So is Eysseric joining Fiorentina or what?

When we first heard that Valentin Eysseric was close to joining Fiorentina, we were pretty excited. After all, he’s exactly the sort of player Stefano Pioli and the Viola need: reasonably young at 25 and with room to improve (and increase his value), able to play on either wing or through the middle, clever on the ball, able to create chances for teammates, and dangerous at set pieces. While he’s certainly no Federico Bernardeschi, he’s a good player who’d improve most teams he could join.

The casual observer of French football (me) might remember him best for a horror tackle that shattered Jérémy Clément’s ankle back in 2013 and resulted in an 11-game suspension which, to his credit, Eysseric fully accepted after apologizing profusely to his victim. He’s come a long way since, scoring 4 goals and adding 8 assists last term for Nice, many of them for Mario Balotelli.

Hence the excitement, which was doubled when we learned that the transfer fee was only about €4.5 million. It’s been a couple of days since we heard that he’d been signed to a 4-year deal, but he still hasn’t materialized for a medical or joined his new mates at Moena. You’d think that management would want introduce him into a thin squad as quickly as possible, but it’s just been crickets instead.

So what’s the deal? Maybe there’s just a holdup with the work permit or something, as will occasionally happen, but since he’s a French citizen and EU immigration is usually pretty simple, that’s unlikely. Maybe there’s still a couple of details to hammer out with the contract or the fee. Maybe this whole thing is just an enormous misdirection by Pantaleo Corvino. At this point, I honestly don’t know.