Journalist Andrea Longoni has taken aim at AC Milan’s management, labelling it worse than the era with Marco Fassone and Massimiliano Mirabelli.
It has been yet another turbulent last few days for Milan, following on from Paulo Fonseca’s decision to criticise the attitudes of certain members of the team after the win against Red Star on Wednesday.
That generated enough headlines on its own, as did the decision from the directors to not make their presence felt at Milanello the next day, which some perceived to be leaving the coach alone.
What it means is that Milan are going into their birthday celebrations with a dark cloud overhanging, and not just because of the poor results in the league to this point either.
Longoni spoke in his weekly column for MilanNews published on the day of the 125th anniversary celebration game against Genoa, and he picked apart why the current management are failing.
“It will be a party tonight, but it will certainly not be celebrated in a historical period to be framed, on the contrary. It will come at the end of a hectic week, yet another. This time for the sensational outburst from Fonseca after the Red Star game,” he began.
“A few months have passed since the start of the season, but it seems like a year for everything that has happened. Cooling break deserted, gestures to silence the crowd, anarchy on penalties, punitive benches, anger towards a substitution: everything and more, seasoned with too many defeats and too few points won.
“In the background, a management that is too often absent and detached from what should be the real focus, that is, the pitch. The absence from Milanello the day after the coach’s harsh public attack on the team, cries out for vengeance.
“Justifying it by explaining that they did not want to delegitimise the coach is even worse. Fonseca was delegitimised when Ibra met with the team in the dressing room without him, or when he himself put him in a corner in a press conference (“I decide when the market ends”), or when Saelemaekers was sold, whose confirmation had been loudly requested by the coach.
“An intervention on Thursday at Milanello would have been a must to reinforce his thinking, but instead the management opted out, which also happened in the famous episode of the cooling break, defined by Furlani as a ‘non-event’.
“The players are to blame, the coach is to blame, but the main problem is upstream. Almost worse than Fassone and Mirabelli: they had inherited a disastrous Milan, unlike the current management… It will be a celebration, but many protagonists will be missing, among the most important.
“Some weren’t even invited: a lack of style and respect for the history of these colours. Not inviting Rivera is something that is neither here nor there, despite the dispute over image rights. Not inviting Boban, equally.
“Just like having the invitation delivered to Maldini not from the upper levels, like any warehouse worker (with the utmost respect). It will be a party, but a great piece of the great Milan will be missing. A party where the birthday boy is almost gone…”
Scathing, true and sad. And unfortunately there seems to be no end in sight as none of these managers are going anywhere.
Oh but they will go! The main worry now becomes “WHEN”, and “IN WHAT STATE” will Milan be when they do Continued mismanagement always translates into loss of revenue and fall of the market value of any business. A time comes and the ‘managers’ responsible for the mismanagement have to cut their losses.
The current owners are in even a worse scenario, seeing they have a debt owed to the previous owners to pay. Ability to pay it is directly determined how successfully they run the club, otherwise they will soon throw in the towel. I don’t think it’s simply a coincidence that since RedBird took over and started looking for new investment partners, no major partnership has been named!! Ear-to-the-ground kind of sign.
Exactly! I’ve been saying the same. A newspaper article has recently expressed the rumor (collected from the United States which makes it more credible, not from Italy) that Gerry Cardinale is already thinking of cutting his losses and allowing Milan to be repossessed by Elliott, as soon as in February 2025, because he won’t be able to pay the vendor’s loan before the deadline. He looked for investors or share buyers to be able to pay back the loan, but could find neither, because of how he thoroughly destroyed the Milan brand.
The “winning is boring” man never understood that without results on the pitch, no investors or buyers would want a club in frank decline who is not even likely to make the next UCL, which means that revenues for the club would be kept at a minimum.
Congratulations, Gerry! You thought that hiring a cheap coach, putting a low cap on money for each new signing of not more than about 20M, and keeping a low cap for players salaries at about 7M, would balance your books and get your property to be more desirable for investors.
Yep, the books have been balanced all right, but you forgot that by doing that, Milan would fall (and has fallen) into being a mid-table team with no European competition, which pretty much cancels investor interest.
A European football team is not just a financial sheet; it relies on victories and trophies to thrive financially, and to get into lucrative competitions, attract new fans, and sell merchandise. Often fans have several options to root for, with more than one major teams for each market and also national followers of teams even when they are not residents of that market. Lose consistently, and you lose those fans.
What Gerry hasn’t understood is that Italian and European football don’t have the same structure of American leagues like the NFL and MLB, where even franchises that are doing very poorly on the field are still very profitable. A recent example: even the lowly NFL team Carolina Panthers, one of the worst NFL teams that hasn’t achieved any seasonal success in years, and hasn’t qualified for the league playoffs in years, is still one of the most profitable sports clubs in the world, according to a recent survey by Forbes magazine. The Carolinas (North and South) don’t have any other football team, so if fans are unhappy with how the Panthers perform on the field, they will still remain with the team for lack of other options.
The American leagues have a draft system that delivers to the worst teams, the best recruits for the next season, so that the league remains relatively balanced, and losing consistently can actually make you improve your roster for the following season so that you can win again. Losing teams keep their fans, who know that and wait for better times in relatively short time frames. The last placed league team is not relegated; instead, they qualify for hiring the top prospect in the draft. They are actually rewarded for being bad.
Well, there is no such system in European football. If you lose consistently, you fall down the drains and you don’t recover as easily (see the banter years). Then, you can’t hire the best players because they have no interest in playing for a team that is not in the Champions League, and you also see your best players asking to leave, in these circumstances (which is rarely the case in American leagues).
So, Gerry thought that winning wasn’t important and his club would still be profitable. Well, not really, Gerry. Unlike the NFL where there is no promotion or relegation and year after year even the horrible teams continue to compete at that same level, which is the highest level because there is no supra-national competition, in European football you need to qualify for the UCL or at least the Europa League to remain profitable, and for this, yep, winning is not boring or optional; winning is essential.
The thing is, if Gerry Cardinale was that unfamiliar with how European football works, he should have hired competent managers who are experienced with football, know the environment, and know what they are doing, Instead, he named a bunch of clowns to manage the team, and we are seeing the disastrous result.
Good riddance, Gerry. Don’t let the door hit you on your way out.