Victor Osimhen was Napoli’s talisman in the 2022-23 season as they won their first Serie A title in 33 years. Their success made him one of the most coveted strikers in Europe.
So how has he ended up out on loan in, with respect, the Turkish league just a year later?
It goes against what Osimhen himself expected of the summer 2024 window. In January, he told CBS Sports Golazo that he was ready to take the “next step” of his career. Instead, he has taken a left-field move, going from one of Europe’s top five leagues to Istanbul’s Galatasaray.
The move isn’t even a big-money permanent transfer, with the 25-year-old making a season-long loan switch to join the likes of Hakim Ziyech, Lucas Torreira and Davinson Sanchez at reigning Superlig champions Galatasaray. While long-time Crystal Palace hero Wilfried Zaha has left the club on a season-long loan to France’s Lyon, Osimhen is set to play alongside former Napoli team-mate Dries Mertens, the Italian side’s all-time top scorer.
Turkey is ranked 10th in the UEFA country coefficients, a position based on how an association’s (league’s) clubs perform across the three European competitions, behind not only the big five of England (Premier League), Italy, Spain (La Liga), Germany (Bundesliga) and France (Ligue 1), but also the top divisions in the Netherlands, Portugal, Belgium and the Czech Republic.
And Galatasaray will not even compete in Europe’s top club competition this season. They lost to Swiss champions Young Boys in the Champions League qualification play-offs, so will instead take part in the Europa League. Osimhen’s loan side will face the likes of Ajax and Tottenham Hotspur in the league phase of UEFA’s second-tier tournament.
Osimhen won Serie A during the 2022-23 season (Tiziana Fabi/AFP via Getty Images)
It feels like a stark drop off for Osimhen, who scored 26 goals in 32 games in that 2022-23 title-winning season. Only four players across Europe were more prolific — and it was no surprise to see him win African Footballer of the Year 2023.
So how has he ended up at Galatasaray? How good is the Nigeria international, really? And what went down in his crazy summer?
What happened to Osimhen across the summer window?
To tell the story of Victor Osimhen’s summer, you have to go back to the start of the previous season.
Osimhen had become the only African player to be crowned Capocannoniere (top scorer) in Serie A, with those 26 league goals in 2022-23, efforts that saw him finish eighth in the Ballon d’Or voting.
But his newly-found reputation came with a history. His brilliant campaign as Napoli won the league had followed inconsistent seasons. Before that 26-goal haul, he registered 10 and 14 non-penalty goals in the previous two Serie A seasons respectively. He also averaged just 22 starts a year.
His form also dipped after the title win. Napoli had three different managers last season, making the worst title defence in Serie A history. His agent considered legal action against the club when a couple of TikTok posts on the Napoli account mocked his client in a racist way. Bridges were rebuilt and Osimhen signed a new contract before Christmas, upping his pay and extending his stay until 2026.
But injuries, suspensions, the open dissent he showed Rudi Garcia, Napoli’s first manager of last season, and Nigeria head coach Finidi George (in an explosive Instagram Live), and his lengthy participation at the Africa Cup of Nations in January and February disrupted his season and diminished his value.
By the end of his 12-non-penalty-goal season for Napoli, interested parties wondered whether even matching what the Italians had paid French club Lille for him, in a controversial summer 2020 deal that led to investigations by prosecutors in Naples and Rome, was even worth it.
Even so, staying at Napoli was not an option. Just a month after that December contract renewal, Osimhen revealed he’d decided on his next step. “We already knew this last summer,” Napoli owner Aurelio De Laurentiis said. “The negotiations over a renewal would not have been so long otherwise. We already knew he was going to Real Madrid, Paris Saint-Germain (PSG) or the Premier League.”
The Nigerian spent the summer working on his own at Napoli’s training ground in Castel Volturno. While he was doing that, Napoli signed €150million (£126m, $166m) of players, including Chelsea’s Belgium international striker Romelu Lukaku.
In the background, Paris Saint-Germain were weighing up a move. As The Athletic’s David Ornstein and Peter Rutzler reported in February, Osimhen was on their transfer shortlist after France forward Kylian Mbappe made it clear he would be leaving as a free agent this summer.
Lukaku came in to replace Osimhen (Francesco Pecoraro/Getty Images)
By the end of August however, Ornstein reported PSG had decided not to pursue the situation.
Saudi Arabian side Al Ahli were also interested, but Roberto Calenda, Osimhen’s agent, made clear in his response to negotiations with that club how he viewed Osimhen’s future.
“Osimhen is a Napoli player, with a contract recently renewed to our mutual satisfaction,” he posted on X. “He made history with Napoli and when there were important offers (including this year) we always accepted the club’s decisions. As I have already said, he is not a parcel to be sent far away to make room for new prophets. Victor was elected African Footballer of the Year, eighth at the Ballon d’Or, he still has a lot to say in Europe. We need respect and balance.”
