Keita Baldé: one great season, then the long goodbye

The season that announced him

Keita Baldé had been on Lazio's books since 2011, a teenager signed from Barcelona's satellite system after an ice-cube prank got him exiled from Camp Nou. He spent years waiting on the fringes, a year unable to play because of passport issues, a season with the Primavera side training alongside the first team, flashes off the bench including a winning goal against Bayer Leverkusen in a Champions League play-off.

It all came together in 2016–17. Keita became a fixture in Lazio's starting eleven, scoring regularly through the campaign. In March he made his 100th Serie A appearance, and in April he produced the signature moment of his career: a hat-trick against Palermo in a 6–2 win, completed in just five minutes, the fastest in Serie A since the 1974–75 season. It pushed him into double figures for goals for the first time. A week later he scored twice in the Derby della Capitale against Roma, helping Lazio to their first league win over their rivals since 2012, and becoming the first Lazio player since Roberto Mancini in 1998–99 to score a brace in that fixture.

The move, and the years that followed

That form made him one of the most coveted forwards in Italy. In August 2017, Monaco paid a reported €30 million to sign him on a five-year contract, handing him the number worn by Tiémoué Bakayoko before his move to Chelsea. He scored in Ligue 1 within his first month, but he never reproduced the Lazio form at the club level that mattered most.

A year later he was out on loan at Inter Milan, the club he had supported as a boy. He scored a handful of goals, including a brace against Frosinone and a winner against Empoli, but limited appearances meant Inter chose not to trigger the €30 million option to buy, and he returned to Monaco having not nailed down a place.

From there the career became a tour of loan spells and short-term deals. Sampdoria took him on loan in 2020, though injury kept him out for nearly two months before his first goal, in a match in which he was also sent off. A permanent move to Cagliari followed in 2021 for a single season. In 2022 he signed a three-year contract with Spartak Moscow in Russia, but his time there was disrupted almost immediately: Italy's anti-doping body banned him until December 2022 over testing procedure violations at Cagliari, despite no banned substance being found, and Spartak complied with the suspension. He later returned to Spain on loan at Espanyol, before his Spartak contract was terminated by mutual consent in 2024. He then signed in Turkey with Sivasspor, and by February 2025 he was back in Serie A at Monza.

What stayed with him

Away from the club game, Keita built a steady international career with Senegal, the country of his parents rather than Spain, where he was born. He was part of the squad that reached the 2019 Africa Cup of Nations final, then part of the side that finally won the tournament in 2021, a triumph that saw Senegal's president name him a Grand Officer of the National Order of the Lion. It stands as the lasting honour of a career that, at club level, never matched the heights of that one Lazio season.