Will the Rossoneri rise again?
AC Milan are showing signs of recovery. But will they bear fruit?
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Will the Rossoneri rise again?
In the summer of 2011 my job took me to the Bavarian town of Herzogenaurach. It wasn’t the first time I’d been there and it wasn’t nearly my last visit but it was among the most memorable.
Located to the north-west of the city of Nuremberg, Herzogenaurach is the home of adidas. On this particular occasion I was there for a day’s media work at Adi Dassler Sportplatz, the company’s on-site stadium facility, with newly crowned Serie A champions AC Milan.
The triumphant head coach was Max Allegri, who’d guided a star-studded Rossoneri to their first Scudetto since 2004. We worked with Clarence Seedorf, Mark van Bommel, Massimo Ambrosini and a very young Mattia De Sciglio that day. Alessandro Nesta was there too. We chatted with Zlatan Ibrahimović and Alexandre Pato.
Throughout their visit to the south of Germany, Allegri’s Milan exuded confidence. They were back. Their eighteenth title was secured and the future sprawled tantalisingly before them.
They didn’t win the league again until 2022. Title number twenty awaits them, nudged out of reach by the realisation of modern Napoli and then by a resurgent Inter Milan, who pipped the Rossoneri to the landmark Scudetto by the small matter of just nineteen points in 2023/24.
These are frustrating years. Milan’s success in the nineties conditioned a generation of football enthusiasts around the world to the idea that the game isn’t quite karmically balanced unless AC Milan are collecting trophies.
The club moved to put that right in the summer of 2024, appointing former Porto, Braga, Lille and Roma coach Paulo Fonseca. It was a bold choice. Fonseca’s league wins amount to three Ukrainian Premier League titles with Shakhtar Donetsk, which reveals very little about his ability.
Unsurprisingly, there have been questions asked. Fonseca and Milan were winless in his first three Serie A matches, which included a loss at Parma in between 2-2 draws at home to Torino and away at Lazio. So far, so uninspiring. But that was then.
Milan beat Venezia 4-0 in their first game of September thanks in no small part to the attacking contributions of Tammy Abraham, Christian Pulisic and Rafael Leão, not to mention some rather desperate defending from the Venetians. All four goals came in the first thirty minutes.
After losing to Liverpool in the Champions League, the next league game was the Milan derby. The Rossoneri had lost to their rivals six times in a row in all competitions but made them appear quite ordinary. Pulisic scored a terrific solo goal in the tenth minute and Matteo Gabbia’s late header won it with Milan every bit the better side.
Even with a late red card for teenager Davide Bartesaghi, Fonseca’s side coasted through a 3-0 win against Lecce at San Siro to take their tally to nine points out of nine and make the short-term future look a little rosier for the red and black. Might there be better times ahead?
So many of the great Milan teams have been blessed with a spine full of world class players. Genuinely top-tier talent is out of reach for them in the prevailing financial age but Fonseca at least has attacking weaponry capable of troubling the top of the table.
With six games played in Serie A, Milan are its top scorers at the time of writing. Their fourteen goals are the result of the highest number of shots on target in the division as September came to an end.
Their left flank is formidable. Leão is one of football’s most underappreciated players in terms of global renown and has been for years. He’s fearless and incisive, always eager to get on the ball and not far short of spectacular when he has it. He’s quick, he’s direct, and he has the technical ability to scare the skivvies off even the most robust of right backs.
Leão’s three assists are bettered only by his compatriot, Nuno Tavares of Lazio (on loan from Arsenal), and his creative performance is varied and consistently excellent. His numbers reveal a player who’s effective in every aspect of invention. He does it all, year after year.
If the opposition can deal with Leão, rampaging left back Theo Hernández is coming up right behind him. The swashbuckling Frenchman is a leader beyond his 26 years and has played more than 200 times for the Rossoneri since signing from Real Madrid five years ago.
Pulisic, also 26, is really finding his groove at San Siro in the early part of 2024/25. Nobody in Serie A has scored more than his four goals. Of the clutch of players with four, only Atalanta’s Mateo Retegui has a better ratio of goals to minutes, albeit on the back of a better expected goals value than Pulisic.
The Milan forward is out on his own in terms of total goal contributions thanks to a couple of assists, and he plays with the swagger of a man who’s enjoying the challenge of messing with Serie A defenders. His goal against the Nerazzurri was preceded by an almost identical run right up the gut. He’s a pest and he’s productive.
