Meet Chelsea’s new signing Cesare Casadei, the free-scoring 19-year-old No 8 from Inter
(Top photo: Cesare Casadei unveiled at Chelsea; Getty Images)
By James Horncastle - THE ATHLETIC
Aug 19, 2022
By the canal in the elegant resort town of Milano Marittima, there’s a place you can sit down for a piadina — one of the local flatbreads — and flick through the sports pages. Cesenatico, the hometown of Italian cyclist Marco Pantani, is a short bicycle ride down the Romagnola Riviera. Cesena itself isn’t far inland either.
It was in Cesena that Italy played Hungary in June, at the Dino Manuzzi stadium. The owner of the piadineria in Milano Marittima will be hoping the national team returns soon. His son, Cesare, can play a bit and it surely won’t be long before he gets a senior cap.
The boy came through the ranks at Cesena, a once proud club that tended to be a staging post for up-and-coming coaches. You may have heard of some of them: Gigi Radice, Osvaldo Bagnoli, Arrigo Sacchi and Marcello Lippi. Cesare is far too young to remember them. He was only seven when Cesena last appeared in Serie A and Emanuele Giaccherini upset AC Milan on the night the club announced the signing of Zlatan Ibrahimovic back in 2010.
Mismanagement led to Cesena’s bankruptcy four years ago. Little did the club know at the time, mired as it was in €73million (£61.7m, $74.3m) worth of debt, that the academy could be sifted for gold. After bringing through the Rimini Iniesta, Stefano Sensi, it produced Marco Carnesecchi, the Italy Under-21 international goalkeeper, now on Atalanta’s books, who last season helped guide Cremonese to promotion to the top flight for the first time in 26 years. Then came our Cesare, who Chelsea must be recruiting to do more than follow in the footsteps of Sam Dalla Bona and Luca Percassi. Why else would they be prepared to pay his current club Inter Milan an astonishing €20m to bring him to Cobham?
Welcome to Chelsea, Cesare Casadei! 🇮🇹
— Chelsea FC (@ChelseaFC) August 19, 2022
Cesena could have used that money but when they went to the wall in 2018 and started over at the bottom of Italy’s football pyramid, a couple of Inter scouts — Paolo Manighetti and Beppe Giavardi — flagged one name to their superiors: Casadei. Cesare Casadei. He’d been released and, for a time, seemed bound for AC Milan where his coach Christian Lantignotti had returned to train the under-17s.
Lantignotti himself rose through the ranks at Milan, his career peaking as a teenager when he won pretty much everything there is to win as an extra on the legendary Sacchi team known as the Immortals. If Casadei had followed his mentor to Vismara, where the next generation of Milan players hone their skills, his past with Cesena would inevitably have drawn comparisons with Massimo Ambrosini, the blond stalwart of Carlo Ancelotti’s great sides who also emerged in the environs of the Manuzzi.
Casadei joined Inter instead and within a year became a national champion with the Allievi, the under-17 age group referred to in Italy as the Students. Casadei was not a star on that team. Not yet, anyway. Attention inevitably fell on hat-trick hero Sebastiano Esposito and Dejan Stankovic’s son Filip, who saved a late penalty. The esteem Esposito was held in manifested itself in Antonio Conte’s decision not to let him go to the Under-17 World Cup in Brazil after an injury to Alexis Sanchez.
A kid from Castellammare di Stabia, the same neck of the woods as Gigio Donnarumma, Esposito was taken under the wing of Romelu Lukaku, who made the magnanimous gesture of allowing him to take a penalty in a 4-0 win against Genoa. Esposito scored and the scene of him tearfully embracing his mother went viral.
Casadei is yet to play a single first-team minute at Inter. But honestly, it felt like only a matter of time. Italy coach Roberto Mancini was in the stands for the under-19 Derby della Madonnina in May supposedly to take a closer look at the Carboni brothers, Franco and Valentin, who have already been called up by Argentina. Sons of former Catania midfielder Ezequiel Carboni, the teenagers have dual nationality and may still choose Italy.
Checking in on Casadei no doubt figured high on the list too. By now he was the main attraction of Inter’s under-19s. Casadei made his debut at the Primavera age group just a few weeks after his 17th birthday in 2020. Armando Madonna sent him on with his team 2-0 down away to Sampdoria and within five minutes of entering the fray, Casadei pulled one back. He was establishing a reputation as a super sub, one that bailed out the older boys in Inter’s academy.
At the start of the following season, Madonna turned to him again in the UEFA Youth League. Inter needed a goal against Rennes. Casadei, on his first appearance in the competition, didn’t disappoint with a trademark late run from midfield and a towering header.
Rather than oscillate between the age groups, a decision was taken to make him a fixture in the under-19s. Inter are always competitive at this level but Casadei made the difference between the club contending for the national Primavera title and winning it for the first time in four years.
