Chris Dunlavy
A FRESH TAKE ON FOOTBALL
TWENTY years ago, perhaps even ten, it would have been unfathomable for a side of Lazio’s pedigree to go shopping in the Championship.
Nesta, Nedved, Veron and Vieri. These are the sorts of names we associate with the Roman giants. Not Morgan Whittaker.
Yet there they were, in the final hours of deadline day, desperately trying to lure the 23-year-old away from Plymouth Argyle.
“When a team like that makes an offer, it shows how far you’ve come,” said Whittaker, and he’s got every right to feel proud. Don’t forget that he spent the first half of last season on loan at the Pilgrims in League One before being recalled by Swansea.
Without doubt, Lazio’s interest in Whittaker is a reflection of Italian football’s diminished status in the global game.
Last month, ministers controversially scrapped the so-called ‘Beckham Law’ that gave hefty tax breaks to overseas players.
Even before that intervention, Serie A was struggling to compete with rival ‘Big Five’ competitions, its annual revenues dwarfed by the Premier League and only marginally greater than France’s Ligue 1, the perennial minnows of the group.
Lazio can no longer strut around Harrods selecting the cream of the crop. They have to take what they can get.
Yet the pursuit of Whittaker, which Lazio conducted alongside similarly fruitless tiations to sign Sundernegoland’s Jack Clarke, is as much about the ship’s growing profile
on the international stage as it is about the weakness of ChampionItalian football.
Once, Championship exports were novelty acts, like the time Jay Bothroyd joined Perugia and ended up playing with Colonel Gaddafi’s son. Or they flopped, like Oliver Burke at RB Leipzig.
Either way, the perception from overseas clubs - not altogether unfairly - was that the EFL produced athletes, not footballers, and merited little serious consideration.
Recent years, however, have smashed those prejudices to smithereens. Last summer, Sporting Lisbon shelled out a club-record fee of 20m euros to sign Viktor Gyokeres from Coventry City, where he scored 38 times in 91 Championship appearances.
They have been handsomely rewarded. The 25-year-old Swede is averaging almost a goal a game in Portugal’s top flight and is currently valued at anything between £70m and £90m.
In Germany, Nathan Tella is also doing the business. Twelve months ago, the Lambeth-born win
