The decision has been made to terminate Kevin Zeroli’s loan and bring him back to AC Milan, but it will be a return in passing.
As Calciomercato.com recall, Milan made the decision to allow Zeroli to rejoin Monza on a dry loan until the end of the season, to try and help them get out of Serie B and back into the top flight. However, it has not gone to plan so far for the midfield talent.
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The start of the campaign was a period of modest use for the Italy U21 international, before being relegated to the bench as a rarely-used substitute. Since the beginning of December he has been battling a muscle injury too, which hasn’t helped.
In this first part of the season in the second division, Zeroli has only played five times (two of them as a starter) for a total of 265 minutes, which Milan know is far from enough for his personal and professional growth.
Asolution was found that could satisfy all parties involved: as reported by Sky, Zeroli will have his loan at Monza ended and he will move to Juve Stabia on a dry loan. Sporting director Matteo Lovisa pushed for the Primavera graduate, and he will reunited with Ignazio Abate, the coach at Juve Stabia.
Meanwhile Mattia Liberali has played a total of 130 minutes at whatever serie B team he left Milan for after refusing to extend his contract.
Well, good riddance. Liberali was a disappointment. Had a terrible season. He showed promise two summers ago in pre-season but then never matched that perceived potential with actual good performances in official games. There is a reason why only a Serie B team took a chance on him while Camarda attracted Serie A interest.
Management getting a front row seat to their blatant arrogant mismanagement coming back to bite them. The youth project completely exploded after firing Abate, crashed and burned immediately, causing the players to want to leave as they’re all better than Serie D, meaning they demanded to either play in the 1st team or leave. Then the management sends them on random loans to whichever teams were willing to hold onto them for a little. Now were stuck here. All our youth talents progression stalling because the management failed on every single level. And now were literally indirectly asking Abate to fix things again.
Incompetence at its finest…
Abates dismissal was poor judgment for sure. But I’m pretty confident some Milan fans greatly exaggerate the potential of our youngsters…
Exactly! You get it. See my longer post here about it.
Yes, firing Abate was a huge mistake and mostly Ibra’s fault. But I’d be a bit skeptical of your statement that the kids are all better than Serie D. They are very far from being able to come back to C. Only the winners of each of the 9 serie D groups advance to C, but Futuro finished the year in 6th place in their group, having lost and tied many games in Serie D. I find it unlikely that they will climb all the way to first in the second half of the season. If they can’t earn promotion from D to C, then they are not all better than D. It may very well be that D is their true level. Like someone said in this thread, many Milan fans tend to overestimate the potential of our youth players.
In world football; it is VASTLY more common for youth players to fail to make it into a top team in one of the main European league. Players like Chelsea’s Estevão and Barcelona’s Yamal are EXTREMELY rare. They are far more the exception than the rule.
Just think of it: there are literally thousands and thousands of youth players in the various academies out there in all leagues… but there are just a few spots in the first teams of the top clubs of the top 5 European leagues. So the rule is for academy players to drop off entirely or make it into lesser clubs of the top leagues, or lesser leagues.
Another way to realize it: think of youth national teams. Look at the roster of one of the youth national teams of the main footballing nations in the world. Then look at that same country’s national team roster, 10 or 15 years down the road, and see how many of those youth national team players made it into the senior national team. MUCH more often than not, the answer is a round ZERO. Sometimes one or two at most, and that’s already rare. There are a large number of factors that interfere with the opportunity to fulfill one’s once perceived potential: not only a lot of footballing talent is needed but also stamina, mentality, stability, muscle development, family support, good coaching, opportunities, avoiding injury, etc.
We currently have a few exceptions in our first team. Bartesaghi. Torriani. Gabbia (no longer young but he did come through our academy). De Winter came not from our academy, but from another one (Juve’s). It’s already QUITE a lot, to have four academy products currently in our first team (although two of them are not starters). Even Camarda is struggling at Lecce; 1 goal and 1 assist, the entire season, and he’s been unable to consistently start. And Lecce is a bottom-feeder. I don’t doubt that he has potential but it remains to be seen if he will fulfill it. If he does, that makes 5.
So, is that a small number? Not at all. It’s actually a HUGE number. So is it likely that we’ll have many more making the first team? No, it isn’t. If we get 5 academy products making it into the first team; that’s already defying the odds.
Will Zeroli make it? Maybe. But at one point Liberali looked better than Zeroli, and he did not make it,
We all need to realize that youth players have a long road ahead of them in order to make it into a top first team of a top league, and the vast majority simply don’t make it.
