AC Milan head coach Stefano Pioli has responded to the idea that his side are struggling in two key areas where they excellent last season.
The two big strengths of Milan during their Scudetto win last season were the away form of Pioli’s side – the best in the division with only one loss – and also their defensive record. The Rossoneri had the joint-best defence in the league along with Napoli and conceded just twice in the final 11 league games of the campaign.
However, this season Milan have already conceded as many goals in the first seven games of 2022-23 as they did in the entire second half of last season, while they have only won one of their first four away matches in all competitions.
Speaking at his pre-match press conference, Pioli touched on the two issues and also gave an update on the injured players, with his comments relayed by SempreMilan.it.
“Winning is always our goal, at home and away. We’re sorry we haven’t been able to do it away from home so far, I don’t know if it’s a coincidence, but I think the only time we played below our level was against Sassuolo,” he said.
“We come from a defeat and therefore we want to get back on the right foot immediately against an opponent we respect. We analysed the goals conceded and our data that says that we are the ones who concede less. We need more attention and concentration, if we have conceded all these goals it is because it was missing.
“In the last two days I liked the team, they are fine. Rebic will be called up, he’s fine. Origi is better, but he won’t be called up yet. The others are all available, apart from the injured players everyone already knows.”
The areas we struggle in…
1) Not selling our players when they have value and letting their contracts run out
2) not having the funds to properly reinforce the needed areas like ST and RW but rather getting players for CB…. then signing guys like messias rather than getting easy relatively cheap options like Deulofeu who is a drastically better player, etc.
1. We started negotiations with both Donnaruma and Kessie long before their contract expired. I hope you’re not reffering to Chalanoglu because he’s just limited both as a player and as a human being. They both promised they would sign an extension, but then were played by their managers who only want dollars. They would have moved anyway so there’s no blame on Milan. There’s nothing that can stop these players from moving, even if we paid what they asked for. The managers want their signing fee as well and we can’t pay 18 million for a player that’s already in our team. That would be a very bad transfer. Also we’re not really missing Donnaruma or Chalanoglu so it would have been a mistake to invest that much money in those players. Kessie is missed a bit more, but we have enough players to fill in for him that just have to stand up. Kessie also had only one top season so it would have been outrageous to overpay him.
2. Although I agree that Messias wasn’t the best signing, we had to work with the transfer budget that was available, which still was amongst the top net budgets spent this summer in Serie A. I don’t think signing Delofeu and not signing De Ketelaere would have been a better move. If you want to win by being a Playstation manager, you have to support PSG or Man City. Spend all the money of the world and still not have won that one CL trophy you really want but see it go year after year to the traditional clubs.
Learn to enjoy what we have. We’ve come a long way and are still building. It will be with ups and downs, but it’s looking good for the future.
We have a loss of 65m. And you’re still asking the club to sign more players? Any normal company would have to sell some of its assets to balance the books, which means selling players but not replacing them. And before you go into the whole other clubs are buying ….yea their financial management is not very good.