Sergio Conceicao certainly has no intentions of giving the AC Milan squad a break after their Supercoppa Italiana triumph, and has changed the pre-match routine.
According to what is being reported by La Gazzetta dello Sport, the squad will sleep at Milanello tonight on the eve of the game, something that they have not done since before the Covid era. Conceicao wanted to change that, and it is unlikely to be a one-off.
For Milan it is a break with the past, considering that Paulo Fonseca – in the case of evening matches at San Siro – asked the players to be at Milanello on the same day, obviously from the morning. Stefano Pioli arranged for the players to meet in a hotel in the San Siro area on the morning of games.
Conceiçao thus continues along the line of being quite strict and maintaining maximum focus. It is his way of doing things, it is his principles. In his first week at the club he had the team train several times in the evening, another change compared to the past.
On the first day, December 30, he trained with the floodlights and in Riyadh he also planned a double training session on the eve of the match against Juventus.
He had the players wear shin guards in training and, the day before the Supercoppa Italiana final against Inter, he called everyone for a video session at 9:30 pm.
It sent a clear message: the team are strong, but they have to give their all. Even at the cost of going back to habits from a few years ago, viewed as outdated by some, but for others it is a way to build focus and togetherness too.
Conceiçao has scheduled a final training session at San Siro this afternoon, at 16:00 CET, behind closed doors. It is an absolute first, perhaps to see the stadium – frequented as a player and then as an opponent – before the match.
Conceicão is exactly what our Milan squad need. We need a coach who is bigger than our stars. Not in just in name and accomplishments, but in personality. Fonseca was always smaller – he knew it, everyone knew it, and the insecurity was obvious. Conceicão is everything that Fonseca wasn’t.
Most all Fonseca was put in someone else’s shoes, which had no right to work. Lame management wanted to make him a better, tougher version of Pioli , when every team of his before Milan presented the complete opposite philosophy of elegant, positional futbol. Identical was the case with his human resource management in Lille, Roma or Shakhtar.