The Artemio Franchi is a building site at the moment. The Fiesole, one of the ends behind the goal, where the Fiorentina ultras stand, is undergoing work for the first time since Italy hosted the World Cup in 1990. The council needn’t have hired a wrecking ball to knock it down. Moise Kean, Fiorentina’s own demolition man, is blowing up. His hat-trick at the weekend in the 3-1 win against Hellas Verona sent Fiorentina joint top of Serie A for a few hours. It was Kean’s first tripletta (hat-trick) in senior football. But it could have been his second in three league games. The 24-year-old had magnanimously allowed his goalless team-mate Lucas Beltran to take a penalty in the 5-1 win over Roma. When The Athletic asks Kean if he believes he can finish top of the scoring charts this season, he backs himself. “Why not?” Kean says. “It’s something I draw motivation from. It’s among my objectives.”
As he makes the short drive to Coverciano, the leafy suburb of Florence where the national team meet up, Kean relishes the competition with Mateo Retegui for the role as Italy’s No 9. The Argentine-born Retegui has, much like Kean, benefited from a move over the summer. Retegui has scored 11 goals in 12 appearances in Serie A for Atalanta. Kean gained ground on him on Sunday, climbing up to eight, and is determined to catch him in what feels like a re-run of the 1996-97 season when Vincenzo Montella and Pippo Inzaghi duked it out to be crowned Capocannoniere. The gauntlet has been thrown down. “I like challenges,” Kean says. “And the one between me and Retegui is great because it’s good to have a bit of a challenge. If you don’t have anyone pushing you, it’s not as motivating.”
(Image Photo Agency/Getty Images)
Florence is bringing the best out of Kean. It is a demanding one-club city, home of the Italian language and capital of the renaissance. If the team isn’t up to the standard of everything else Florentines are exposed to on a daily basis — Botticellis and Da Vincis — and hasn’t the style of Gucci or Ferragamo, the locals don’t need to be Dante to make the owners and players feel as if they’re in one of the Nine Circles of Hell from the Inferno. Conversely, if you perform under this kind of pressure the supporters will build statues in your image, as they did for Gabriel Batistuta who got his own version of Michelangelo’s David (Footnote: the ultras melted it down in anger when he left for Roma in 2000).
“So many things have changed since I got here,” Kean says. “The prospects I have. Florence, as a city, believes in me and this has given me that little bit extra to improve and do well. I watched a few videos of Batistuta and (Luca) Toni when I joined. Florence has always been a big football town and this means a lot to me. The fans really take you into their hearts. They care about the jersey. They give you calore assoluto.” You can translate that as warmth. But so many intangibles are wrapped up in it. It’s affection, the shouts of encouragement as he walks the medieval streets. Kean feels like the main man here. It’s why his agent Alessandro Lucci thought Florence was the perfect place for him to fulfil his potential; this city of renaissance, this city of strikers.
Fiorentina were in need of one. Curiously for a club that has reached three finals in three years (two in the Conference League, one in the Coppa Italia), Fiorentina have not had a centre-forward in keeping with their history and tradition over the same period. Arthur Cabral and Luka Jovic might beg to differ but ever since Dusan Vlahovic’s sale to Juventus in early 2022, the team has lacked a prolific goalscorer in the league. Kean is already in double figures in all competitions (12). It’s his best-ever campaign in Italy and there are still two-thirds of it to play. “This year it matters a lot to me that I prove myself,” Kean says. “I was coming off a year non facile.”
Kean celebrates after scoring against Retegui’s Atalanta earlier this season (Francesco Scaccianoce/Getty Images)
His second spell at Juventus had not been easy. The stable environment in which he came through no longer existed. Kean returned as Cristiano Ronaldo left. Juventus were no longer champions and bringing back Max Allegri, the coach who granted Kean his Serie A debut at 16, wasn’t enough to restore the club to its position at the top of the league. The chairman Andrea Agnelli and the board resigned amid an investigation into the club’s financial affairs, points deductions were levied for transfer dealings. It was a disruptive, stressful time.
Kean suffered injuries and felt unlucky. In one game against Hellas Verona last October, the VAR ruled out two goals he scored for a microscopic offside and a soft foul. Kean despaired and Allegri substituted him. Juventus then tried to move Kean to Atletico Madrid over the winter. He even watched Diego Simeone’s side beat Valencia at the Civitas Metropolitano on January 28 only for the move to break down. Had it gone through, Kean would have added La Liga to experiences in Serie A, the Premier League and Ligue 1. “I feel old because I started so young,” he says.
