Napoli agree deal for Tottenham's Vlad Chiriches

The 25-year-old moved to north London from Steaua Bucharest for a reported fee of 9.5million euros in August 2013 but struggled to cement a regular first-team spot at White Hart Lane and will now be moved on.

Tottenham said on their official website: "We have reached agreement with Napoli for the transfer of Vlad Chiriches. We wish Vlad every success for the future."

Chiriches isn’t anywhere near the ‘flop’ that other players have been at Spurs. The issue many big-name defensive signings have is that even if they perform well somewhere else, much of that comes down to the entire back line of four defenders – how well they work together, how disciplined they are as a unit. Spurs tend to sign defenders and expect them to slot straight in and perform as well as they did elsewhere (see Fazio).

He’s seen by many Spurs fans as a ‘cultured’ defender – he has the ball skills to match his defensive competence. But, when a defence struggles to gel like Tottenham’s has, ‘cultured’ traits end up looking like pointless luxuries, and frustrating ones at that. In short, Tottenham’s situation was in hindsight a terrible place for the confidence of a promising player like Vlad.

AC Milan seemed to be scouting him forever. Even though they’ve had their problems over the last few years, their scouting system is at least far more respected than Tottenham’s system of ‘buy anyone who’s highly rated in the media’. If they wanted Chiriches, there’s a chance they saw something in his game which was perfect for a big Serie A club. So, we suspect that Chiriches will have a great chance to repair his reputation and his confidence at Napoli, provided it is not damaged beyond repair.

Ilaria Bottura, Eurosport.it: Honestly, we don’t know Chiriches well. He played few games in the last season, so we didn’t have the opportunity to study him. We also were surprised by Napoli’s flash-operation, because he could be a sort of Mister X of this summer, an unknown player to discover as the season progresses.

Maybe you’re not able to perceive it in Napoli’s statement, but even his role is not that clear: they talk about a “defender”, but no news about his position and his skills (maybe also Napoli doesn’t know who they bought!!!).