Ralf Rangnick is closing in on becoming AC Milan’s next head coach, a report claims, but that doesn’t necessarily mean Zlatan Ibrahimovic will leave.
As Wednesday’s edition of il Corriere dello Sport reports (via MilanLive), despite the denials of the past few days Rangnick remains in pole position for the Milan bench, and the German is considered the perfect prototype of the coach that Elliott Management is looking for to lead the Rossoneri’s new era.
A coach who makes the team play well, who knows how to improve it and who is capable of shaping young talents into potential top players – as well as finding talents at an early age and then enhancing them and deriving rich capital gains.
Over the past 15 years, in fact, Rangnick has trained four clubs with an average age under 25 years. With Hoffenheim, from 2006 to 2011, he even had a group whose average age was 22.7.
At Schalke 04 he had a team with an average age of 24.7, his most experienced, and it was the side that knocked Inter out of the Champions League. At Leipzig, in the 2015-16 season, he returned to lead a 24.2-year-old team, which then went down to 23.1 in the following years.
Another sign of his possible arrival, the newspaper adds, is the the non-renewal of veterans such as Lucas Biglia and Giacomo Bonaventura, both of whom are on deals which expire at the end of the season.
There may perhaps be an exception for Zlatan Ibrahimovic, a bit like Raul who joined Schalke 04 when he was 34 years old back in 2011 to give Rangnick’s group some experience and leadership. Zlatan could be that same man.
