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Kalidou Koulibaly agent blasts Napoli, says they're "too small" for his client

Well that's going to torpedo their contract talks.

Gabriele Maltinti/Getty Images

Kalidou Koulibaly has had a fantastic season and was slated to be rewarded for that performance by getting a new contract. News of those talks broke a few weeks ago, but precious little in the way of updates since then. Well, his agent Bruno Satin is finally talking, giving an interview to French media, and no one involved in the talks are going to be happy with what he had to say.

[Koulibaly] has a contract that allows him to stay in Napoli for some time. But if he receives an offer from a club that plays the Champions League every year, he'll certainly think of it.

Napoli negotiate some big transfers, but they are still a small club in terms of their structures.

There are electric cables everywhere in the stadium, so you can imagine the fear of getting electrocuted when it rains. I know, it's just a quibble, but I don't think they have this kind of trouble at Bayern Munich.

-Translated quote source: Football Italia

Hooooo boy. That's going to take some unpacking.

Koulibaly has definitely been receiving a number of offers from abroad, especially in England, but we know of none from Champions League teams. In fact, the only Champions League-capable team that's shown any public interest in Koulibaly in the last year has been the team that already pays him. And will be paying him until 2019. And wants to pay him more money for more years.

And what the hell does "small club in terms of their structures" even mean? Is this a reference to Napoli's image rights hangup? I mean, yeah, that's annoying and frustrating, but "small club structure"? Really? What about pulling your client out of anonymity and making him into a star, alongside Marek Hamsik and Gonzalo Higuain and Pepe Reina and Dries Mertens? Yeah, that sounds real f**king small.

That electric cable jab is just cheap and mean for the sake of being cheap and mean. It's completely exaggerated and ridiculous. I mean, of course Bayern don't have "problems" like that -- not that people are getting electrocuted every time it rains at the San Paolo -- because they're a super-rich club with a new, state-of-the-art stadium. They don't have a stadium that was old and falling apart 20 years ago and has had minimal work done since then because the local council is both broke and too damn stubborn to work with club ownership to get shit done.

Get out of here with that crap.

All of this is just another example of "agents are the worst." Satin is trying to shake things up to draw offers from other clubs in order to gain leverage in his contract talks. It's an age-old trick in sports contract negotiations. But the way he did it is so scummy and so backhanded and so unnecessarily arrogant that even Mino Raiola and Jorge Mendes probably think Satin should have thought twice before speaking. It's going to backfire, it's going to turn fans against Koulibaly, and it's going to get ugly.

Agents are the goddamned worst.