The Future is Now in Milan

The new Rossoneri are young, fun, and just might be about to end a decade of Juve dominance.

Friends, away! Let’s go! Mythology and the Mystic Ideal are defeated at last.
—Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, “The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism”

The time from kickoff to AC Milan’s first goal last weekend was about as long as it takes to read this sentence aloud. I don’t know how that’s possible but it’s true. Brahim Díaz nudged the ball from the center spot to Hakan Çalhanoğlu, who waltzed through three defenders before sliding it to Rafael Leão cutting in from the left. The striker broke the back line on his first touch, settled with his second, and finished on three. Six point two seconds from whistle to net. The fastest goal in the 122-year history of Serie A, or at least the part of that history we can measure to the fraction of a second.

Almost as remarkable as the speed at which Milan dispatched Sassuolo, who’d come into the game above Juventus on the table, was the inexperience of the kids who did it. Leão and Díaz are 21. Çalhanoğlu is entering his prime as an attacking midfielder at 26, which would put him slightly on the young side at most clubs but looked downright geriatric in a Milan eleven whose average age was 22.9, a few months older than Google.

Young, foreign, and cost efficient: meet the new AC Milan, a club with a long and proud history of being none of those things. Once upon a time the Italian giants boasted the biggest trophy case in Europe. Now their strength is figures on a spreadsheet whose bottom line, sooner or later, will be revenue. The squad’s minutes-weighted age in league play is 24.7, the third youngest in FBref’s top leagues. Its Transfermarkt value of $490 million ranks a distant fourth in Serie A; in England it’d be ninth, between Leicester City and Wolves. Bargain shopping for players is a strategic part of what the club’s new American hedge fund owner has called “the relaunch of Milan.”

What’s surprised even people inside the club is how fast the rebuild has brought success on the pitch. No club in Italy had a better 2020. The Rossoneri haven’t lost a single domestic game since the restart in June. A third of the way into the new season, they’ve won their Europa League group and sit atop the Serie A table with the second-best points per game and expected goal difference per 90’ in Europe’s big five leagues. The club’s veteran manager, Stefano Pioli, told reporters in the summer that he was happy to lead “a prestigious club, with a team with a lot of quality and room to grow.”

Then, sounding as though he still didn’t quite believe it himself, Pioli added: “But our future is now.”

Mythology and the Mystic Ideal

Though war and fascism hobbled Italian clubs in the first half of the twentieth century, by the sixties the San Siro had emerged the center of the soccer universe as Milan and Inter each claimed a pair of European Cups. “Milanese football in particular, and Italian football in general, was the first European football born of the new wave of post-war industrialization, of economic miracles and popular affluence,” David Goldblatt writes in his global history of the game The Ball is Round. “It was high industrial football marrying a new level of detailed professionalism, with rational, systematic, technical and tactical knowledge and a highly organized division of labour on and off the field.”

A match-fixing scandal sent AC Milan down to Serie B in the early eighties and nearly bankrupted the club. It took a showman to save them. Goldblatt tells how a young media magnate named Silvio Berlusconi bought Milan in 1986 and introduced the next season’s squad with a dramatic helicopter landing at the San Siro set to Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries,” a made-for-TV moment that Berlusconi’s network ran on repeat to drive ticket sales. The team lived up to the hype thanks to their manager, Arrigo Sacchi, who practically invented the modern game with his high back four, structured press, and quick transitions. Milan won back-to-back European Cups under Sacchi in the eighties and three more as Berlusconi rose to become the Prime Minister of Italy. A defender named Paolo Maldini helped lift all five trophies.

Even if you’ve heard that history a hundred times before, it bears repeating just how big a break with the past Milan’s last couple years have been. In 2017, Berlusconi sold the club to a Chinese businessman, but when the buyer defaulted on a loan, the club wound up with Elliott Management, a New York hedge fund that specializes in distressed securities. They got a distressed soccer club. Milan had never fully recovered from yet another match-fixing scandal that coincided with its last European Cup in 2006-07, and over the last decade their stagnant revenues dropped out of the game’s elite. The new owners hope to turn a profit by replacing the San Siro, the embodiment of Italian soccer’s storied past, with a modern stadium and then flipping the club for at least a billion dollars.

AC Milan managed to wring trophies out of Italy’s postwar industrial boom and the rise of the information economy; now the club is trying to do it the twenty-first century way, on the back of the global financial market. “Elliott looks forward to the challenge of realising the club’s potential and returning the club to the pantheon of top European football clubs where it rightly belongs,” the hedge fund’s manager, Paul Singer, announced during the takeover in 2018. “Elliott also strongly believes in the value-creation opportunity at Milan.”

Friends, Away!

Even as they’ve rebuilt their squad around potentially profitable 21-year-olds, Milan has made a few concessions to the past. The hedge funders have entrusted their project to Maldini, the former club legend turned technical director. Though he was reportedly told he “must avoid aging stars and acquire young players who have higher transfer resale value,” that didn’t stop Maldini from signing Zlatan Ibrahimović, who first played for Milan a decade ago and competed against Maldini with Juventus and Inter years before that. “I was playing with him on the PS4,” marveled Leão, who wasn’t even born when his 39-year-old teammate went pro.