At only 24, this is his eighth season in the game. He has been through and seen a lot. Kean’s father wasn’t around much as he grew up and then, once he made it, his old man gave an awkward interview revealing how he had demanded Juventus give him a couple of tractors in negotiations to keep the boy in Italy amid interest from England. His mother worked all hours at a local hospital to make ends meet while his older brother, Giovanni, played football in the lower leagues. “I was home alone and had to take responsibility for myself,” he recalls.
In the garden back in Asti, the Piedmontese town he called home, Kean imitated the great Inter Milan strikers of the late 90s and early 00s. “I always liked Ronaldo O Fenomeno,” he says, “particularly the fun he used to put into his game. When he began doing his step-overs you just knew he was going to beat his man. I always liked the ease with which he did it. Obafemi Martins was one of my earliest idols too. He used to inspire me a lot. I loved his determination, the way he attacked the goal, the hunger with which he played. In the garden, I tried to be a mix of them both.” Martins’ son Kevin, an electric winger, recently lit up the Coppa Italia in Monza’s 3-1 win over Brescia. “I saw that,” Kean says, excitedly. “It seems like only yesterday I was watching videos of his dad. It makes you realise how quickly time flies.”
Martins in action for Inter against Ajax in the Champions League (Tony Marshall – PA Images via Getty Images)
The streets of Asti have not forgotten Kean. They are where he learned the game and honed his skills. Pick-up games drew crowds and Kean loved the feeling of making them go wild. “I liked getting a reaction out of people,” he says. “I used to always try to nutmeg someone, do step-overs and put on a show. It’s different when you get to Serie A. It’s more mature. But there are still times when I get the urge to try something and put on a show. That’s why people come to watch and pay for tickets. Kids come to games and you have to entertain them. That’s how I see it.”
Kean’s hat-trick goal at the weekend was an example of that. He helped his goalkeeper David de Gea get an assist by bringing a long ball down and then engaging in a one-v-one situation with Verona’s midfielder Reda Belahyane. Kean kept the Moroccan on a piece of string. He ran at him, stopped, started again and then cut the cord, driving inside before finding the bottom corner.
David de Gea’nın Hellas Verona karşısında Moise Kean’e yaptığı asist…🤤pic.twitter.com/5YOxuxQPb1
— TRT Spor (@trtspor) November 12, 2024
The goal must have taken Kean back to his childhood. In Argentina, players take their first steps in football on the cancha; dusty, uneven neighbourhood pitches, scraps of land. In Italy, it’s the oratorio. Footballers are made in church. For decades the Catholic church turned a lot of its landholdings into pitches and parish football clubs as a way to mentor the next generation. It was a way to get them to come to mass in return for a kickabout.
“We used to play tournaments at the oratory where there’d maybe be five of my mates and we’d play five-a-side,” Kean says. Everyone wanted him on their team and they played for keeps. “There was a sum of money and if you won, you’d come away with some of it. Let’s say you put in €5 each to organise the tournament, you’d then win €5 each.” Kean cleaned up at these mini-World Cups. “I played a bit for Senegal, for Morocco, for Peru and a bit with Italy. I was the smallest.” And the best. Players used to fight over him because having Kean on your team meant a guaranteed share of the winnings. “There were arguments,” he laughs.
Word of his talent travelled fast in Piedmont. Torino got hold of Kean first but Juventus then offered him a place in their academy at 13. Turin is only an hour’s drive from Asti but it felt much longer. Kean wasn’t only saying arrivederci to his home, it was addio to his childhood too. A shot at professional football at the highest level represented an opportunity to give his family a better life. It brought more responsibility than most people realise. “You get to my age, I’m 24, and there are times when I’m talking with my mates and I say: ‘I’ve already done everything’.” Not necessarily in the game, but in life compared with other kids in their mid-twenties.”
Last year he became a father and Kean has matured since he walked through the gates of Juventus’ training grounds in Vinovo and the Continassa district of Turin. “Juventus taught me a lot of discipline. They took me from nothing. I was a kid from the streets and they taught me a lot. I left home early and they were more than a family to me. They threw me into the first team at 16 and it was a dream.” Juventus were in the midst of winning nine consecutive league titles at the time. To break into that team so young is a measure of Kean’s talent. Juventus were playing on three fronts, sure, and there were plenty of games to go around but his competition was Gonzalo Higuain, Paulo Dybala, Mario Mandzukic, and, later, Ronaldo.