His strike rate frankly showed more in common with a promising centre-forward than the player he is: a hard-working No 8 whose timing, leap and aerial ability would decide so many games for Madonna and his successor, the former treble-winner Cristian Chivu, who played under Mancini at Inter.
Casadei scored 17 goals last season, the biggest of all coming in the title-deciding play-off final against a Roma side coached by Daniele De Rossi’s father, Alberto. Ghosting into the penalty area, the captain’s armband strapped to his bicep, Casadei’s 80th-minute headed equaliser took the game into extra-time. His team-mate Nikola Iliev ended up getting the winner but when the final whistle came and the ticker tape fluttered down, it was Casadei holding the Morosini trophy, an award given to the MVP of the Primavera play-offs.
Calling him up to Italy’s senior squad must have crossed Mancini’s mind. The 57-year-old’s tenure as commissario tecnico has been distinguished by provocative selections, the most famous being that of Nicolo Zaniolo before he’d even appeared in Serie A. But the Finalissima against Argentina at Wembley was approached as a swan song for Giorgio Chiellini and some of the other veterans who won the European Championship last summer. After that, for the Nations League, Sassuolo’s box-to-box midfielder Davide Frattesi was rewarded with a debut in Casadei’s position.
Casadei, meanwhile, was in Slovakia participating in the Under-19 Euros where he had a solid enough tournament as Italy made it to the semi-finals. He was overlooked by UEFA’s technical committee when it came to naming their best XI. Napoli striker Giuseppe Ambrosino made the cut and was the only member of Carmine Nunziata’s squad in the team. Israel’s No 10 Oscar Gloukh left a big impression on scouts as the revelation of the Euros while Casadei’s new Chelsea team-mate Carney Chukwuemeka received plaudits for the role he played in England winning the competition.
Casadei was in the news during the tournament, however, due to the appearance of his name in talks between Inter and Chelsea over Lukaku’s return to San Siro on loan. Inter, initially, did not wish to sell and repeat the mistakes of the past. They gave Leonardo Bonucci away in 2009 and although that trade was justified on the basis it supplied Jose Mourinho with Thiago Motta and Diego Milito in return, other academy sell-offs have come back to haunt Inter, most notably the decision to package in Zaniolo to the swap deal for Radja Nainggolan in 2018.
On the one hand, Casadei’s sale continues this trend. On the other, the circumstances are a little different as this is less of a choice and more of an obligation. Inter need to turn a net profit of €60m from the transfer window this summer and so far business has been slow. One way of doing that is to contemplate sacrificing a big name as was the case last summer with Achraf Hakimi. That player was supposed to be Milan Skriniar but PSG, for now, disagree with Inter’s valuation of the Slovakia international, who has only one year left on his contract.
A deal may still get done but consideration must be given, in the meantime, to alternative fund-raising solutions and the irony is that at a time when Inter need to move to a more sustainable model and would be advised to bring players through its academy, the youth sector is once again the source of a quick buck. Around €35m is coming from Andrea Pinamonti’s sale to Sassuolo and Casadei’s move to Chelsea alone.
More and more Italian youngsters are going abroad. They have been encouraged to do so by Mancini and Italy Under-21 coach Paolo Nicolato as long as it’s the right thing for their development. Cher Ndour is now at Benfica, Filippo Calixte Mane at Borussia Dortmund and Lorenzo Lucca at Ajax, clubs with strong reputations for putting high-potential players on pathways to success. Wilfried Gnonto is playing regularly at Zurich, Esposito is now at Anderlecht, Manuel Viti is stepping up from Empoli to Nice, and then there’s Gianluca Scamacca who hopes to go to another level at West Ham. All have good prospects of playing.
What Chelsea’s plans are for 19-year-old Casadei remain to be seen. The club already have one of the best academies in the world producing players for its first team, and its top graduates don’t always get the playing time they crave. Conor Gallagher and Armando Broja are back from loans at Crystal Palace and Southampton respectively, but neither are nailed on to start every week. Levi Colwill has headed out on another loan, this time to Brighton.
Tammy Abraham, Fikayo Tomori, Ola Aina, Jeremie Boga and Ethan Ampadu have all had to leave for Serie A to escape the frustration of warming the bench at Stamford Bridge, so it’s curious Casadei is going the other way at a time when he needs first-team football. Whether it makes sense or not, this is Chelsea under Todd Boehly, where dropping €40m for players like Casadei and the uber-talented Chukwuemeka — someone Milan were prepared to offer €3.5m to sign — seems to be given the same thought as buying a piadina on the Romagnola Riviera.
James Horncastle covers Serie A for The Athletic. He joins from ESPN and is working on a book about Roberto Baggio.
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