Theo Hernandez has been one of the best left-backs in the world recently. However, this season the AC Milan player has suffered a clear drop-off.
With an expiring contract, the understandable reaction among fans would be to extend Theo’s contract. However, Milan are not facing an easy decision, instead, it is quite the opposite given the variables involved in a renewal.
As Gazzetta dello Sport writes, the Frenchman has been the ‘greatest attacking full-back of the last 15-20 of Italian football’, and whilst his defensive issues have been known, they have been accepted due to his attacking prowess.
Now though, the problems are glaring, and there is no defence from his attacking numbers. It goes beyond this though, and the 27-year-old has fallen below the title of ‘sufficient’, and this cannot be the case for a player demanding the top dollar.
Given the captain’s armband this season, there has been nowhere to hide for the man entrusted to be the Rossoneri’s leader, and ‘Superman’ Theo is nowhere to be found.
Once a ‘hyper-modern’ full-back, the Hernandez of the present is far away from that, with the report even quoting the words of John Kennedy: ‘Don’t ask yourself what Milan can do for you, ask yourself what you can do for Milan’.
Time is running out for him, and with decisions needing to be made soon, an answer must be found.
im prettuý sure if he goes to bayern he will reagin his form and become the best lb in the world again
It was the haircuts. The moment he dolled himself up with these hairdos, we saw him fade away. The razor hath bad chi energy. Fried brain. No good.
If he leaves for about 70-90m buy Robinson, Miguel gutierrez or ait-nouri
who the hell are those
I think the first question should be:
who the hell will pay 70-90M€ for him?
I like that they said the greatest ATTACKING fullback in ITALIAN football, instead of that nonsense that he is the best left back in the world.
How can someone who in most games is the worst defender on the team since he came to Milan be the best LB in the world even though he is playing in defense?
He is a great athlete who the unathletic serie A makes look better than he actually is.
He is faster then 99% of the players, but if you put someone as fast on him, like Bellanova, he is completely taken out of the game.
Di Marco surpassed him as the best attacking left back in Milano couple years ago. Offensively and defensively Cambiaso is better than both and he can play both left and right back equally well.
It doesn’t mean Milan should sell him but that salary he is asking he isn’t worth.
5 m plus bonuses is more than enough, just like his buddy Leao.
The player has declined since Maldini’s departure. Another fine decision from Mr Cardinale…!
Some fans in their quest to give a director more importance than he actually deserves come up with excuses that make Theo look like a weak man whose form and play depends on who the director at the club is.
Theo Hernández as Milan player in all competitions:
19/20 7g, 5a
20/21 8g, 8a
21/22 5g, 10a
22/23 4g, 5a (worst season as a Milan player and Maldini was still at Milan)
23/24 5g, 11a ( offensively he matched his best season without Maldini at the club, what decline?)
24/25 2g, 2a
Defensively, he was never/ever good. Kessie covered up a lot of his mistakes. You should say Kessie’s departure exposed Theo as the bad defender he has always been, and you can blame the incompetent management and cheap ownership at the time for that.
Theo, just like Leao, has not had a decline. They haven’t improved either.
They are the same players they have always been. Only people perception and expectations of them have changed. In the first few years, fans were turning a blind eye to their mistakes, poor attitude, and effort because they considered them young and immature while other players were the leaders and were assigned the blame. In today’s Milan they are the leaders, unfortunately, and they still make the same mistakes, still have the same poor attitude and lazy effort.
“In today’s Milan they are the leaders, unfortunately, and they still make the same mistakes, still have the same poor attitude and lazy effort.”
To be fair Leao made some efforts as of late and has improved a bit. However it’s a bit too recent to draw definitive conclusions and the results are certainly not that good either.
During the last Euro, Theo did a good job defensively against every player not named Lamine Yamal, although you might say that with Deschamps’s ultra defensive setup, he was less likely to get exposed compared to our high pressing line and possession style. It might sound weird, but I do think Theo has the technical abilities to defend well, but he sort of chose to abandon his defensive duties. It’s not like he can’t defend, it’s more like he won’t defend, so it can be fixed if he abandons his poor attitude and adopt a better work ethic.