Both Pulisic and Leão have made fourteen key passes. Only two players have made fifteen. From the right and the left, Milan’s wide players are delivering. Central midfield is perhaps less convincing and definitely less established, but Fonseca has a suite of options that are the envy of most of Serie A and reaching their peak.
New signing Youssouf Fofana is settling well as Milan’s first choice with Tijjani Reijnders in the middle of the park. As well as playing against Liverpool, Fofana has started four of the five league games for which he’s been available since moving to Italy in August. Milan’s only defeat was the exception.
Reijnders is yet another player in his mid-twenties and he’s capable of making things happen, not least with a dead ball. His free kick set up Gabbia’s winner in the derby win and he’s started the last five matches in the league and the Champions League tie.
Ismaël Bennacer is injured but Fonseca can and does also call upon the services of Ruben Loftus-Cheek at the slightly older end and Yunus Musah for an injection of youth. These are all players who affect the game and are adept at moving the ball at close quarters, very much Milan’s strong suit when they’re not wreaking havoc up the left wing.
Mike Maignan is approaching his hundredth league game for Milan and is widely recognised as one of the best and most reliable goalkeepers on the planet. At 29, he’s both a senior player for Fonseca and still looking ahead to many more years at the highest level. Milan felt his injury problems keenly at the end of last season.
If the last line of defence is a strength for Milan, the first line of attack is more of a question mark. Fonseca’s tactical shift for the derby was a somewhat surprising choice to bring Alvaro Morata into the side to play off Tammy Abraham.
It worked beautifully and both players are proven in terms of Serie A goals. Either one of them could operate as Milan’s number nine. Neither is quite at the level required to drag the team back to the top, though, and the same is true of Noah Okafor, with whom they’ve shared minutes in Fonseca’s efforts to overcome the loss of Olivier Giroud’s fifteen goals in 2023/24.
The answer might well be a combination of all three but one suspects a league-leading centre forward will be a major factor if and when Milan recapture the title.
There’s been similar shuffling at the back. It’s too early to be alarmed – Milan aren’t especially leaky, for one thing – but, with four different partnerships having started the first six Serie A matches, Fonseca would surely be happier to find a consistent pairing. Malick Thiaw’s persistent injury issues are a significant hindrance but Fonseca is at least possessed of quality options.
Milan don’t have the best squad in Serie A but the reaction to their sluggish start hinted that Fonseca shouldn’t expect a great deal of patience or sympathy if results were to deteriorate. Beating Inter was a much needed springboard but Fonseca’s ability to make the jump from highly rated before Milan to decorated in Milan might be the biggest question mark of all.
The club’s relatively new American ownership group would find their judgement under scrutiny too, and three wins of the spin must have lightened the mood at San Siro and RedBird significantly.
If the Rossoneri can maintain their improved form and stay competitive this season, if they can retain all their key players, if Fonseca fulfils the promise that attracted Milan and a host of other reported suitors, they might only be a few tweaks away from being in meaningful contention once more.
If they can somehow pull off something special in the next year or two and snare that all-important twentieth Scudetto, the Milan faithful will quite rightly point out that they’ve been there before.
After Milan rolled into adidas headquarters as champions in 2011, their supporters waited another eleven years to see it again. For most of us, eleven years without a title barely scratches the surface of our misery.
Milan aren’t most of us. For Milan, eleven years was a drought – not the first, but a drought nonetheless. The future will be defined not by venti, but by how quickly it’s followed by ventuno and ventidue.
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“As the ITC regulations constitute the very foundation of how the international transfer system works today, should the CJEU find in favour of Diarra on Friday, Fifa would have to overhaul the process which underpins all of it.”
On Friday, the Court of Justice of the European Union will rule on Lassana Diarra’s case against FIFA.
As reported by Philippe Auclair in The Guardian, the ruling will determine whether FIFA unlawfully refused to issue the international trade certificate that would have unlocked Diarra’s move to Charleroi, thus restricting his ability to work. The potential implications are significant.
Dessert
I’m not a Charlotte supporter but I do keep an eye on them as a fan of manager Dean Smith and indeed captain Ashley Westwood. I find them rather stylish. Clearly, adidas Skate and Black Sheep agree.
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