There is the president's signature, on the role and how much it means to be Mina. There is pressure and recognition from the club, in massive doses. And there is no lack of investment, on the Colombian from Guachenè, because his contract - recently renewed until 2028 - provides for over a million net per season. Top player, in short, by popular acclaim, because he is the player who won the most duels in the last Serie A (211), he is on the podium for balls recovered (129) while his work of pressure, of charge and of aggression on the field is not quantifiable, numbers in hand. It is called leadership, it weighs a lot but not on the scale.

In short, the intuition of former sports director Nereo Bonato to go to Florence at the end of January 2024 to recover a serial benchwarmer and entrust him with the keys to the rossoblù defense has proven decisive. Probably, Cagliari's best purchase in recent years, keeping us low. If there were doubts about his physical condition when he first landed in Assemini, fueled by his wanderings between therapists and the gym during the weeks of Ranieri's management, it was the Colombian himself - with Nicola's staff in symbiosis - who dispelled them with thirty-one appearances in the '24-25 season, a record for a career spent between Santa Fe, Palmeiras, Barcelona, Everton and Fiorentina. He had suffered from muscular problems everywhere, concentrated above all in the posterior muscle bands of the legs. In Sardinia, the land of centenarians, Yerry Fernando Mina González met his footballing Lourdes. Making the fans fall in love, crazy for his punctual scenes, the face to face duels with the unfortunate reference opponent striker, his ruinous falls in the grip of excruciating pain especially when Cagliari needs time. But above all in Cagliari, a place that lives on bread and football, it was understood almost immediately that this bizarre gentleman is a footballer with rare technical, tactical and also finishing skills. From the first day, when Ranieri threw him in to mark Lukaku, in a freezing Roma-Cagliari in February 2024, and he didn't let the Belgian giant see the ball even though the Giallorossi scored four.

The market

The consistently high performance of the Colombian centre-back could not go unnoticed, both in Italy and abroad, including Arabia. And just in the past few weeks, there had been rumours of an offer from a Saudi league club of five million dollars a year, guaranteed for two seasons, but Cagliari had promptly relaunched by renewing his contract until 2028 and the defender was in full agreement. Not only that, because Mina had declined other offers from Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Brazil, giving absolute priority to the Italian league and Cagliari, where he feels very comfortable, as he has always declared.

Mina is also a protagonist in the locker room, as Giulini underlined: «He is a different player, he must be managed carefully, he can make us make the leap». One capable of great exhilaration and bad moments, but always with a big smile and that “panita” distributed to everyone, a sign of friendship, of sharing that his compatriot Cuadrado has always dispensed in any locker room – Juventus above all – he has ended up in. Cagliari and Mina, it's still love. For a season not to be missed.

Henry Pilia

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