Both Theo and Leao will never be leaders however, and we need to accept that and stop giving them the armband.
You have some good points, but where it doesn’t make a lot of sense, is that Theo had last season one of his two best offensive productions, like you said yourself. So regardless of Kessié shielding him defensively (and yes, Kessié shielded not only Theo but several other midfielders and defenders including the goalkeeper, with his relentless DM play and presence everywhere on the field), there’s been a steep decline for Theo in offensive contributions. From 16 goal contributions in 23/24 which is actually quite great for a defender, to only 4 now, getting close to mid-season already, that’s a big difference. So, something else is going on at least offensively, not just the absence of Kessié defensively (who wasn’t there in 23/24 either). While the two issues are not entirely unrelated (when someone else covers for you defensively, you can roam up front much better), It can’t be the only determining factor. So, even though Kessié was important to Theo, obviously that’s not all, because even without Kessié he did produce 16 goal participations last season. So, it’s something else.
Whatever the cause or causes is/are, that’s not an excuse for Theo. If you read my other post in this thread, I did acknowledge how detrimental he’s been to the team this season, and I did acknowledge that Theo was never a good defender.
But I do think that – while that’s not enough of a justification – there is something weird going on with Theo, this season. Whatever it is, by now I have little hope that he will recover.
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Looking back, letting Kessié go was arguably the management’s worst blunder in the last several years. Milan was one team with Kessié, and has been consistently a much worse team without him. Donnarumma, Çalhanoğlu, CDK, Tonali, Kalulu, ANY other player Milan has failed to retain or sold lately, as bad as their absence has been, never had such a HUGE impact on the team as letting Kessié go. That’s really incompetent management. When you have a player this essential (and that’s not hindsight; at the time I already considered him essential, much before he left), you just shut up and pay him whatever he is requesting, because by failing to win trophies and to qualify for prestigious and lucrative competitions, you miss a lot more money than you’d have spent on that player’s requests. Duh.
But of course, our management being cheap and incompetent, and not only the current one, but the previous one too, we see ourselves in this sad situation.
I mean, you allow a player as essential as Kessié to walk away for free? That means you’re definitely not doing your job properly.
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Of course, you couldn’t finish your post without taking another cheap shot at Leão. Such obvious hatred… I think you don’t realize how weak you appear when you do that, in a time when everybody recognizes that Rafa has put a big effort into correcting his ways, and has been performing appropriately, which is way better than what we can say about Theo.
Look, you point to Theo’s insufficient 4 goal participations. Leão has had two and a half times more (10, only behind Puli’s 11) despite the whole team being poor, the coach being an idiot, and Leão playing fewer games. Whatever your distorted opinion of Leão is, he is definitely not our main problem. Only in your hateful universe, he is.
“Theo Hernández as Milan player in all competitions:
19/20 7g, 5a
20/21 8g, 8a
21/22 5g, 10a
22/23 4g, 5a (worst season as a Milan player and Maldini was still at Milan)
23/24 5g, 11a ( offensively he matched his best season without Maldini at the club, what decline?)
24/25 2g, 2a”
LOL. That buries the “He misses Maldini” theory completely.
Regardless of how well he did in previous seasons (for which I do respect him), currently Theo is one of the four worst players in Milan’s roster, together with Emerson, RLC, and Terracciano. There are a few others who aren’t doing so well either, but nobody has played as poorly as these four, this season. Actually even Terracciano had a few good moments against some minor opponents, and even Emerson and RLC had the occasional decent game, which is less than what can be said of Theo, whose performances have been almost uniformly bad, with just a few touches that were successful here and there (like his pass to Leão that started the build up for Milan’s goal against Atalanta), but too rarely to make any positive impact on the season, and even those good moments were not enough to compensate for the numerous defensive failures that directly caused scores to be conceded, or would have been even worse if not for some of them having been rescued by companions.
