AC Milan stand alone in Serie A when it comes to the impact that they have been able to get from the players that they signed during the 2023 summer transfer window.
Today’s edition of Corriere della Sera (via PianetaMilan) talks about impressive contribution that the new arrivals at Milan have had. Christian Pulisic, Ruben Loftus-Cheek, Luka Jovic, Noah Okafor, Tijjani Reijnders and Samuel Chukwueze have all played their part.
After 29 games in the league, Pulisic is quite literally the best version of himself as he has never had 12 goals in a single season, while he also has eight assists which makes him Milan’s most prolific summer signing.
Since the summer, the Rossoneri have benefited greatly in terms of goals scored to the extend that ‘nobody in Italy has done better’. Loftus-Cheek is scoring regularly (eight goals in 2024, nine total), while Jovic and Okafor have found goals off the bench.
The summer signings have so far given Pioli 40 goals and 17 assists in the league and cup competitions. This means that they have participated in almost 75% of the goals scored so far in 2023-24 (77 in total, of which 55 in Serie A).
The newspaper adds that Milan’s work in the summer window – more specifically that of Geoffrey Moncada and his team – deserves praise and builds hope ahead of the coming mercato.
I now agree that selling Tonali was the right call. Milan had a weak team last season, and money was needed. Plus Tonali got banned for gambling. Reijnders made a big game with the Netherlands this week. If they keep improving and a few good buys are made this summer again, Milan can challenge for the Serie A next season.
The Summer Mercato was a great one even if many fans here failed to see the potential in the signings. Everyone wants goals and contributions right from the start.
Doesn’t work that way. Players need to settle, find a rhythm, this isn’t PlayStation. And now that this has slowly been happening, we can see results.
Of course this Milan is far from a finished product, as many players still have room for improvement. I do foresee the next season being a much stronger one in terms of players’ performances since they will have had a season together to gel.
Couple of more key additions and we should be a solid team all around, hopefully with an upgrade on the coach and ideas.
It hurt to see Maldini leave, but give credit where credit is due.
That math is so bad i don’t even know where to begin lol I get that they’re trying to big up the new signings but they didn’t have to reach like that
But the math is correct though:
(40g+17a)/(77)×100=74.02%: i.e. almost 75%
They said goal contributions not goals alone.
Wrong denominator bro. Come on
Can’t divide goals plus assists of new signings by goals alone 🤦♂️
If that’s the case it could have been possible the new signings contributed more than 100% of the goals we scored 🤣🤣🤣
This kind of analysis is common among football specialists and media. If you do not understand its point, that is another issue.
Stfu you Inter POS
Plus I’m a statistician, I literally know this is wrong.
The “stfu” and “POS” do not harm me, they just show your IQ value.
Oh please you come to a rival fan site and expect niceties??? You can have these other guys give u a pass, don’t expect we all do.
Gtfoh with your smugness…”oh it’s a common thing around these so-called other people” like they’re that better because they’re “journalists”. Oh please. It exposes your lack of thinking skills and your comment is bereft of any sort of basic, first step critical thought.
If I don’t understand?? Bro if YOU don’t understand that YOUR issue not mine. Don’t assume because they put an article out, it’s heaven sent and I don’t understand what they’re saying. It’s precisely because I DO UNDERSTAND is exactly why I made that comment. I’ve put out articles too but the ones I put out are peer reviewed and appear in academic journals. They don’t go through that high level of scrutiny,.clearly as one can tell with this drivel CorSera put out to feed people like you into a pushed narrative.
The irony in mentioning IQ when you fail to understand how basic percentages work. Like you just gobble up what media puts out like sheep without questioning it or apply basic critical thinking skills. Both you and CorSera have poor math skills if you think that sort of analysis can warrant a pass. But I get it, push something out to the masses and rely on people’s lack of ability to understand basic math and it will stick. 75 is a better number than 41. Yea run with that. If let’s say after round 1 we applied the same concept and Deers had the second assist vs Bologna, it would mean the new signings at that point would have contributed 150% of all goals (1g+2a)/2 goals, lol what????? They contributed more than the total amount itself??. Make that make sense. And that is why that analysis was trash/lacks logic. It’s ok. It happens sometimes and it’s ok to mention that it is. We’re all better for it.
