AC Milan’s team of analysts were not convinced by the signing of Divock Origi but the decision was made by the directors to go through with it anyway.
That is according to James Horncastle, who in his latest piece for The Athletic talks about how Milan are trying to offload Origi after just one season as CEO Giorgio Furlani continues his mission to ‘correct the errors’ made last summer.
He writes that the club’s data team were ‘unsure about Origi’ when he was put forward to them as a potential signing, because of ‘the small sample size of minutes on which to judge his performance in recent years’.
Despite these concerns, the then-directors Paolo Maldini and Ricky Massara ‘pushed the deal through anyway’ because they believed he was a ‘low risk’ signing due to it being a free transfer.
He cost nothing in transfer fee (but has a high salary) and has also ‘delivered next to nothing’ with just two goals in his debut season.
It was also known that the Belgian was ‘nursing an injury upon his arrival’ which did not help his integration, but the decision was made by Maldini and Massara to hand him a four-year deal.
