AC Milan head coach Paulo Fonseca is continuing to sculpt and mould his side, and a report has highlighted the changes he is expected to make compared to Stefano Pioli’s approach.
La Gazzetta dello Sport (seen below) report this morning that the idea is to reduce the number of opportunities given away to the other team at all costs, even at the cost of creating fewer.
Fonseca will use possession to control the pace, he will ask for more dribbling and he will try to keep the team compact. The most visible shifts, however, are in the positions of certain individuals.
Five names above all stand out as having adapted roles compared to what they did under Pioli and those are Christian Pulisic, Fikayo Tomori, Ruben Loftus-Cheek, Yunus Musah and Alexis Saelemaekers.
The heart of the team
Pulisic was used as a No.10 and not as a right winger in the friendly against Real Madrid and this has already been talked about a lot. The idea is that from the middle he can go left and right, use both feet, give more assists.
It’s difficult to do better than 2023-24 in which he racked up 15 goals and 11 assists across all competitions, but Fonseca believes in the idea and it means that Loftus-Cheek will move back from the attacking midfield role to the double pivot.
RLC was perfect for Pioli’s style as he found someone similar to Sergej Milinkovic-Savic but under the Portuguese the No.10 role as has different responsibilities, which means the Englishman can shift back and take advantage more of his physicality and dribbling.
The flanks and Tomori
On the right the forecasts say that we will see much more of Chukwueze and much less of Musah, who Pioli also used wide to differing degrees of success. In the new Milan, the USA international will be a midfielder and the past says that that is the position in which he can do best.
He has the physique to tackle, win the ball back and accelerate forwards, his most natural quality. Of course, he is likely to be better off with Tijjani Reijnders (or Yacine Adli) than with Loftus-Cheek, but preseason is helping establish which pairings work best.
On the left, in addition to Rafael Leao, we now see Saelemaekers. He has been shifted from his first spell at Milan as a right winger over the the opposite flank where he played at Bologna, though Noah Okafor will battle for the spot too.
Finally, Tomori is right-footed but at Milan he always played on the left side of the centre-back pairing. With Strahinja Pavlovic things change because he will shift to the right, and this helps the geometries when it comes to build-up play because he will use his preferred foot more.
