Turin has always been an expensive place to do a bit of shopping. Just ask Manchester United. A year after spending £15.3million on Matteo Darmian in via Arcivescovado, they returned to the Piedmont capital last summer to write out a cheque for £89m and complete the purchase of Paul Pogba in Corso Galileo Ferraris. The city with the Alps as its backdrop doesn’t look like getting much cheaper anytime soon either and not just because of Brexit.
This weekend reports emerged of a £56m bid - since denied - from Arsenal for Torino striker Andrea Belotti. “He’s worth more than what the team making the offer has offered,” Torino director of sport Gianluca Petrachi told Sky Italia without actually naming Arsenal himself. The new contract Belotti signed a month ago should have made that self-explanatory. It's well documented that it includes a buy-out clause worth £86m (€100m) and one which is only valid to non-Italian clubs.
“We won’t take any offer below this figure into consideration,” declared Torino owner Urbano Cairo. When Belotti’s extension was announced, the player's coach Sinisa Mihajlovic didn't shy away from calling it exactly how he saw it. “No one is worth that kind of money,” he said. “Not Pogba. Not Higuain. You’d have to score four goals every Sunday and win games by yourself to be worth it.” But that’s today’s market and on Saturday Mihajlovic revealed he didn’t sleep for two nights in December after a Chinese club offered to pay him the kind of salary it’d take “five or six years to make in Italy.”
Whether Belotti is an £86m player or not, his stock has risen at an exponential rate over the last year. Only Higuain managed to score more goals in Serie A in 2016 and there was a time during the autumn when the Italy international seemed to steal the Juventus striker’s thunder. To an extent this helps explain Torino’s valuation. Make no mistake, there is an element of oneupmanship about it. Juventus paid a Serie A record £81m to activate the buy-out clause in Higuain’s contract with Napoli. By making Belotti’s clause even bigger than the Argentine's not only did Torino seek to give the idea that they have a striker every bit as good if not better than their rivals, the decision to make it valid only to foreign clubs ensured there'd be no repeat of what happened in the summer when Napoli and Roma were helpless to stop Juventus taking Higuain and Miralem Pjanic away from them by the same means.
It was a smart move by a quietly shrewd club that has brought in £87m over the last three years from the sales of Ciro Immobile, Alessio Cerci, Angelo Ogbonna, Kamil Glik, Nikola Maksimovic and Darmian. Should someone come in and meet the asking price set in Belotti’s contract, well, Torino would then double that amount in one fell swoop. It would represent a huge profit on the £7m it took to acquire him from Palermo 18 months ago.
Belotti is a blue-collar kid from Gorlago, the same village as Beppe Savoldi, who was once the most expensive player in the world. Locals apparently used to tell him: “You’ll never be like Mister Miliardo.” But Belotti took no notice and persevered even when he couldn’t get a game for Albinoleffe’s Under-17s. “Every year he was the last player they decided to keep,” Belotti’s father Roberto recalls. It was around this time that Belotti and his brother Manuel got matching tattoos on their ankles saying “Never give up.” Shortly afterwards, Belotti won the third division’s awards for Best Young Player and Young Goalscorer. He joined Palermo on the back of it. However, in Sicily Belotti had to be patient again. Winning a regular place in the starting line-up was tough especially as the stars of Paulo Dybala and Franco Vazquez suddenly shot into the ascendancy.
Still Belotti established a reputation as a super sub and, after also tracking his progress with Italy from the Under-19s to the Under-21s, Torino clearly saw enough in the hard-working striker to persuade them into giving him the responsibility of leading their line. Initially it looked like they might be made to regret it. Belotti scored just once in his first 16 games for the club. Presumably he then rolled down his sock and looked long and hard at the inked phrase on his ankle, drawing inspiration from it, because almost a year ago to the day, something just clicked. “I had a boom,” he told Il Corriere della Sera and once Belotti started scoring, he couldn’t stop.
In March, the 23-year-old ended Gigi Buffon’s record-breaking 974-minute long run without conceding. He finished 2016 with 24 goals. Belotti's style of play has drawn comparisons with Christian Vieri. “You must never stop scoring, not even in training,” he says. “You’ve got to create a relationship between yourself and the goal that gets into your blood.” To Belotti, goalkeepers are the “enemy” precisely because “they can ruin this relationship.” Unsurprisingly he doesn’t care how he scores. “Whether it’s a bicycle kick or off my backside, the joy is always the same.” Of his 17 goals for club and country this season, six have been with his left foot, six with his right and five with his head. He is a complete striker and a well-rounded young man as well. A former altar boy, he still goes to church and his nickname and trademark goal celebration ‘the Rooster’ comes not only from a mate with the surname ‘Gallo’ but also chasing his grandmother's chickens around the garden. Named after his grandfather, who died six months before he was born, he used to always be round nonna's house just to make sure she didn't get lonely.
His down-to-earth personality distinguishes him in an industry and a position that doesn't exactly lack for prima donnas. “I’ve been lucky enough to get to know Andrea's parents,” Mihajlovic told Il Corriere della Sera. “They’re honest folk. Andrea’s like someone from a bygone era. I read in an interview once he said his aim in life was to make enough money so his parents didn’t have to work anymore.” With high-earning Joe Hart likely to return to the Premier League in the summer, and Torino now turning their attention to the more affordable Lukasz Skorupski, the question is: will Belotti follow the on-loan City `keeper to England? Torino certainly hope not. The intention behind the buy-out clause was to put teams off. “I’m more of a buyer than a seller,” Cairo says. However, with the Rooster calling almost every Sunday these days, Europe’s super clubs have woken up to his talent for scoring goals.