You know that you’ve been REALLY bad when you depend on Emerson rescuing you, like the latter did towards the end of the Atalanta game. When you’re making Emerson Royal look good, that’s pretty bad.
Theo didn’t use to be included in a list of our worst players (the opposite used to be true), but whatever is going on with him, this season he’s been horrible and he has been a huge part of our lost points. That is, he’s definitely been a liability rather than an asset.
I kept waiting for Theo to bounce back, thinking that he was just exhausted or had something else going on inside his head that he’d eventually deal with (Theo has had other slow seasonal starts before, but in the past he recovered; this time he is not recovering).
At this point I must acknowledge that he’s been just unbelievably bad and the odds that he will recover his previous good form seem to be slim, given that he doesn’t seem to be happy at AC Milan either.
So if nothing major happens to change this sad situation, maybe it’s time for Theo and Milan to part ways, for the good of both parties. It is conceivable that Theo will do better elsewhere. Whatever is going on with him, his overall stance does cause the feeling that he won’t go back to playing well for Milan. He seems to be screaming “my time here is over.”
Is he finished as a footballer? Is it a case of irreversible decline? Probably not. Theo is still young, and he can’t have just unlearned how to play football. It’s something else. I don’t know what it is, but if he goes to another club, maybe he will show again why he was at a time considered to be one of the best Milan players instead of being one of the worst. The fact that he has generally (not always) played better for the French National Team than for Milan, hints at the problem being different from just a question of skills or lack thereof.
Theo has never been a good defender, which is weird for a player whose official position is that of a defender. However, he used to show enough quality as a helper of the team’s offense, to compensate for that. Lately he’s not compensating offensively for his defensive failures, therefore his weaknesses have been more visible.
I mean, if you let in a goal but then you help with scoring two goals and the team wins, you’re still fine. But when you just concede goals and you do little to compensate for that by originating scores, then you’re just detrimental to the team, and currently, that’s sadly what Theo is.
Theo should be played higher up in a 3-5-2. Less defensive duties and more attacking freedom.
Chant it with me…
Theo out
Tomori out
Calabria out
Leao out……
I think you’re one of the ones who saw the problem from the first few weeks. All the fullbacks have been exposed under Fonseca. They’ve all regressed. When it’s a new guy like Emerson, well, maybe he’s just bad or need time to adjust to the new league. For the proven guys; you have to look at the coach. Like, what has changed from Calabria stopping the best left wingers in the world (Mbappe, Kvara…) to being exposed 10 times per second in a game (apart from the injuries). How has Theo went from top 2 left back in the world to barely seen. And don’t give me this crap about he’s never been good defensively; you don’t become the starting fb for the Serie A winners (Serie A!) and habitual top-2 team in the top-2 league in Europe, and the starting LB for France, world Cup finalist (and yes they use a back 4 more than they use a back 3) , if you’re bad defensively. It’s the same crap as “Leao is lazy”. The guy that runs the entire length of the pitch to provide an assist (to Giroud against Napoli for example) is lazy? Or you’re just misusing him?
“The guy that runs the entire length of the pitch to provide an assist (to Giroud against Napoli for example) is lazy? ”
The thing is that EVERYONE will run the entire length of the pitch to score or assist a goal. Everyone. But the team players will also run the entire lentgh of the pitch to prevent opponents from scoring. That’s where the work rate is measured. In defending. WITHOUT the ball.
They don’t run like Leao is the point. We can all run, including some of us here on this forum, the length of the pitch. To do it like Theo and Leao, with the level of pace to gain an advantage on an opponent…that’s where butter meets the bread
Bingo.
The talk wasn’t about running styles or pace. It was about work rate / laziness. You can run like Usain Bolt but still be lazy. Laziness isn’t about whether you run fast or not. We’re talking about willingness to suffer for the team. Every player will run upwards with the ball. Lazy or unmotivated players will not do that the opposite way without the ball.