For Genoa, this season should have been one centred on celebration, not on survival.
It had been 30 years since the Grifone were the port city’s sole representative in Serie A after last season’s relegation of Sampdoria.
However, instead of enjoying being the only club at the Marassi who host Italy’s illustrious big names such as AC Milan and Juventus every week, they seem like a side who are suffering this season from a few years of mass investment and ever-evolving dressing rooms.
They have rarely had a defined core group of players during this time under the pressure of Enrico Preziosi’s presidency and it is not just the playing staff who have not been allowed to truly settle.
In the last two years Genoa have had six managers on the bench at the Luigi Ferraris, a massive indication that Preziosi is growing increasingly impatient if new arrivals cannot immediately adjust themselves to their new environment.
Outside of Palermo’s Maurizio Zamparini, he is perhaps the Serie A President who is proving most prone to pushing the panic button when the season is not proceeding in the manner that he had perhaps expected.
There is always going to be substantial expectation and pressure at this football club regardless of whoever the President is because they play in one of Europe’s biggest leagues and are one of its biggest teams.
When it comes to Scudetto successes, Genoa are behind only Juventus, Milan and Inter and are just one league championship from securing that famous gold star for the front of their red and blue jersey.
This is why you cannot blame Preziosi for at least being active and hands-on in his approach to trying to bring his club back to where they belong (when compared with other clubs such as Lazio it certainly is not a bad thing) but the continuous cull of players and chopping and changing of the squad now seems to be having the opposite effect on the Rossoblu.
So far this season the club have used three different formations in an attempt to find their correct formula and used 29 different players, something which does not allow for great tactical comfort (although Juventus are doing a fine job of it themselves) and which does not allow any manager to find a suitable core base of players to base his team around.
The pursuit of building a squad that can challenge at the top end of the table has not come cheap either. In the past three seasons (including this one) the club have spent close to €210million bringing players in and when you consider how some of the expensive stars performed in Genoa, it is not the return on their investment that the club expected.
For the money spent during this time too, you would expect much better for what you have paid and in truth, they could probably have gotten better options for their money than what they have paid for.
The departures of Thiago Motta and Diego Milito to Inter as well as paying a fee believed to be close to €13m for Robert Acquafresca is baffling as the player scored just twice during his time there.
Sergio Floccari was bought for over €9m although by the time he had left for Lazio, the club had paid roughly €2m for each of the four goals he scored during his time at the Marassi.
They are not the only such players brought in for big fees who have failed to appease the fans of Italy’s oldest club over the past season or so. Transfer fees in the region of €8m were paid individually for each of Alberto Gilardino and Sebastian Frey who joined from Fiorentina and Miguel Veloso was brought in from Sporting Lisbon as well as speedy full-back Rafinha from Schalke.
These players brought with them excellent form for their respective previous clubs and as a result there was real optimism in the camp that was coupled with genuine expectation.
Players such as these were high calibre players who, along with the likes of Kakha Kaladze, Marco Rossi and Bosko Jankovic, could surely fire Genoa into a definite Europa League place and perhaps even exceed those ambitions.
Yet despite a brief Europa League fling, the club have simply not managed to put in the performances expected of them and many of those players brought in to push them into the upper echelons of Serie A have struggled.
Alberto Gilardino has made a noticeable difference to the way Genoa play and there is no doubt that the side do look better when he partners the always reliable Rodrigo Palacio but he has not hit the back of the net frequently enough which has been a major source of frustration.
He has scored just three times since his January move with two of these goals coming from the penalty spot but there is no doubt that he has proved the perfect foil for Palacio whose own form has been all the better for having ‘Gila’ at his side as his 11 goals since the ex-Milan striker’s arrival show.
Frey has failed to hit the same stunning form that he showed at Fiorentina and though he is still a goalkeeper capable of pulling off the outstanding he certainly seems to be lacking confidence.
In the middle of the park, Veloso has massively underperformed after a promising start to his Rossoblu career and has not matured in the manner expected of him and this unpredictability in form has also been a problem for players who a lot is expected of like Kevin Constant and Giandomenico Mesto.
There is of course still time to recover and ensure they will remain in the top flight next season (as tantalising as the prospect of a Derby della Lanterna may sound for the neutral) but even if this does happen it is hard to see the club finding a way out of the current cycle they find themselves in.
This was highlighted in the now infamous incident in which the Ultras invaded the field in the team’s 4-1 defeat at home to Siena last month in which the fans ordered the players to hand over their jerseys as they felt the men on the field were unworthy of wearing them.
In Italy, fans do have a lot of power and whether or not Genoa go down or stay up this will no doubt be something that Preziosi agrees with (despite the frequent managerial changes) and do not be surprised to see another summer of mass changes.
Should the club go down then obviously their better players will want to leave and continue to play at the highest level but even if they stay up there is no guarantee that those men who have let those fans and their club down this season will be afforded another season to make amends at Marassi.
The Grifone truly find themselves between a rock and a hard place at the moment and it will be tough to find their way out of it regardless of results between now and the end of the season.
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