In addition to the 4-2-3-1 formation, which was used almost exclusively last season, Stefano Pioli could consider a three-man backline for the upcoming season amid the return of Simon Kjaer.
The Dane has recovered from the serious knee injury he sustained in December of last year and now he wants to compete for a starting spot. The Kalulu-Tomori duo will be hard to budge, though, but the solution could be a three-man backline (via Gazzetta Dello Sport).
That way, Pioli could make the most of Kalulu and Tomori’s pace on either side of Kjaer, who is more positionally aware. It’s an option that certainly looks interesting on paper, but it remains to be seen if it’s doable.
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This would have made sense with Botman, I can’t see it working with the current trio.
It can’t happen easily in practice. With this set up there is no back up (not a single player) in defense. To play with 3 in the back we need at least 2 more CBs of good level.
We do still have Matteo Gabbia, but I agree, that’s not enough. We need more center-backs (regardless of this idea) and Maldini and Massara know that.
Exactly, we’d need way more defensive backups
DeChamps uses Theo same way, has him forward ,but his speed allows him to cover and drop back on the counter attack basically as we are now to our 4-2-3-1. Theo is an offensive threat especially when he transitions up the center, Pioli used this strategy second half of season to force defenses to quit marking Leao with two defenders and opening up the box.
saelemaekers 🥲
Media bored , coming out with another nonsense story.
Milan doesn’t have enough defenders to play with 2 CBs bit now supposedly they are thinking to play with 3 . And all that just so they can accommodate a 34 Kjaer who is coming back from ACL injury and has been injury prone his whole career.
Plus outside of the few years under Zaccheroni , Milan has never played with 3 men defense
In a way we basically played like this several times last season with the way we played, with Theo dominating the entire left flank with runs …the only slight difference is that Calabria was tucked a little far back except on some occasions when Kalulu covered for him when he decided to join the attack.
My only bother about this formation is that pushing Theo far Infront may chock out spaces for Leo to make his own runs to when you consider how Leo plays himself.
Whatever the formation is, the three guys that absolutely have to play in defense are Theo, Tomori and Kalulu. They have been incredible for us and, because of them, our defense is the strongest it has been since the days of Nesta, Zambrotta and Thiago Silva.
With this currently squad that would be suicide formation. Kjaer old ,slow,lacking stamina. For 3 CB formation ,you need atleast minimum 6 player can play as CB on squad and 4 of them must starter quality. Calabria as RWB are worst decision too since calabria weak on atacking ,if kalulu or florenzi maybe good as RWB
I’m not sure about this formation. On the one hand, a 3 man back-line frees up another player for the midfield/attack, which can be deadly in the attacking phase. On the other hand, this leaves no room for an attacking midfielder, which is something we’ve been needing and which we’ve been targeting on the transfer market for a while now.
And like other people have already said, this is entirely dependent on securing more depth in the defensive department in order to support such a formation, but that’s something we need ragardless.