Fabio Paratici might actually join Fiorentina

Fiorentina may meet its fans demands by putting a uomo di calcio in charge. Multipleoutletsreport that the club is in negotiations with Fabio Paratici to take the controls in Florence and pull the Viola out of their astonishing nosedive. With the January transfer window just a week and a half away, it’s imperative to get him (or anybody, really) in the building to start fixing this unbelievably broken team.

Paratici had a decent career in the 3rd and 4th tiers of calcio before hanging up his boots and moving upstairs. He first caught notice as Sampdoria’s head scout in 2004, working with Beppe Marotta and becoming his right-hand man as Samp ascended into the Champions League. He followed Marotta to Juventus in 2010, helping the Juvenuts maintain an unprecedented string of domestic success.

That ended in 2018, when Juve went all-in and signed Cristiano Ronaldo in a desperate attempt to win the Champions League. The financial reverberations of that move are still shaking the Bianconeri 7 years later and eventually undermined Paratici, whose contract wasn’t renewed in 2020. He rocked up at Tottenham Hotspur a year later, bringing Antonio Conte and a host of ex-Juve players to White Hart Lane, but picked up a FIFA ban in 2023 for his role in some financial shenanigans back in Turin. Since October, he’s been back at Spurs.

There’s no doubt that Paratici knows his way around the mercato. He’s got a network of contacts and relationships with all the major player agencies, the sort of soft knowledge that Fiorentian badly lacks since Daniele Pradè (rumored to still be haunting the Viola Park) was fired. Every club he’s worked at has moved up the table or remained at the top. His track record is, in many ways, sterling.

What isn’t sterling is his methodology. That ban came from Juventus’ involvement in the Plusvalenze scandal, which saw the club using massively inflated transfer numbers to ensure it met FFP regulations; for example, Paratici flipped Rolando Mandragora to Udinese for €20 million in 2018. While there’s technically no rule against it, he was prosecuted and eventually the FIGC and FIFA brought the hammer down on him.

I’d be inclined to believe his protestations of innocence if not for some previous shady behavior. There was some sort of skulduggery between him and the admittedly skulduggerous Urbano Cairo in 2008, and when Paratici moved from Samp to Juve, owner Riccardo Garrone was furious, as he’d had a verbal agreement that Paratici would remain in Genoa to replace Marotta as DS.

That said, Paratici’s track record is diverse and has some major successes. He’s snapped up youngsters like Paul Pogba, Domenico Berardi, and Leonardo Spinazzola. He’s gotten massive moves like Gonzalo Higuaín, Paulo Dybala, Douglas Costa, and Cristian Romero over the line. He’s added Bosman veterans Andrea Pirlo, Kingsley Coman, and Adrien Rabiot. For my money, he’s at his best spotting competent, workmanlike players who function really well as part of a team rather than superstars, which bodes well for fixing this busted Viola team.

The downside is that he’s made some catastrophic moves as well. The Cristiano Ronaldo gamble ended up being a miss of club-altering proportions, for example, while Matthijs de Ligt, Arthur, Bryan Gil, and Emerson Royal were all pretty poor signings for Juve and Spurs. Rocco Commisso will have to whip out that checkbook because Paratici isn’t afraid to spend some money.

It’s a bit strange that Paratici would leave Spurs just after being reinstated but maybe he’s homesick enough to accept the Fiorentina job, which certainly looks like a poisoned chalice. Per Niccolò Schira, he’ll get a 5-year contract and could sign on the dotted line as soon as Monday, which would leave him 10 days to get up to speed before the mercato begins.