of control, too. Finding the net on a handful of occasions in Serie A is enough, particularly if the player is Italian, to engender hyperinflation. “(Sassuolo) paid €23m (£20m; $24.4m) for Andrea Pinamonti and he scored three times last season,” Corvino huffed.
Press clippings of those comments must have been tacked to Pinamonti’s locker. He has already almost matched last season’s tally (five goals not three) in the latest edition of Serie A, with four goals so far, and even punished Juventus at the weekend. All Corvino was doing, however, was defending his lanky centre-forward Assan Ceesay — not to mention himself — from the accusation that pains him the most.
Porca miseria, had he got the striker wrong?
Corvino didn’t think so. He signed Ceesay for nothing from FC Zurich on the back of a 22-goal season and expectations, owing to Corvino’s reputation for striking gold, were disproportionately high. “I want to talk about something that hasn’t happened to me in two decades,” Corvino said. “It used to happen down the bar but now it’s all over social media. I’ve noticed on these platforms — don’t ask me which one because I can’t keep up — that there’s overkill. It’s like there’s a plan to destroy footballers and make them out to be something they’re not. I’m talking about Ceesay.”
The Gambia international scored six goals in his first season in Italy, a respectable amount for a newly promoted team. As such, Corvino thought Ceesay deserved more credit. After all, the goals didn’t only come in the fight for survival with Sampdoria but also against teams like Juventus, Inter Milan, Atalanta and Fiorentina. “After Cristiano Lucarelli, Javier Chevanton, Valeri Bojinov, Cosimo Francioso, Francesco Palmieri and Mirko Vucinic — players I signed — I don’t remember any other strikers getting into double figures with Lecce in Serie A,” Corvino argued. “Pedro Pasculli (a World Cup winner with Argentina in 1986) scored nine goals. As for Ceesay, we paid nothing for him, he scored six times and now you want him gone.”
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In the end, Ceesay is no longer a Lecce player. The trolls got what they wanted as Lecce sold him. In quintessentially 2023 fashion, he went to a club in the Saudi Pro League, Damac, coached by Cosmin Contra, a cult hero in Italy for the worldie he scored in the Derby della Madonnina and the time he picked a fight with a pitbull (Edgar Davids).
Corvino made a profit, as always, and knew exactly how he wished to spend it. He picked up the phone and called Vucinic, one of the best signings of his career. Vucinic retired six years ago and seems to spend most of his time puffing cigars, but Corvino trusts his ability to evaluate strikers and knows he is an assistant coach on Montenegro’s national team. He wanted Vucinic’s opinion on a fellow countryman, one he’d seen playing in Slovakia.
“What’s this Krstovic like, then?” Corvino asked. Nikola Krstovic finished top scorer in the Slovak Super League last season, almost firing Dunajska Streda to their first-ever title. “I told Vucinic I planned to spend between €10m and €12m on him,” Corvino revealed. “He replied: ‘Go get him’. The truth is I ended up paying €3.8m.”
Pitching Lecce to Krstovic was easy enough. He showed him videos of lu sule, lu mare e lu ientu — the sun, sea and wind — that makes Lecce the Florence of the south and explained his own track record in the Balkans. Corvino knows the next big thing out of Montenegro when he sees it. “I said to myself: ‘I found Stevan Jovetic and Vucinic’.” He kept repeating an old Italian saying. “There isn’t two without three.”
Krstovic has been the revelation of the season so far in Serie A. Four minutes after coming on against Fiorentina, he scored an equaliser as Lecce came back from 2-0 down to draw 2-2 in a derby between Corvino’s old clubs. “He’d had a single training session,” Lecce coach Roberto D’Aversa said with the kind of low-key astonishment Italian coaches do so well. Six minutes into Krstovic’s first start, a near post run and glancing header opened the scoring against Salernitana. Then, in Monza, barely a minute passed before Lecce won a penalty, which he converted, finding the top corner as the flailing goalkeeper dived the other way.
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“He’s surprised everyone,” Corvino’s deputy Stefano Trinchera said. “But not us. We were aware of his ability. He’s a polished player.”
In the stands at the Via del Mare on Friday night, a fan came dressed as Jesus Kristo-vic. He carried an icon showing Corvino’s face and didn’t care Pope Francis was at the Stade Velodrome in Marseille rather than in Puglia. Forgive the Pontifex for the sin of missing a near-divine intervention on Italy’s heel.
Krstovic failed to score for once, but, on the hour mark, he showed what he is capable of by holding up a loose ball in the penalty box and then performing a couple of keepy-uppies to tee-up a scissor kick that flashed narrowly past the Genoa goal. “He seems able to score in lots of ways,” Corvino said. “With his head, in the box, shooting from distance.”
Lecce still found a way to win without Krstovic making the scoresheet. They’re yet to drop point at home and find themselves third in the table in the midst of their best start ever. “Corvino has told me to turn the table upside down and think of it that way,” D’Aversa said as he posed for photos with Serie A’s first manager of the month award in his hands. The 48-year-old, who Corvino signed as a player at Casarano in the mid-1990s, got Parma promoted from the third to the second tier all the way back to the first division and kept them in Serie A by developing the likes of Alessandro Bastoni and Dejan Kulusevski on loan from Inter and Atalanta. He is now repeating the same tricks at Lecce, although Corvino has a different modus operandi to D’Aversa’s old sporting director Daniele Faggiano.
He doesn’t really do loans as he can’t profit from them. Instead, Corvino has assembled Serie A’s youngest team on a wage bill of €15.5m. The under-19s are champions of Italy and Tuesday’s game against Juventus offers a tangential reminder of his ability to scout for the academy as well as the first team. Corvino signed Dusan Vlahovic as a teenager for Fiorentina and watched as he delivered the Under-19 Coppa Italia before moving up to the seniors and making an €80million move to this midweek’s opponents at the Allianz Stadium. Krstovic is the same age as Vlahovic (23). He looks fresher and less jaded than the Serb, who had a thousand-yard stare as he was substituted in Juventus’ error-strewn 4-2 defeat to Sassuolo at the weekend.
Acutely aware that we live in an age of hyper-commercialisation of footballers in which the comments below will speculate — four games into Krstovic’s Lecce career — about his next destination, D’Aversa said: “We hope these players who are unknowns now get to go to big clubs.” It happened to him with Kulusevski, whom Juventus decided to commit €45m to sign from Atalanta four months into the Swede’s young player of the year-making loan at Parma.
Corvino, meanwhile, has done it again. After turning Morten Hjulmand, a no-name Dane playing for Admira Wacker, from a €2.5m player into an €18m sale to Sporting Lisbon, Krstovic is likely to be Lecce’s next windfall. The social media trolls that were critical of Ceesay are now fan accounts of Krstovic.
This summer Corvino made no mistake. He did not get his striker wrong.
(Top photo: Maurizio Lagana/Getty Images)