Liverpool's stunning new £10m signing is a proven star - but won't necessarily improve the squad

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Will Federico Chiesa really improve Liverpool’s chances of winning the Premier League? We look at how much of a difference he can make.

Federico Chiesa’s move to Liverpool has been confirmed after. Whirlwind negotiations have made him the second signing of the Arne Slot era and the first new face who will take to the turf at Anfield under the Dutchman’s watchful gaze. The deal has also made Chiesa one of the splashiest signings of the summer, even if the cash actually spent was pretty minimal by Premier League standards. But what can the Italian offer his new club, and is he really as good as we all remember him to be?

Chiesa arrives with a reputation much larger than the fee he commanded – a relatively paltry £10m, with an extra £2.5m on offer to his former side Juventus should Liverpool win the Premier League or Champions League. There’s an also an argument that his reputation exceeds his accomplishments, although that isn’t necessarily his fault.

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Chiesa’s crowning achievement is undoubtedly the role he played in Italy’s Euro 2020 win – he scored twice, won two man of the match awards and was named in the team of the tournament, but in an unfortunate twist that would foreshadow the next few years of his career, he was taken of injured in the second half of normal time during the final against England and watched the penalty shootout from the sidelines. He has spent much of his time there since.

Early in 2022, Chiesa tore his anterior cruciate ligament, and was sidelined for 10 months – since then, there has been a constant string of muscular injuries to contend with, many related to that same knee. In total, he has missed 84 matches for Juventus and Italy since that win at Wembley. It has, understandably, held him back, and a total of 13 league goals and a single Coppa Italia win in the past three seasons feels like an underwhelming return, even if understandably so.

To state the obvious, he will be of little use to Liverpool if he continues to spend large portions of time on a treatment table – but can he still play the way he did at Euro 2020, and is he better than the forwards Liverpool already have if he can? That’s less clear-cut.

The good news is that he found a decent amount of form and consistency across the 2023/24 season, comfortably his best and healthiest campaign since the injury issues began to mount. He managed 37 appearances and 29 games, scoring 10 goals (from an xG of 6.4, which is a testament to the enduring quality of his finishing) and assisting two more, although that latter number undersells his creative capability – he laid on 6.2 expected goals’ worth of chances for his team-mates only to watch most of them missed.

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Both Luis Díaz and Cody Gakpo, the most obvious immediate rivals for the left-wing role at Liverpool, managed more goals and a very similar volume of chances created last season, but from a far larger number of games. Minute for minute, Chiesa scored more and created more – the table below compares some of key statistics from the last year of the three players’ careers, to give a more detailed idea of how they stack up:

How Chiesa compares to his new Liverpool team matesHow Chiesa compares to his new Liverpool team mates
How Chiesa compares to his new Liverpool team mates | NationalWorld

What these numbers imply is that Chiesa offers something of a middle ground between existing options. Díaz gets in far more good shooting positions and his off-ball movement is superior (‘progressive passes received’ measures how many times players control a pass either inside the box or at least 10 yards downfield of the initial passer), but is a much less accurate finisher than either of his counterparts. Chiesa, meanwhile, is a fine finisher but doesn’t get into those dangerous positions quite so often despite being the best dribbler of the three.

The stats for both of Liverpool’s players are slightly inflated by playing more games against lesser teams in European and domestic cup competitions and the gaps between Chiesa, Díaz and Gakpo narrow if you only include league matches, but they hint at the full story – Chiesa is certainly better in some aspects of the game, but taken as a whole he isn’t much of an upgrade on current form.

That form has definitely improved over the last year when taken as a whole, but he remained a frustrating figure in Turin. He started the season with four goals in five Serie A games, but then managed just one of the following three months. A few niggling fitness problems plagued him over the winter, and then he finished the season with a couple of goals, but only after managing just one in 14. In totality, his numbers were very respectable indeed, but his performances came in fits and starts, in flashes and bursts of form followed by long spells during which he was relatively ineffective.

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To get the best out of Chiesa, Slot will need to keep him healthy and find ways to emphasis the qualities he does have. That may mean encouraging Chiesa to get further upfield more often, to be the last man off the shoulder of the defender and find more opportunities to bring his shooting prowess to bear, or it might mean asking him to take defenders on one-on-one more often that his natural game tells him to. It would be interesting, given his playing profile, to see how Chiesa does as a central striker as well if Diogo Jota and Darwin Núñez need some rest or struggle for form. One way or the other, he needs to find the consistency that has been lacking for so long.

Ultimately, signing Chiesa is not a clear and absolute win for Liverpool on paper, and thanks to his injury history there is certainly an element of risk attached. But the talent is undeniably there to, at a bare minimum, offer squad depth without a loss of quality, and if he can stay fit and healthy then he has a proven ceiling which is extremely high – and besides, thanks to the fact that he only had a year left on his Juventus contract, the initial outlay is cheap by modern standards. If the injuries do come back and his best form never returns, then at least the loss won’t be excessive.

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