National football team defender Kim Min-jae won the European big league debut season.
SSC Napoli, an Italian professional football team to which Kim Min-jae belongs, drew 1-1 in an away game against Udinese in the 33rd round of the 2022-2023 Serie A held in Udine, Italy on the 5th.
Napoli, which recorded 80 points, widened the gap with second place Lazio (64 points) to 16 points, and even if it lost all of its remaining five games, it would keep its first place in the league.
Napoli, which returned to the top of the 카지노사이트 league 33 years after 1990 when Diego Maradona (Argentina), who passed away in 2020, won the league for the third time in his career, including 1987.
After Park Ji-sung and Jung Woo-young, Kim Min-jae is the third Korean player to win the English, German, Spanish, Italian, and French leagues, which are considered to be the five major leagues in Europe.
Park Ji-sung won the title at Manchester United in England in 2007, 2008, 2009 and 2011, and Jung Woo-young, who belonged to Munich in the German Bundesliga, reached the top of the league in 2019.
In Italy, where only a few Korean players entered the top 5 leagues in Europe, Kim Min-jae wrote a record of being the first Korean player to win.
Kim Min-jae played a central role in defense, appearing as a starter in 32 of the team’s 33 league games this season.
When Kalidou Koulibaly, who served as the team’s center back until last season, left for Chelsea in the English Premier League, Napoli recruited Kim Min-jae from Turkiye Fenerbahce to fill the void.
Serie A was the first big league experience for Kim Min-jae, who moved to Fenerbahce in 2021 following K-League Jeonbuk Hyundai and Beijing Guoan in China and entered Europe.
However, he was very active from the beginning of the season and quickly became the center of the team.
In September of last year, Kim Min-jae was selected as the Serie A Player of the Month. Kim Min-jae was the first Asian national player to be selected as the Serie A Player of the Month, which is awarded from the 2019-2020 season.
From the beginning of the season, Kim Min-jae was recognized for his skills by tying up the league’s representative strikers, such as Chiro Immo Bile (Lazio) and Olivier Giroud (AC Milan).
With Kim Min-jae at the center, Napoli scored the least amount of goals (23 goals) in the league this season.
Even last season, Napoli conceded only 31 goals, making it the league’s least conceding team along with AC Milan.
Kim Min-jae’s personal ransom also skyrocketed.
Transfermarkt, which specializes in the market value of soccer players, sets the transfer fee for Kim Min-jae at 50 million euros (approximately 73.1 billion won).
This is a figure that has doubled from 25 million euros in September last year, at the beginning of the season. In October 2021, when he was playing in Turkey, it was 6.5 million euros.
In the national team, Kim Min-jae, who helped Korea advance to the round of 16 at the FIFA World Cup in Qatar last November, was controversial, such as cutting off social media relations with Son Heung-min (Tottenham) during the A match in March this year. It became ‘et’.
Foreign media highly praised Kim Min-jae’s role in Napoli’s victory this season.
The Associated Press listed the main players in Napoli’s victory and pointed to Kim Min-jae along with Victor Osimen, who scored the top scorer in the league this season (22 goals), and Kvica Kvaratskalia, who was selected as the player of the month last August.
Regarding Kim Min-jae, he evaluated, “I was recruited as a substitute for Koulibaly, but he quickly adapted and was selected as the September player.”
AFP also selected Kim Min-jae as one of the five “invisible heroes” who silently contributed to Napoli’s victory this season.
AFP reported on Kim Min-jae, “Even in the early days of joining, there was a question mark, but now he has become a fan’s favorite player.”
“The fans shout ‘Kim, Kim, Kim’ whenever Kim Min-jae tackles or heads.”
Kim Min-jae, who made his presence known on the big stage by raising his team to the quarterfinals in the UEFA Champions League this season, is expected to see how much he can improve next season.