Manchester United Target Kim Min-Jae Could Be A Bargain (Again)

After an incredible season, Napoli could lose its key defender to a Premier League side, albeit for a bumper fee.

That sentence could’ve been written last year when Senegal star Kalidou Koulibaly moved from Napoli to Chelsea. Napoli replaced Koulibaly with South Korean defender Kim Min-jae, who turned out to be one of the bargains of last summer.

Kim and Georgian midfielder Khvicha Kvaratskhelia have been revelations at Napoli, helping the side win its first Serie A title since the days of Diego Maradona.

Napoli signed them in similar circumstances. Both players were at what can be seen as “stepping stone” clubs, who also got them for a bargain fee due to the situations at their clubs before that.

Kvaratskhelia was at Dinamo Batumi, a club on Georgia’s Black Sea coast that few followers of Europe’s big leagues would’ve heard of. But he was already highly rated from his time at Rubin Kazan and was only back in his home country as FIFA had allowed foreign players to unilaterally end their contracts due to the war in Ukraine.

Kim Min-jae was also at a transition club, albeit the far better-known Turkish side Fenerbahce. He joined them as a way to get out of China, as other European sides wouldn’t meet Beijing Guoan’s transfer fee for a player unproven outside of Asia.

Both Kim and Kvaratskhelia had suitors in the past and their potential was well known, but Napoli were the club that took the risk on them, and the reward was far bigger than they could’ve imagined.

Now, Napoli’s stars are firmly in the crosshairs of the top Premier League sides and Kim Min-jae’s contract has a release clause that will almost guarantee he leaves Italy this summer.

It’s been reported that Kim’s release clause, which is only active for the first 15 days of July, would allow him to leave Napoli for between $55 million and $65 million, depending on the buying club.

That’s around the tenth most expensive fee ever paid for a central defender, and is similar to the reported fees that Tottenham Hotspur paid for Cristian Romero and Manchester United paid for Lisandro Martinez. But the way transfer fees in the Premier League are going, it would be a good deal.

Manchester United is one of the clubs linked with Kim Min-jae. Should United sign him, the club will get a player just coming into his peak years as a defender and who can make an instant impact, just like he did at Napoli and Fenerbahce with little time needed to adapt. At Napoli, it only took Kim until September before he won Serie A’s player of the month award.

Kim is strong, good in the air and good at intercepting the ball, but also has the passing ability that allows teams to keep hold of the ball and build from the back, making the most passes in all of Serie A this season, with the eighth highest passing accuracy. He’s played almost every minute for Napoli this season as well as featuring in the World Cup for South Korea. He also, crucially, is exempt from military service as he was part of the South Korea team that won gold at the 2018 Asian Games.

Koreans have known that Kim Min-jae was destined for big things ever since his debut season at Jeonbuk Hyundai Motors, where he made the K League team of the season as a key part of the team’s title-winning side. At that time though, Chinese Super League clubs were awash with money, and their foreign player quota rules encouraged clubs to sign the best Asian defensive players for relatively huge sums and on big-money contracts. This led Kim to move to Beijing rather than directly from South Korea to Europe, and while he played against the likes of Oscar and Paulinho in China, he was unproven at the top level, which meant clubs weren’t willing to take a risk on him for the fees Beijing were demanding. It took him a season in Turkey at Fenerbahce before he finally got his move to one of Europe’s top five leagues.

Now, after a year proving what he can do in Italy, Kim Min-jae is not the risky signing he might have been seen as last summer.

With a Serie A title to his name, and almost certainly to be in most people’s Serie A team of the season, he represents a bargain to either Manchester United or whoever else is willing to pay his release clause this summer.