Kean boosts Fiorentina’s hopes after leaping from bench he should not have been on | Nicky Bandini

The man who breathed life into Fiorentina’s survival bid was not meant to be playing at all. Moise Kean returned to training on Saturday after almost a week away attending to a private family matter. The club’s manager, Paolo Vanoli, did not intend to name him in the matchday squad to face Cremonese one day later, but had his hand forced by a late injury to Edin Dzeko.

“I have to tell the truth because that’s how I am – I’m a sincere person,” explained Vanoli at a press conference on Sunday. “When [Kean] came back I told him ‘Moise, out of respect for the group, I’m not even going to put you on the bench’.”

Kean’s departure had ruffled feathers in Florence, at a time when his team were bottom of the Serie A table. The rest of the squad was being kept together in a winter training camp. Furio Valcareggi, football agent and son of the former Fiorentina player and manager Ferruccio Valcareggi, made headlines by telling a local radio station that the club ought to cut ties with Kean and whoever gave him permission to leave in the first place.

Vanoli had no appetite for this discussion. He stressed that Kean’s time away had been agreed with the club long ago and in fact pushed back several times until it could be delayed no further. His focus instead was on those players who had been present and training hard to turn thing around.

He could hardly be blamed for all Fiorentina’s struggles this season. Before Vanoli was hired on 7 November, the team had taken four points from their opening 10 games – a scarcely credible underperformance from a side who finished sixth last season. Still, five points from seven games since his appointment was not much of a new manager bounce.

Raffaele Palladino’s resignation as manager in the summer ought to have been read as a warning. He later explained his choice by saying “I see football like a jigsaw. All the pieces need to fit together for it to work.” Fiorentina have come to resemble the neglected box at the back of the family games cupboard, a jumbled-up mess of different sets with pieces missing from all of them.

Palladino’s initial successor, Stefano Pioli, was a disaster, failing to win once in Serie A. Even here, though, he was not the only one culpable. Fiorentina spent more than €90m on transfer fees this summer but few of the new faces have delivered. Daniele Pradé tried to shield Pioli by taking responsibility for these missteps when he resigned as sporting director in November.

Fiorentina fans show their support before the crucial match against Cremonese. Photograph: Massimo Paolone/LaPresse/Shutterstock

Perhaps rightly so. Pradé signed Roberto Piccoli from Cagliari in a deal that – if bonuses are triggered – could become the most expensive in club history, but five months later the striker still looks like a foreign object. He is all at once too similar to Kean to play in a front two, both players wanting to attack space behind the defence, but not prolific enough to deliver as an impact sub.

Then again, Piccoli too has been harmed by upheaval around him, adapting first to a new club and then a whole new coaching staff within weeks of arrival. Vanoli has shuffled through several formations already in his eight games in charge, not helped by absences of key players. Besides Kean’s time away, and Dzeko’s new ankle injury, this last week saw Fiorentina’s squad beset by flu.

The challenges do not begin or end with the playing squad. Fiorentina are playing home games in a half-closed Stadio Artemio Franchi, where renovations were meant to be completed in time for centenary celebrations this year but now will extend into 2027. Pradé, two months after his resignation, still has not been properly replaced. Fabio Paratici was expected to take over as Head of Football this week but his arrival from Tottenham has faced unforeseen delays.

Even here, are we just scratching the surface? From the outside, it can appear that the club has never been able to fill the leadership void left by Joe Barone’s passing in March 2024. Fiorentina’s general manager died after cardiac arrest at 58 years old. He was the right-hand man of owner Rocco Commisso, whom he worked for at Mediacom and the New York Cosmos before taking on his role for the Viola in 2019.

For a time, Palladino’s coaching covered over the club’s many cracks. It was he who tapped into Kean’s potential in a way that no other manager had achieved – taking a player who had often been deployed in wide or deeper-lying forward roles and encouraging him to focus on getting into the box.

Kean, who had only hit double figures once before in his career, scored 19 goals in 32 Serie A games to finish as the league’s second-top scorer. There were some beauties along the way – not least a spinning volley against Genoa – but this was also a numbers game. Given licence to be selfish, Kean averaged more shots-on-target per touch than any other player in the division.

All of which brings us back to this weekend, and Fiorentina’s game at home to Cremonese. Vanoli’s team had finally picked up their first win of the league campaign just before Christmas, an out-of-nowhere 5-1 thrashing of Udinese, but followed that up by losing 1-0 to Parma. They remained last in the standings, and five points from safety, as they headed into 2026.

Cremonese have surprised a few people since returning to the top flight, recording upset wins over Milan and Bologna, but this was still a team Fiorentina must aspire to beat at home. Despite thoroughly outplaying them in the first half, it appeared they might not succeed.

Cremonese defenders appeal in vain to the referee for an infringement after Moise Kean’s winning goal. Photograph: Paolo Giuliani/NurPhoto/Shutterstock

Fabiano Parisi headed against the crossbar and Rolando Mandragora drew a full-length save from Emil Audero during an opening flurry. Fiorentina then thought they had earned a penalty when Federico Baschirotto dragged down Piccoli, but the decision was overturned after a VAR review, referee Federico La Penna judging that the forward had initiated the contact.

Fiorentina’s energy waned in the second half, and only an eye-catching save from David De Gea kept them from falling behind when a late Franco Vázquez free-kick eluded everyone else inside the box. Vanoli, desperate to make something happen, looked down the dugout and saw the one player who was not meant to be there.

Kean’s 85th-minute introduction drew a mixed reaction from the home crowd, with one or two whistles but more noticeably just a lack of enthusiastic applause for a player who – although less prolific than last season – had outscored all of Fiorentina’s other forwards with four goals so far in this campaign.

His fifth arrived moments later. Niccolò Fortini met a cross from the left with a back-post header that Audero could only parry out at close range. Kean was in the right place, at the right time, to bundle it over the line.

A messy, fortuitous, goal, but who cares when you are fighting against the drop? A win meant that for the first time since early November, Fiorentina could climb off the foot of the table. Well, sort of. They are level on points with Pisa and Verona, and have a superior goal difference to both, but in reality any ties would be broken first on head-to-head records, or, if it mattered to decide the last relegation spot, a playoff.

We can probably leave it a few months before we start to worry about those sorts of details. “A goal can arrive in the last moment,” said Kean, “We can still save ourselves, right up to the end.”