“We thought we had closed a deal,” Napoli sporting director Giovanni Manna said. “But it fell through.” Al Ahli had held parallel negotiations with Brentford for their England striker Ivan Toney, and have signed him instead.
Chelsea then pursued a deal until the close of the window for English clubs last Friday. The Athletic’s Simon Johnson and Liam Twomey reported Chelsea were pushing for the deal in the final few weeks of the window. The west Londoners explored up to seven different structures of a pay deal for the player without success. Osimhen wanted to come, but he also wanted what he viewed as a sufficiently lucrative offer. That was outside the parameters the Premier League club operate at. Chelsea did not get far in formalising a deal with Napoli either, given the situation on personal terms.
The window then shut for most major European leagues. Turkey was one of the only countries Osimhen, who was not going to play for Napoli this campaign, could still move to.
He has now joined Galatasaray.
Why did Osimhen join Galatasaray?
Osimhen is no stranger to playing in Europe. He has had spells with clubs in Germany (Wolfsburg), Belgium (Charleroi), France and Italy, before this move to Istanbul.
The quality of football in the Turkish league, compared to a lot of other European top-flight divisions, is questionable, but Osimhen received a hero’s welcome when he arrived to finalize negotiations.
What a welcome for Victor Osimhen as he arrives in Turkey ahead of his loan move to Galatasaray! 🥳 pic.twitter.com/bXJmTNSvYP
— Sky Sports Football (@SkyFootball) September 3, 2024
His idol, former Ivory Coast and Chelsea striker, Didier Drogba, spent a season at Galatasaray in 2013-14, although he was nine years older at the time than Osimhen is now.
With Osimhen frozen out of Napoli’s plans, Galatasaray saw an opportunity to land a highly-rated striker still in his prime. They could also offer him European football — albeit in the Europa League rather than the Champions League after failing to beat Switzerland’s Young Boys in that play-off.
It just so happened that Galatasaray striker Mauro Icardi suffered a back injury the week before they moved for Osimhen, in the team’s opening league fixture of the season. This will keep him out for several weeks.
The Super Lig side also had longer to get the deal done than other clubs across Europe who pursued Osimhen in the final days and hours of their window. Turkey’s transfer window has a later closing date of September 18.
This is a significant commitment for Galatasaray. They will pay Osimhen €6million (£5.1m; $6.7m) in wages for the rest of the season — with Napoli having covered his salary for July and August. However, they will not have to give the Serie A side a loan fee. And it is still less than they pay Icardi, who is on around €10m a season. Galatasaray had also offloaded one of their higher earners, Zaha, on loan to Lyon earlier this summer.
Osimhen’s biggest issue in the past has been availability. He has played more than 27 league games in a season only once in his career and also scored 20 or more league goals just once — both in Serie A in 2022-23.
The Nigerian benefited from the break due to the 2022 World Cup that season (for which his country did not qualify), scoring 17 of his 26 league goals in 21 matches after the tournament in the November and December. He scored eight times in his 12 league appearances after the turn of the year last season, having managed nine in 16 games in 2021-22.
The drop in Osimhen’s end-product since 2022-23 can be attributed to issues on both player and system issues. His shots per 90 minutes in Serie A fell to 3.9 (from 4.6), and his non-penalty expected goals (npxG) per 90 went down to 0.5 from 0.7, while his npxG overperformance of 0.18 per 90 slid to a more sustainable 0.03.
A comparison of his charts from data company smarterscout, which give players’ games a series of ratings from zero and 99 in various metrics, from the past two seasons reflects those statistics. But it also indicates he suffered a drop in aspects such as link-up play, defensive intensity, and ball retention. The mid-season Africa Cup of Nations in January and February this year and nagging fitness issues were also factors.
Osimhen’s struggles last season were not down to him alone. Losing manager Luciano Spalletti, renowned for making good strikers great, to a sabbatical was a major blow. Napoli’s title-winning campaign was built as much on attack (with a league-best 77 goals scored) as on defence (only 28 goals conceded). Selling centre-back Kim Min-jae to Bayern Munich last summer also hurt them.
In attack, Serie A defences found a dimmer-switch for the electric Khvicha Kvaratskhelia last season, leading to a fall in goal involvements (from 25 in 2022-23 to 19). Kvaratskhelia was still one of Napoli’s best players but was made to work much harder throughout the campaign, scoring just once in his final eight league games.
In midfield, Andre-Frank Anguissa was not the same two-way force he had been the previous season, playing 300 fewer minutes in the league and recording just two assists and no goals (down from three goals and five assists in 2022-23).
Osimhen is a prototypical centre-forward in many ways. He is a high-volume shooter, an adept presser, and an aerial threat with pace to burn and the ability to effectively lead a press. However, last season was a clearer reflection of him as a player than 2022-23 had been.
He has yet to entirely exit the “on his day” and “deadly when fit” bubbles we have come to see far too often in football.
Anantaajith Raghuraman
(Top photo: Islam Yakut/Anadolu via Getty Images)
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