People here tend to blame the club for the fact that most youngsters didn’t, don’t, or won’t make it, but that’s more the rule. There’s nothing abnormal about it. Yes, Milan committed blunders while managing Futuro but even if we hadn’t, there would have been no guarantee that we’d have a bigger number of youth players making it into our first team.
Every single person in our first team, no, every single person playing professional football right now, is someone’s academy product. Players like Chelsea’s Estevão and Barcelona’s Yamal are extremely rare, thats why Chelsea and Barcelona only have one of them.
The truth you are ignoring is that a lot of players are more cut out for top level football than they are for lower league football. It’s a paradox that there is actually more space and time in top level football, and some players thrive on that.
You mention Bartesaghi but he’s not the exception because he’s got more talent – he didn’t even particularly stand out in his year group – he’s the exception because he was fed into the first team early on and adapted quickly. If we still had Theo, he too would be labouring in Serie B right now.
You also mention Liberali – remember he played one game for us and didn’t look out of his depth at all. Mark my words on him, a Verona or Torino level club will take a punt on him and he’ll end up at Juve, or worse, in England.
And a word on England – the two teams that are realistically fighting for this year’s championship are both full of their own youth products – they were simply given a chance.
It’s not even remotely true that all players in professional football are a product of someone’s academy. First of all, not all clubs have youth academies. Plenty of players simply just get hired by a lesser club from a lesser league while young or less young, and then slowly climb up to bigger clubs and more prestigious leagues, without ever participating in an organized club academy. Second, even if this were true (that everyone comes out of an academy which is absurd), my post repeatedly said that youth players rarely make it into the first team OF THE TOP CLUBS IN THE TOP LEAGUES, not just any club. I said that many of the hundreds of thousands of young players either never make it anywhere and drop off, or MAKE IT INTO LESSER CLUBS OF THE TOP LEAGUES, OR INTO LESSER LEAGUES. You are deliberately changing my words to out-of-context and ignoring essential parts of my words.
Think of the top 5 European leagues, widely considered as the top club leagues in the world. They are the EPL, us (the Italian Serie A), the Spanish La Liga, the German Bundesliga, and the French Ligue 1. How many TOP clubs are there? Some 5 or 6 in the EPL. 3 in Spain. 1 in France. 3 in the Bundesliga. Some 5 in Serie A. That’s 18 clubs. Make it 20 for the sake of the argument . Say a roster has an average of 25 players. You have 500 spots. However there are literally hundreds of thousands of kids in academies all over the world and hundreds of thousands more that evolve outside of the academy structure especially in poorer countries (think of the thousands of African players, for example, or the South Americans) and in lesser leagues of the richer countries. Do you think every Serie B club has an academy? Much less Serie C. Similarly, in the various English secondary leagues, rarely the small clubs have academies. So the percentage of youth players that make it into the first teams OF THE TOP CLUBS IN THE TOP EUROPEAN LEAGUES is utterly small, and that percentage is small too if you only consider academies.
My point was to say that fans here blame Milan a lot for supposedly mismanaging Milan’s youth players from our academy, forgetting that as a worldwide rule, it’s only a tiny minority of the huge mass of youth players that make it into the first team of the top clubs in the top leagues. So the situation of Milan’s youth players is the rule, not the exception.
I mentioned Estevao and Lamal to highlight the wild expectations some fans here have of our youth players. I’ve read people saying “why isn’t the young X or Y playing for the first team? Look at how other clubs handle it! Look at Estevao, look at Lamal!” My point was to say, “play down your expectations; nor every youth player is named Lamal or Estevao; these are extremely rare.”
You mention Arsenal and ManCity. Having more academy players AT THIS TIME is a bit of sheer luck and again not the rule; maybe it’s temporary. If you look at other points in time, they might not have been as full of academy products.
Liberali having ONE good game with us proves nothing. Even the worst players can have the occasional good game (think Emerson Royal). But he failed miserably with Futuro. He had a huge stream of pitiful games. Ended up in Serie B and is not doing well there. Why do you think he’d be doing well in the much tougher Serie A? Oh, he’ll one day make it into Verona or Torino? Even if he does, that doesn’t invalidate my point because Verona and Torino are not among the top Serie A clubs. Oh, then he’ll make it into Juve? Good luck with that; he’d have to first make it into the likes of Verona or Torino and so far I don’t see it happening given that even in Serie B he’s been pitiful.
