AC Milan may have finished second in Serie A last season, but only a fool would celebrate placing nearly 20 points behind historic rivals Inter Milan. This weekend’s action showed how vast the gulf in class between these two sides are, as Inter dispatched of heavyweights Atalanta 4-0 while Milan were very lucky to even get a point against Lazio.
Although Milan made a few smart signings last season, the reality is they showed no progress as a team and instead found a convenient way to scapegoat Stefano Pioli for a less accomplished manager.
In what world is firing the guy who brought the Scudetto back to Milan in favor of Paulo Fonseca an upgrade? Fonseca has no accomplishments in club football. He has literally never won a league title outside of Shakhtar Donetsk, which is a job so easy that three dogs stacked in a trench coat could win the Ukrainian league with Shakhtar, such is the structure and youth development of that club.
Fonseca has the ego of a Jose Mourinho with the resume of a Jos Luhukay, except at least Luhukay won the 2. Bundesliga twice. Again, Fonseca has never won anything, flopped at Roma, and earned the Milan job after not even taking Lille to Champions League qualification in Ligue 1.
There isn’t a single player Fonseca has developed or made better. Milan, one of the most historic clubs in world football…second to only Real Madrid in Champions League titles, hired a guy worse than the manager they disloyally canned.
But it’s par for the course for RedBird Capital, who gutted Paolo Maldini despite Maldini literally being the biggest icon of Milan AND on top of that constructing the very squad that won the Scudetto in 2021/22.
Instead of building on their success that season, Milan have regressed, gotten rid of anyone with close ties to the club like Maldini and Sandro Tonali, and proceeded to do nothing about the team’s biggest weaknesses in the defense and midfield.
After a dreadful transfer window in which Milan signed nobody outside of replacing Alvaro Morata for Olivier Giroud and bringing in Tammy Abraham, the barren defense is ripe for the picking, torn to shreds by Lazio.
And if it weren’t for super-sub Rafael Leao saving the day, Milan would be ruing three more lost points. Why didn’t Leao, by far Milan’s best individual player, start the game?
Better yet, if you want to argue that Leao isn’t Milan’s best outfield player and instead point to Theo Hernandez…he didn’t start either as part of some cruel power play from a manager with, again, no actual credibility in Milan to speak of.
It is Fonseca’s ego. Fonseca can say whatever he wants, but he has no legitimate reason for benching Leao, and only the most self-hating, deluded, misanthropic teenage Milan fan will try to justify Leao being left out of the team.
Milan are headed for another doomed season, perhaps worse than last season. Because Juventus, Roma, and Atalanta all got better this summer. Milan played musical chairs with their strikers and maybe got marginally better there, while they got worse by the law of stagnation everywhere else.
The worst being, of course, the hiring Fonseca. Again, I ask you to show me what he has accomplished in world football. One star he brought to the world. One marquee season. One beautiful story. One league title. There is nothing.
He is out of his depth and has lost the respect of his best players and his most diehard fans. To begin with, Milan legends were openly scratching their heads at the hire.
But I am sure Zlatan Ibrahimovic, a man very accomplished in running teams and a known leader and Champions League winner (oh wait), has an answer for all of this. Or maybe he is making another nonsensical video with Speed.
Maybe that epitomizes what Milan has become. A venture capitalist club focused on marketing for invented “celebrities” – a great institution that has lost touch with what truly made it great in the first place. Pioli and Maldini briefly brought it back, and their heads rolled at the feet of the new world order of football’s business machine, which is paradoxically less financially viable anyway.