I was trying to search online the original CorrSera article to confirm these are the actual numbers (75%) but only got all the other sites one football, yard Barker etc. that just ran blindly by regurgitating it and reposting. Kinda disappointed you guys at Sempre went that way too instead of vetting the figures and coming out with an article of your own to disagree with the figure put out. It doesn’t take that long after all and if the 40/77 was an indication, then that 75% should be highly surprising. I know for sure Theo, Leao and Giroud alone in seire A have 20+ goals so logically/mathematically the others can’t be more than 3 quarters of goals.
It seems they added up the goals and assist and divided it by the goals only. That’s apples and oranges. if you’re doing total goal contributions it should be GC of new signings divided by total GC. If it’s only goals it should be goals divided by total goals only. Goals and assists will always exceed goals only, so it inflates the stat incorrectly.
Here are our season’s numbers (based on fbref)
————————-G——A —–G+A
Overall
Serie A ————–55—–40—–95
UCL——————-5——-5 ——10
Copa Italia———5——-4——–9
Europa————–12—–10——22
Total—————–77——59—–136
New signings
Serie A————–27——13 —–40
UCL —————– 3 ——–1 ——4
Copa Italia———2 ——–1 ——3
Europa ————-8———1 ——9
Total —————40 ——-16 —–56
% New Signings 52%—-27%—-41%
(G+A)
So the 40 and 77 are fine if you’re looking only at goals. So Sempre’s 40/77 makes sense. The (40+16) Corsera used in the 56/77=75% DOES NOT!
Because the 77 needs to be adjusted higher to account for both goals and assists. It should be 56/136 or 41% the true figure (or round about the similar figure as the goals contributions). You’re welcome 🤗
Thank you!
But even the above analysis isn’t particularly helpful!
The whole thing is just nonsense.
The numbers have clearly been given a massive boost by Pulisic who is our player of the season scoring and assisting more goals than Saelemaekers and Junior Messias combined.
A clear improvement.
That is what transfers SHOULD look like.
RLC has also added better stats than Brahim (and obviously CDK).
However CDK has gone to our rivals and contributed goals and assists, so we have helped our immediate rivals.
The rest it’s just a numbers game.
You couldn’t say any of the others have had sensational seasons. But if you throw enough players at a problem you’re bound to get numbers!
But we have also conceded a shed load mainly because of our midfield.
Overall I’d say Pioli and the players (old and new) have done a great job considering. The big number that counts is we’re 2nd (after finishing 4th). How we got there is less of an issue than the fact that we are there.
I now just hope we build on that rather than selling off another star to fund 10 new transfers!
Yea I’m not even saying Pulisic is a bad signing. He’s been excellent. All I’m saying is that saying new signings contributed 75% of all goal contributions is totally wrong. It’s 41%. And that’s a HUGE difference. that to me is selling a narrative that somehow the signings are waaay better than meets the eye.
Last year, we had an extraordinarily bad league campaign by our regular standards but an extraordinarily good campaign in Europe. Right now we’re back to producing what we would normally produce in a typical year….50+ goals, 30+ conceded and doing not so great in Europe. Europa is propping up the goals but those teams aren’t ucl caliber teams as last year (Rennes and Slavia are not Tottenham and Napoli). So it’s not like we’ve improved exceedingly well. We were just made whole from prior years. And there’s other stats to show that’s the case…
Oh it’s just the typical media narrative that transfers are awesome and let’s have lots more of them as it provides more content.
It’s why nobody bothers investigating agents and all of the dodgy money and transfers in football that are mostly ruining the game.
I would say the relative success of the transfer strategy last dinner is the exception not the rule. Changing that many players at once was a massive gamble and it just happened to have paid off.
It’s certainly been helped by the fact that Pioli has a knack for delivering top 4/2 finishes with Milan. The senior players have also provided a foundation and the majority of the starters. It was mostly a revolution on the bench except for midfield which has been our biggest weakness.
It’s a gamble if you don’t know what you were doing. This management knew exactly what they were doing. And you failed to see that at the time. This wasn’t Fassone and Mirabelli.
@ Goku They can predict the future?
And before you get ahead of yourself the main weakness remains the part of the pitch where they did the most fiddling and we still ended up playing Adli.
The big success is Pulisic. He’s been the difference between us fighting for 2nd v struggling to make the top 4 (whilst our loanees overtook us).
It was a gamble. And it paid off.