The other relic is Pioli, who’s been a journeyman Italian coach for a couple decades. Hired as a caretaker last October on a deal that was only supposed to see out the season, Pioli’s unexpected success earned him a two-year extension in July. That in itself might not have been a big deal, but it came at the expense of Ralf Rangnick, the famous architect of the Red Bull soccer empire, who was lined up to take over Milan and remake it after the highly successful youth pipeline he ran from Salzburg to Leipzig. Probably wisely, Milan backed away from a hire that would have amounted to a manifesto and decided to stick with what’s working.

There’s nothing too fancy about Pioli’s system, a standard 4-2-3-1 that consciously draws inspiration from Hansi Flick’s Bayern Munich. “All teams at a certain level these days try to press their opponents high and offer the fans attacking football with quick, gifted players,” Pioli told The Athletic. “That’s the direction we’re heading in.”

Sure enough, FBref’s Statsbomb data shows Milan at 22.3 pressures per 100 opponent touches outside its defensive third, the highest rate in Italy. Though they don’t tilt the field quite as effectively as Atalanta or Napoli, they’re deadly on set pieces, with more xG from corners and free kicks than anybody in Italy, according to Understat. If there’s a concern in Milan’s top-line numbers, it’s that a ton of their xG comes from penalties—they’ve won as many freebies as the next two Serie A clubs combined, which can’t possibly be sustainable unless we’re headed for a new Italian officiating scandal. But they keep the pressure on defenses, generating the most xG in the league from a fast pattern of play.

Quick, attacking soccer with a high-pressure four-back defense: this Milan would make Sacchi’s team proud. “They played twice as fast as anyone else did at the time,” Pioli remembers of the legendary late eighties Milan, “with great skill and intensity.”

A closer look at the pass data suggests how Pioli’s team keeps up their own intensity. In the plot above, each color represents a group of similar passes. The colored groups on the top row of pitches indicate which pass types Milan and its opponents do more than average, while the bottom row shows which pass types each does less. On the top left pitch, for instance, the four different clusters of short passes in Milan’s attacking half show the team attacking through the middle, putting pressure on opposing center backs at the top of the box. Even though the 23-year-old French left back Theo Hernández is a progressive force in Milan’s buildup, the bottom left pitch shows they don’t dally on his side or launch longballs up the wing. On the right two pitches, you can see that Milan’s opponents try to play over pressure any way they can and rarely set up in Milan’s half long enough to bother switching play.

It’s straightforward, au courant soccer that’ll make Milan’s kids a hot commodity on the transfer market whenever the money starts to flow post-pandemic. Since Ibra went down hurt last month, Leão and Díaz have stepped up with a very respectable 0.5 non-penalty expected goals plus assists per 90’ apiece. As much as they miss Zlatan, who was scoring an absurd 1.4 non-penalty goals per game in his first six league matches, losing him has made Milan more balanced and creative, especially in the buildup. “When you’ve got a player like him on the pitch, you look to get him the ball as quickly as possible even if there’s another solution on,” explained the midfielder Ismaël Bennacer.

The squad’s quartet of 21-year-old attackers also includes the Belgian Alexis Saelemaekers and the Norwegian Jens Petter Hauge, who logged a goal and an assist against Milan in an August Europa League qualifier and signed for them the next week. But locals are more interested in the development of the goalkeeper Gianluigi Donnarumma, a veteran with 22 national team caps at 21, and new loanee Sandro Tonali, who drew wildly premature Andrea Pirlo comparisons at Brescia but hasn’t won regular midfield starts away from the reliable Franck Kessié and Bennacer.

Still the prospects keep coming fast. Just this month, the 20-year-old Pierre Kalulu has emerged as an exciting ball-playing center back. And there’s a 19-year-old on the bench with a last name you might recognize: Daniel Maldini, whose dad runs the club and whose grandfather captained it to its first European Cup.

Will this whole rebuild translate into trophies and hedge fund profits? Honestly, who cares—it’s just fun to watch Milan step out from under the weight of its own myth and let a bunch of talented kids cut loose. And yet there’s a lingering sense that a decade of Juve dominance just might be about to fall. “No one knows what the future holds,” Pioli told a reporter recently. “Maybe your future’s uncertain too.” ❧

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Further reading:

• James Horncastle, Inside AC Milan: Waking a sleeping giant (The Athletic)
• Arash Massoudi, AC Milan and Elliott: The Hedge Fund Trying to Crack Italian Football (FT)
• Sam McGuire, The tactics behind Stefano Pioli’s Milan Renaissance (Twenty3)
• David Goldblatt, The Ball is Round: A Global History of Soccer (Riverhead 2006)
• Cheuk Hei Ho and Eliot McKinley, Using K Means to Learn What Soccer Passing Tells Us About Playing Styles (American Soccer Analysis)

Image: Tullio Crali, Le forze della curva