Kean on the bench for Juventus in 2016, at the age of 16 (Matteo Bottanelli/Getty Images)
Italy’s then coach Roberto Mancini fast-tracked him and Nicolo Zaniolo into the first team after they fired the Under-19s to the European Championship final, where Kean’s brace in the final took victors Portugal to extra time. His first senior goal against Finland in March 2019 was the second most precocious in the history of the national team and started a streak of six consecutive games on the scoresheet for club and country. Kean seemed to be the next big thing. Then a matter of months later Juventus sold him to Everton to book some much-needed pure profit from a homegrown player, after Dybala and Higuain refused moves away from the club at a time when money was sorely needed to cover the running cost of Ronaldo.
“Out of all the experiences I’ve had, you won’t ever hear me say I had a bad one,” Kean says. “I find positives in all of them. If I hadn’t spent that year at Everton, I wouldn’t have learned the things I did there. I was a bit unlucky. I went there expecting to play a bit more. I was 19. I joined from Juve and thought I was going to smash it. Unfortunately, it didn’t go like that. We went through three coaches that year and mentally… it was all new for me. I was in England, it was a new environment…”
When The Athletic comments on the weather in Merseyside and the lack of sun compared with parts of Italy, it brings back a memory for Kean. “They were so used to not seeing the sun, they were barbecuing on the beach in winter,” he says. The same beach in Crosby that Carlo Ancelotti used to love to stroll down. “They were in short sleeves in winter. I said to myself: ‘These people are out of their minds’,” he laughs. “But England made me learn a lot about myself. I matured a lot. When I got there I didn’t play much. I used to think, ‘How am I not getting into this team, at Everton?’ Mentally, it made me evolve. I wasn’t playing and it was in dark times that I knew I had to grit my teeth and train even more. Then the chance to go to PSG (on loan) came along, I moved there and got everything out of myself that I could. I wasn’t playing at Everton and I knew I had to give triple. That’s how it went.”
Kean’s year in Paris was the best of his career up until now. Only Kylian Mbappe outscored him and he found the net at the Camp Nou when PSG beat Barcelona 4-1 and his French strike partner completed a hat-trick. “You can only learn being next to champions like Mbappe and Neymar,” Kean says. “Even if you don’t want to learn, just by watching them, you learn. Even if you were to think, ‘There’s nothing I can take from them’. You watch them and see things that aren’t normal and think to yourself, ‘I want to try that’. I was really lucky to get to play with them and they taught me a lot, particularly Mbappe and Ney.
(Marcio Machado/Getty Images)
“It wasn’t just them either. There were others like Leandro Paredes, Marquinhos and Presnel Kimpembe. They knew it hadn’t gone well for me at Everton and they helped me. I swear to you they were great, great people, all heart. I felt the love around me and I did well because of it. Just by showing me 80 per cent of what they did every day made me want to do well. When you have people around you who care about you and believe in you, it means a lot.”
Kean now has that again at Fiorentina. Speaking from their state-of-the-art training ground in Bagno a Ripoli, the best in Italy if not mainland Europe, Kean is the driving force of a young team built around young Italian players with a young Italian coach. After a slow start, Fiorentina have caught fire. In the space of a week in October, they put six past Lecce, four past St Gallen and five past Roma. A disciple of Gian Piero Gasperini, the team’s new manager Raffaele Palladino abandoned his 3-4-2-1 after the first few weeks, seeing it didn’t suit the team, and they’ve since gathered enough momentum to even put them in the title race. Six straight wins have the Viola a point off league leaders Napoli.
Kean’s own purple patch has overflown into the national team. He scored the winner against Israel in September and still showed up for the first day of the get-together in October when a bad back ruled him out of action. It was a gesture greatly appreciated by Italy’s coach Luciano Spalletti. “I care a lot about the national team,” Kean says. It hurt when he didn’t make the final cut for Euro 2020 and missed out on the tournament last summer. “As I said, that was something I learned from too. I have to show I deserve to be there. Every time you play for Italy you have to sweat and show how important it is to wear that shirt.”
In the rolling hills of Tuscany, Kean is getting better with age, just like the Sassicaia that gets bottled around here. This year promises to be his best yet. “I just want to go out on the pitch, score goals and whatever comes of it will come,” he says. “I don’t set myself limits.”
(Photos: Getty Images/Design: Kelsea Petersen)
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