This has been the most “successful” overhaul in terms of number of changes in a team I’ve ever witnessed. But it was still disruptive and we’re still not going to win any of our targets we set out except the bare min of top 4. The guys are only now really coming together …this after 8 months together. It takes time to gel, it was obvious 🤷♂️ but they shoved overly optimistic objectives that created too much pressure on the team and it affected results. We could have been in a much better position.
I’m not surprised you are yapping away. This team is miles better than it was last season. It isnt even a comparison. And we had injuries in defense in existing players and players like Kjaer simply were not the same.
You’re the one that said these reinforcements were massively disruptive. And you wanted us to stick with Saelamaekers and Messias.
Yeah massively disruptive to players that clearly weren’t performing.
Whether it’s 41% or 75% (I do think 41% is probably more accurate), that alone is a huge number. And those reinforcements were absolutely critical in revamping this team.
May I remind people we only got in 4th because Juventus has a point deduction. Our team was sliding. This team is miles better than that.
I also am not disagreeing that we had numerous signings and they all needed time to gel with the team. But massively disruptive it was not. Maybe massively disruptive to the bums we had playing on our right side where most of the improvements were made.
Every player, barring Chukwueze, has been either incredibly successful to being very good. Definitely better than what Maldini did. I still have hope for Chukwueze and perhaps that last goal will be a turning point.
We finished 4th because we focused on making the SEMI FINALS of the champions league and banked Juve’s points deduction to rest players in the league.
And some of the players who weren’t good enough are now helping supposedly inferior teams finish 4th!
Nobody suggested keeping BOTH Saelamaekers and Messias, the idea would’ve been to improve the RW position with a player like Pulisic and keep probably Saelamaekers (which immediately saves us 20m wasted on Chukwueze who alongside Romero was always going to struggle because we signed 3 x RWs!).
But in the mad world of modern football what’s 20m???
And in midfield we’re stuck with Adli who’d be more suited playing that priests’ 5-a-side in Father Ted (Adli is one of the only Milan players I have criticised this season because he’s so incredibly SLOW).
The midfield is our biggest weakness and we have too many RWs, so yes the transfers were a huge success.
Oh I should have just read your comment instead 🤦♂️
Didn’t realize you’re saying the same thing
I didn’t say to stick with Saele and Messias. You’re just making stuff up. I did say it’s disruptive. Ive also said Puli and RLC were fambkes due to their injury history. They still got injured here but not like how they did previously.
” This team is miles better than it was last season”
Like I’ve been saying, its what you define as better. We got kicked out of the UCL this year, last year we made semis. That ISN’T “miles” better, sorry bro. That’s much worse.
In the league, sure we’re better than last season in terms of goals +/- but definitely NOT BETTER than prior years. And I’ve said and will repeat it, we’re just about as good as 20/21 and 21/22. So, we’ve reverted to those levels, no significant improvement over those squads (probably due to loss of midfield defence)
Sorry this was for your comment above
Ok let’s take the number of starters we brought in. Puli, RLC, Reinjders plus maybe Musah. Goals are usually scored in midfield and attack. We play a 4231. So we have 6 players (if you want to include Theo as a 7th that’s fine also) in mid/att which we replaced 3. So one should expect about half (50%, 42% if Theo included) the goals to be scored by the new signings simply due to math. PLUS almost all the subs are new signings too. So, no, respectfully, 41% isn’t mind blowing. It’s about in line with expectations. But that’s a good thing. Not denying that either.
Our RW (Puli) is superb and doing the job of two. I’d like to have kept one of Saele or Messias and have Puli, use the money on a DM.. but alas….
I agree that the new recruits are important in the revamp. We have a fresher squad now. But we still haven’t addressed our defensive mid problem..and its why questioning if spending 40m on subs was sensible in very much the same way questioning blowing the budget on our second target last year was sensible too.
Now that I really read your comment, we more shared thinking that not wtf lol 😂 we just disagree on smaller details but I agree mostly. It was disruptive which now they’re finally gelling looking good. The signings themselves weren’t the issue.
As a reminder, because it’s easy to forget these days, last year we prioritized UCL which made us less potent in the league. The League couldn’t make up its mind on the punishment for Juve *during the course of the season*, that created problems for decisions we made in the league (at one point Juve was behind, then they were ahead then behind again). We played a whole new team vs Bologna for instance which was based table standings at the time. That game alone negates the whole Juve thing if we had played the first team and won.