AC Milan are expected to field a starting line-up in the game against Bologna that is entirely made up of non-Italian players, a report claims.
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La Gazzetta dello Sport (seen below) reports this morning that Davide Calabria is not at 100% after his muscle injury and thus the starting right-back role will go to Pierre Kalulu for the match against Bologna on Monday night.
France will be the nation most represented by Stefano Pioli’s team at the Stadio Renato Dall’Ara as Kalulu will be joined by his compatriots Mike Maignan, Theo Hernández and Olivier Giroud. Yacine Adli should be on the bench.
Two Englishmen (Fikayo Tomori and Ruben Loftus-Cheek) should start as well, in addition to a German (Malick Thiaw), a Bosnian (Rade Krunić), a Dutchman (Tijjani Reijnders), an American (Christian Pulisic) and a Portuguese (Rafael Leão).
The alternatives are also foreign players, given that Simon Kjaer is Danish, Samuel Chukwueze is Nigerian, Luka Romero is Argentine and Noah Okafor is Swiss.
There are Italians in the squad, but they are not likely to play. Marco Sportiello, Alessandro Florenzi and Tommaso Pobega will be on the bench, while Mattia Caldara and Lorenzo Colombo are expected to leave.
On 13 March 2023, Milan played out a 1-1 draw against Salernitana at San Siro in a game where the Rossoneri took to the field with 11 foreigners for the first time in 123 years. Florenzi and Sandro Tonali then came off the bench.
After the end of the summer transfer market , there will be just five Italian players left in the squad, the lowest quota ever recorded. Last year there were six, in 2021-22 they were nine and the year before that there were eight.
