For Napoli And Serie A, Kalidou Koulibaly Will Not Be Easily Replaced

Last summer saw a huge exodus of top players from Serie A as Cristiano Ronaldo, Romelu Lukaku,and Gianluigi Donnarumma all moved abroad. There were plenty of other examples too – including Cristian Romero and Ashraf Hakimi – as the league lost a huge amount of talent in an extremely short period of time.

Yet 12 months later, those losses don’t seem so great. Ronaldo has unquestionably flopped at Old Trafford, Lukaku struggled at Stamford Bridge so much that he is already back at Inter, while the goalkeeping contest at PSG (and the sensational form of Mike Maignan at AC Milan) prevented Italy’s no.1 from making a real impact in the French capital.

However, it is hard to imagine feeling the same way next year about Kalidou Koulibaly’s move to Chelsea.

The Senegal international has long been the subject of transfer rumours, linked with Europe’s top clubs year after as his form, reputation and ability grew and grew. Yet year after year he reaffirmed his commitment to Naples, not just the club but the whole city, as he explained in an article for The Players’ Tribune.

“When I arrived in Italy, I was a boy. I became a better footballer, because I learned top-level tactics,” Koulibaly explained back in 2019. “They are so meticulous with the tactics here. But the most important thing is that I also became a family man and a real Neapolitan.

“Even when I go back home to France now, my friends don’t call me “the Senegalese” or “the French.” They say, “Ah, here comes the Neapolitan.”

“Napoli is a city that loves people. It reminds me of Africa because of all of the warmth. People do not just look past you. People want to reach out and touch you, they want to talk to you. The people don’t tolerate you, they love you.”

It was easy to see why they had fallen in love with Koulibaly. He arrived in the summer of 2014 as an €8 million ($8.21m) signing from Belgian club Genk, and to say he found adjusting to life in Serie A difficult would be an understatement.

He would make error after error over 27 league appearances in his first season under Rafael Benitez, and it would be the arrival of Maurizio Sarri that changed everything for Koulibaly and Napoli.

The team had conceded 54 goals and finished fifth in 2014/15, but the following campaign they would jump up to second as their opponents managed to score just 32 times despite minimal outlay in the transfer market.

Koulibaly was quick to acknowledge the impact of the new Coach, telling newspaper Il Messaggero that “he rediscovered me, he gave me confidence” and even after they parted ways, the player could not speak highly enough of their time together.

“I was very lucky to play for Sarri and his football was truly wonderful,” Koulibaly told the Corriere dello Sport back in 2018. “He allowed me to see football and football matches in a different way.

“His philosophy was concentrated on tactics, it was all predicted and planned with him. Today, when I watch a game involving any other team, I don’t see it the same way as I did four or five years ago. I owe that to Sarri.”

With the effort he puts into drilling his players on the meticulous details of the game, there is little doubt that the current Lazio boss had an immeasurable impact upon the 31-year-old, but Koulibaly himself deserves immense credit for absorbing those lessons and truly changing his game.

Perhaps the most notable difference is highlighted in his tackling statistics. Figures from WhoScored.com show that he averaged 3.2 per 90 minutes in 2014/15, but that number has rapidly reduced and he made just 1.4 per 90 last term.

That offers some insight into just how much better his positional awareness has become, but Koulibaly is still more than capable of winning a full-blooded challenge when the situation calls for it. He is as difficult to beat in the air as he is on the ground, a 6’ 2” mountain of a man, impossible to get beyond but who moves with unnerving speed across the pitch.

While he is first and foremost a top class defender, to only highlight Koulibaly’s physical attributes is to do him a huge disservice. Once he has won the ball back, he remains equally superb, his touch, control and distribution almost flawless as WhoScored shows he averaged 61.4 passes per 90 minutes last term, connecting with 86.9% of them.

That is a slight drop-off from his final season with Sarri when he completed 87.5 passes at 91.2% clip, but Luciano Spalletti asks his players to push the ball forward far more quickly, so the stylistic change is reflected in those figures.

What that also shows is that Thomas Tuchel should have no fears about the adaptability of a man who has looked imperious at the back whether playing for Rafa Benitez, Sarri, Carlo Ancelotti, Gennaro Gattuso or Spalletti.

What’s more, in a league that champions great central defenders like no other, Koulibaly became elite in the truest sense of the word; he truly was the best of the best.

He did so while continually speaking out against the racism that still plagues Italian football, showing that he was a true leader on and off the pitch, one whose social conscience would not allow him to sit idly and ignore the situation around him.

That too will be sorely missed as he begins his new adventure with Chelsea. Unlike those you moved on last year, Kalidou Koulibaly will not be easily replaced.