For the fourth consecutive year, AC Milan are experiencing an injury crisis in the October-November period which limits Stefano Pioli’s choices and thus has an impact on results.
As Calciomercato.com report, the latest issues suffered by Pierre Kalulu, Christian Pulisic and Marco Pellegrino – all of whom came off the pitch last night against Napoli – mean there have been 19 injuries since August, 12 of them muscular.
Mike Maignan, Rade Krunic, Luka Jovic, Noah Okafor, Davide Bartesaghi and Pierre Kalulu have all spent time out, while Mattia Caldara, Ruben Loftus-Cheek, Marco Sportiello and Samuel Chukwueze are currently out.
Simon Kjaer sustained a muscle problem in the build-up to the Napoli game – one that Pioli admitted he would have started – while Ismael Bennacer’s case is a bit different as he has been out since his operation in May.
The report adds that difficult to say whose fault it is, certainly the problem has been there for years and no one at Milan has been able to find a solution.
If we take a step back and consider the third round of the Champions League as a point of reference, the situation is clearer: in the 2021-22 season for Porto-Milan, six players were out due to injury (Maignan, Theo, Rebic, Diaz, Messias , Florenzi).
In the 2022-23 season, seven players missed Chelsea-Milan (Maignan, Calabria, Theo, Florenzi, Messias, Saelemaekers, Kjaer, plus Ibrahimovic who not included in the UEFA squad list).
This year, four players were not able to take part in PSG-Milan (Sportiello , Loftus-Cheek, Chukwueze and Okafor plus Caldara, Bennacer and Jovic who was injured during the warm-up).
At the end of 2022 La Gazzetta dello Sport had calculated that from 1 July 2022 to 31 January 2022 Milan had racked up over 700 days of absence (almost 180 for Zlatan Ibrahimovic, almost 120 for Alessandro Florenzi, around 100 for Mike Maignan).
They underlined that from Junior Messias to Saelemaekers and from Ante Rebic to Theo Hernandez almost all the players in Pioli’s squad had at least one injury, often muscular problems. That same worrying pattern has not gone away.
One thing is always certain. Milan will be at the top of the list with most players injured. Even the dead weight spent large time injured the past seasons. We must have the worst medial team in Europe
The only thing that makes sense is if the training sessions are just as intense as the matches and players’ bodies don’t have enough time to recover.
Three years in a row of continuous injuries and there are no signs of re-evaluation of staff/training?
There has to be some internal investigation of why these injuries keep occurring. Been numerous complaints from players about the san Siro pitch, could be a reason. Are the practice regiments the same and overbearing? Medical staff that incompetent? There’s a definitely a few reasons that our club needs to figure out. The top teams don’t have the same injury crisis season after season
When this many players have muscle problems, when players are getting injured in warmups, and when players like Kjaer who haven’t even been playing are getting muscle fatigue, clearly you are doing something terribly wrong in the way you are training. This is not new. It’s the entire time under Pioli.
Injury prone AC Milan is the right phrase.
Reminds me of arsenal under Arsene Wenger, they would always be a lot of injuries during the season