Fiorentina break off Muriel talks until relegation is avoided

It’s been fairly obvious for months that Fiorentina would do everything possible to ensure that striker Luis Muriel would spend next year in the Tuscan capital. That’s still the plan, although the Viola have asked for a week (on orders from Diego Della Valle, no less) to ensure their safety in Serie A, which is pretty galling. Once they’ve secured top flight football for next year, they’ll resume their talks with Sevilla.

This is the second hiccup already in Pantaleo Corvino’s attempts to bring the Colombian aboard on a permanent basis, which is certainly a concern as well. You may recall that Fiorentina are trying to talk Sevilla down from the €15 million fee the teams agreed on back in December, which is abjectly on-brand.

While the Viola are reportedly still keen on signing the former Sampdoria forward, this latest development has given several unnamed clubs a crack in the door to slip into and possibly sneak Muriel right out from under Fiorentina, which would also be an all-too-familiar sequence of events for the Viola faithful.

While Muriel has cooled off after a truly impressive start to his career in Florence, that’s hardly an indictment of the player himself, given that the entire team has hurled itself as forcefully as possible through the crust of the earth and now feel the heat ahead of its penultimate match against Parma; while a draw would be enough to secure salvation, it’d be rather nice to win as well.

Hopefully this is just a minor hiccup, the sort we’ll all look back on fondly in a decade when we think about the beginning of Muriel’s torrid, goal-per-game Fiorentina career which will last until he hangs up his boots. Realistically, it isn’t really anything more than a humiliation that, in comparison to the rest suffered this year, barely even registers. If it grows into something more, though, nobody could really be that surprised at this point. It’s just been that sort of season.