Senegal coach, Aliou Cisse has come out to dare Napoli to not sign any African players after Aurelio De Laurentiis’ comment about the Africa Cup of Nations. He recently had his say while speaking to the press, and fans have been reacting.
According to him, even if he has a lot of respect for the Napoli President, he can only challenge him to make real his vow to never sign any African player henceforth.
Cisse added that every African nation is within its rights to call up its players for AFCON matches.
His words, “A football player can play for 12 teams, say, but will only have one national team,”
“Clubs will never be above our flag and our national teams. And every Senegalese who play in Europe, wherever he will be, if he is competent I will call him to defend the colours of the nation.”
“I have a lot of respect for [De Laurentiis] but I challenge them to try to not recruit African players.”
“I met the coach and the sporting director and then they told me, kindly, extremely politely, ‘Your competition is great but to be honest we don’t care. What we care about is to have this boy at the end of the season because he represents 25 million euros to play in the Champions League’,” he continued.
“I can understand, I am not shocked at all. But they can understand that when the nation is within its rights, we are allowed to call [up] our players.
“They can believe what they want but they should let us organise things as we want.”
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