Things may not have gone well for Paulo Fonseca at AC Milan, but now he is very much a fan favourite at his current club Lyon.
Fonseca was hired by Milan to replace Stefano Pioli before the start of the 2024-25 season, but he didn’t even make it into 2025. The Portuguese was sacked after a 1-1 draw at home against Roma on December 29, and his compatriot Sergio Conceicao replaced him.
There have been reflections since from Fonseca on what maybe didn’t work, but football never stops and so he chose to take the Lyon job back in Ligue 1, a league he had more success in given the praise he got for the job he did at Lille.
Things didn’t start brilliantly: Fonseca was handed a nine-month ban in March 2025 for a violent confrontation with referee Benoît Millot during a Ligue 1 match against Brest, after the coach was sent off for dissent following a VAR review.
Fast-forward to now, Lyon are in excellent form and most recently beat Nice 2-0 on Sunday, taking them to within six points of second-place PSG, who in turn are one point behind RC Lens. Fonseca’s team have now managed 13 straight wins in all competitions, including every game in 2026.
L'émotion de Paulo Fonseca face aux supporters 🥹
Quelle saison de l'OL et quelle saison de son coach portugais. #OLOGCN pic.twitter.com/KI9GaDfK0q
— L1+ (@ligue1plus) February 15, 2026
The fans thanked the team after the full-time whistle yesterday and unfurled a banner showing their appreciation for the manager, which made him visibly emotional.
Idk how he is doing that well
Ligue Eh is a completely different animal to Serie A. That said, Fonseca ball was still evident when things clicked. Didn’t we beat PSG in the CL? We also had some bad apples in the locker room…
yup. Not only Serie A but also Milan. Top clubs bring a lot of pressure as well. Gotta know your strengths and weaknesses
Well he came into a Milan that got a extremely bad set up team with no leader and one of the worst transfer windows I’ve seen Fofana, Pavlovic, Abraham, Morata and Emerson Royal 2 of them giant flops Abraham was alright maybe should have stayed and Pavlovic and Fofana both are pretty good players, good squad players for Milan.
He wanted Emerson Royal badly lol.
Fonseca just didn’t mesh with the personalities of the team and players lost respect for him with how he handled a lot of things.
The players did not want to play for him. That’s what happened. We had the potential to finish in the top 4 last season.
That’s one way to put it. Another would be that a couple players, Theo and Leao didn’t like it when he tried to introduce some discipline to the team and decided to sabotage him with lazy play, stupid red cards, and outright defying his orders. And management didn’t back him up.
There was always going to be an adjustment period after coming off of 5 years of playing one style under Pioli, trying to introduce a new more sophisticated style of play with a bunch of new players is going to take time to gel. If management wasn’t going to give him that time then they shouldn’t have hired him.
Sure the Allegri approach will get you better results straight away but there is a ceiling to that style of play, especially in Champions League and it can also be brutal to watch.
Sure but when Sergio started you could tell that Fonseca is actually a tactician preparing for games and he squeezed a lot from what he had. He was not an upgrade on Pioli for sure but we missed on cups entirely and the team played a very basic ball after he was gone. You could tell he was not bad and had a chance to succeed if allowed to keep the job.
BTW
I totally forgot Emerson Royal was here lol
Good for Fonseca.
Lyon also finished top of the table in the Europe league at the end of the league part of the competition.
Not a great coach, but still a very competent coach.
Happy for him. Seems like a nice guy.
Good for him, stop being salty and just wish him well
He is 3rd in Ligue 1 with Lyon. The guy that is first with Lens is doing great. Fonseca is doing like any other Lyon coach…
Never really given a chance here with Theo and Leao basically trying to sabotage him the entire time.
I think Serie A is just bad for him. He would have made it though, if he went to a club that wasn’t result oriented right from the start. Take for example Fabregas with Como.
Remember how he was always complaining that in seria a teams mark man to man, and he wasn’t going to only favour positional play. Well, you need time and failures to adjust, and Milan doesn’t have that sort of patience. You have to hit the ground running or get booted out.
But I’m happy for him that he is succeeding in France.
Correction: *and he was going to only favour positional play…
There are different types of coaches, it’s not a matter of good/bad, but more about appropriate or not. Elite coaches can suffer a lot in a mid-/lower-tier club, the same way very successful mid-tier club coaches can suffer a lot with managing stars. I doubt we will ever see Gasperini in a truly elite club, but he is undoubtedly doing great things with Atalanta/Roma.
Fonseca, Conceicao are both very good coaches, but we were in crisis of identity (and we still are, kind of). The owners want to produce internally and buy cheap/sell big star players while having reasonably good results. The fans of course don’t want to develop-to-sell for profit, we want the profit to be won on the field.
The club tried hiring coaches with profiles that correspond to the ‘talent pool’ clubs, not the ‘top performers’, but at the same time we had ‘VIP’s in the squad that need to be treated with more care (or sold).
Also, they didn’t give Fonseca enough time (nor Conceicao) to work on the project – they fired Fonseca through the media and worked on hiring a new coach in February after just a few games and a title won by Conceicao, basically giving him 0 credibility in front of the team. Maybe a good riddance, maybe not, we will never know…
The problem was created by management. How did we go from one year with an identity to the next year with pretty much the same players and have an identity crisis? It comes down to planning which is management not knowing who to do. They hired coaches which were below grade. There a big difference between for example Conte (who was rumoured to want to take over) and Fonseca. The pedigree is different. Our trajectory at the time didn’t fit their profiles. So we lost a whole year and out of Europe due to those decisions. It wasn’t a time to punt on promise, it was a time to consolidate what we had and hire more sureity. Instead we rolled dice
I agree with the write up for most part, just to be clear
He’s a project coach and has a project to work on. Glad they stuck with him through the ban, not many clubs would do that. But not surprised to see him doing well.
Same coach who lost to Manchester 5:4 while leading 4:2 in 8 minutes 🤣
I believe that most milan fans didn’t want him to succeed because he wasn’t a “milan level manager 🤡” they never even tried to back him and he was a great tactician as he brought the best out of fofana and reijnders he even gave gametime to youngsters but many milan players didn’t respect him enough and theo and leao disrespected him
Why are we even talking about this failure of a coach?? He’s a forgettable speck in Milan’s history. He was not good enough, plain and simple. Blame whatever you want..I see people blaming the players LMAO as if the coach has nothing to do with resolving player issues. He’s the fcking coach! Leao is still here, right?…I don’t see issues with Allegri, a proper coach! Such a lame excuse for his mediocrity as a coach. It was a bad hire from this management plain and simple. At least they corrected their mistake this year.
He’s not the caliber of coach for the level of Milan. The club was too big for him. He’s better suited to lower teams, and even that is suspect re Roma (what exactly did he achieve there?). It’s why he’s at Lyon now and not Barca. We now have a coach that can command respect from the players, thank goodness. After those two terrible managers last year. Such a relief! The less said the better!