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- Jan 17, 2005
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10 years of FIF
Nostradamus
Most Passionate Member
Who were those players?
Well, it's been a while but we had "clan" issues. The let's call it Icardi clan iirc was made up of himself, Miranda, Keita Balde, Vecino, Valero, Joao Mario and a few others who weren't as vocal at the time, like Lautaro. Something like a Spanish/Portuguese speakers clan. Probably Dalbert, too.
You had the Croatians on the other hand with Perisic, Brozovic and Vrsaljko with Nainggolan iirc part of that group and a few others.
Then you had the "neutrals", like Ranocchia, Handanovic, Skriniar, Politano, D'Ambrosio, Candreva, Asamoah etc, mostly the Italians and players that were in Italy for many years.
Spalletti was favoring the 'Croat' clan and singled out players like Keita and maybe Lautaro and Vecino in front of everyone while if you remember Perisic was rather awful during that stretch and he never said anything bad about him. So Ivan didn't react well when Icardi said in front of everyone that Spalletti never says anything about Perisic's form.
Not sure why he ended up getting punched by Nainggolan in a different occasion, but I imagine he also used Radja's name sometime
The captaincy stripping came after a win against Parma when Lautaro scored the winner. Allegedly Spalletti said some bad words about some players, whilst praising a few others and Icardi didn't react well to that. Which escalated to management and Marotta told Spalletti that he has his blessing if he feels that changing the captain would help the team. The decision didn't have much to do with any contract talks. The Wanda shit vs Perisic and Brozovic wasn't helping though.
People didn't pay attention, but this was the reason why Marotta let Miranda go. He was part of that riot. Doesn't mean that everyone was as vocal or everyone was aligned with whatever their "clan" did, but these were the locker room dynamics. For example, you can recall the Politano vs Perisic incident after Matteo scored and Perisic thought that his celebration was a tribute or mock to Icardi.