Arek Milik regrets the way in which Napoli treats him at the moment. Last week, the striker was left out of the selection that the club drafted for the remainder of the first half of the season in the Serie A and the group stage of the Europa League. He will train individually until the winter break, after Napoli failed to sell Milik during the transfer window. In conversation with the Polish Sportowefakty the ex-Ajax player tells his side of the story.

In the last transfer period Milik was heading for a departure from Napoli. The striker was in the spotlight of clubs like Valencia, Juventus, AS Roma and Fiorentina, but none of the transfers took place. Under trainer Gennaro Gattuso there is no role for him at Napoli. “The club wanted to extend my expiring contract. I was given the choice: sign up or leave. I then decided to look for a new club,” says the 26-year-old attacker, who came over from Ajax in 2016. “My agent was looking for a solution and several clubs were interested.”

“We talked to them. The pandemic made it all a bit more difficult,” continues Milik, who scored 38 times in 93 league games for Napoli and his last game before. i Partenopei played at the end of July. “I will not say which clubs contacted, but I can confirm that I accepted a few offers. Those clubs did not reach an agreement with Napoli, so I had to stay.” Last week, Milik heard ‘through the press’ that he had been left out of the selections. He was not surprised by the decision, he indicates. “But the club’s poor communication is not a sign of professionalism.”

“I think I have been treated badly. There are players who have not signed up either, but nothing changes for them,” Milik refers to Tiemoué Bakayoko, Nikola Maksimovic, Elseid Hysaj and Fernando Llorente, who are all part of the Serie A- selection of Napoli. Llorente is the only one of the four not included in the selection for the group stage of the Europa League. “I was the club’s top scorer for the past two seasons and I have always given 100 percent. I do not regret my decisions. It hurts, but I will get through it”, Milik concludes.

Last season he was the club’s top scorer in Serie A with eleven goals, but in all competitions Dries Mertens scored more often: sixteen to fourteen times. In the 2018/19 season, Milik scored twenty goals in official matches, compared to nineteen from Mertens. Last Wednesday he was on the field for ninety minutes in the friendly international match between Poland and Finland (5-1) and scored once. Four days later he participated as a substitute for twenty minutes in the Nations League match against Italy (0-0) in the group of the Dutch national team. In January, at the opening of the winter transfer window, Milik can talk to other clubs about a transfer again.