“Bartesaghi adapted quickly.” Precisely. He got not only the talent (by now it’s undeniable that he is talented; was even called up to the senior Azzurri) but also the mentality and flexibility to adapt quickly and withstand the pressure of starting for the first team of one of the biggest clubs in the world. Do you think all youth players have these qualities and would do well just if given the opportunity? Think again. Like facts show, only a tiny minority of all players worldwide who try to play professional football make it into this level. So yes, Davide is absolutely in the group of players who are the exception.
Nobody should negatively judge Milan’s youth academy solely based on how rare it is for one of those players to make it big, because that’s the rule rather than the exception.
Did our incompetent managers botched Futuro when they failed to promote Abate from the academy to futuro? Absolutely, I said so to start with; firing Abate was a huge mistake and Ibra’s fault for picking a fight with him for not starting Ibra’s son. Also when it was clear that Futuro was struggling, the managers took forever to act, too late to save them from relegation. I don’t ignore that.
My point is, even if they hadn’t fired Abate or mismanaged Futuro, it doesn’t mean we’d have more of our own products making it into the first team, because youth players making it there would REMAIN the exception like it is everywhere else, even in the clubs that manage well their academies, because there are dozens of intangibles a young player must have to make it big.
Also remember, one and a half seasons ago we didn’t even have Milan Futuro; only the Academy. There are only 3 Serie A clubs that have a professional U-23 team: Atalanta, Juventus and Milan. Inter are working now into making one (taking advantage of the Serie C spot we left open to Serie A U-23 teams when we dropped to Serie D).
So even with the debacle caused by Ibra, we are still doing better than the 16 other Serie A teams that do not have a professional U-23 team.
Also do realize that Atalanta’s and Juve’s U-23 teams are much older than Milan Futuro. They had more time to get it right.
I think Futuro will eventually make it back into Serie C, but not soon. For now their level is Serie D, which is another way to demonstrate how some of our fans have wild expectations that are too optimistic. Players who can’t even make it out of Serie D would do well in Serie A??? Yeah, right.
just because he refuse to play Hercules (the god son) we sacrifice the progress bunch of talent by sacking Abate
Yea, that consultant friend of Ibra is a genius! He “fixed” a working prototype in Abate’s team.
Loans rarely work out.
The loanee is shipped to a new club with a new manager, teammates, tactics, training, diet, house, sandwich shop, friends…..and pretty much everything else that is different to what made them the footballer they were in the first place.
The loaning club has no interest in developing a player who they don’t own. They’re only loaning the player to fill some imagined need in the squad as they do the usual panicked transfers to look busy and achieve change for change’s sake.
The parent club has all but given up on the player’s development having outsourced their development to the aforementioned disinterested loaning club.
Someone makes commission. So there’s that.
That’s not always true. Brahim developed enormously at Milan and achieved success with Real’s first team. Gabbia and Alexis came back from loans, quite improved. There are also types of loans that have a higher potential for the receiving team to want to develop the player: a loan with obligation to buy in case of certain conditions being reached (such as number of minutes and number of starts) but also an immediate buy-back clause for a higher amount. That way you are actually paying the receiving team to develop your player. If that team wants to earn the difference between the obligation to buy fee and the buy-back fee, they will have to field the player enough times to make the conditions.
Will that work out every time in favor of the player? Obviously, it won’t be every time. It may or may not York, because of all the other factors you’ve mentioned. But it’s a way to enhance the odds of successful development.
Of course, to make it happen this way, requires competent managers; not really the case of Milan, which is why among our numerous loans to other clubs this season (14, I think) only one was structured this way: Camarda’s. And not even that one seems to be working out for the young man.
Apart from Gabbia, the only youth players to break into the Milan first team in the last (what?) 15 years, never went on loan
De Sciglio, Donnarumma, Calabria, Locatelli and Cutrone.
Gabbia’s breakthrough was largely an accident forced on the club by injuries and mindless transfers. He was called back from his last loan after a few months having appeared 13 times under three different managers. Still people acted like that was some sort of “growth”.
But keep defending loans.
We wouldn’t want to question a system that has destroyed Italian football (as evidenced by the failure to qualify for world cups during a period that happened to coincide with a runway transfer market).
Good times.
“But keep defending loans.”
And you keep fighting the windmills. 😀 😀 😀
Players would benefit more from going on loan to a competitive league – like the championship. Due to the physicality and pace, it’s the perfect place for players to develop physically. Of course, they wouldn’t gain a great deal tactically playing in that league, but that’s not really the point. They leave as boys and come back as men.
If Suso hadn’t done well during his loan spell, his Milan-career would have ended before it even began.
This – Talent is developed with decent players surrounding them.