There are several sub-plots to AC Milan’s game against Empoli tomorrow evening, and one of them concerns Devis Vasquez.
As La Gazzetta dello Sport report, Vasquez is a player owned by Milan who will make his San Siro debut on Saturday, but as an opponent. It has been a rather strange path to this point, but one that sees him as one of the goalkeepers in Serie A with the highest stock.
With five clean sheets in 13 appearances and just 11 goals conceded, Vasquez is the final defender in an Empoli rearguard that is the fourth-best in the league. He landed at Milan in January 2023 with big question marks, never making his debut, and instead featuring twice for the Primavera.
The Rossoneri never really took a chance on him, sending him on loan to Sheffield Wednesday – where he saved a penalty on his cup debut – and Ascoli, with whom he suffered relegated to Serie C last year.
Empoli have a buy-out option at the end of the season for €900k. In hindsight, this is ‘an own goal for Milan’, who in recent years have focused on Marco Sportiello and Antonio Mirante as Mike Maignan’s deputy.
Of course, the club have no shortage of goalkeeping talent like Lorenzo Torriani, Noah Raveyre, Lapo Nava and Alessandro Longoni, but more specifically on the Vasquez operation his market value is definitely now higher than €900,000.
In September he was man of the match in a 0-0 draw against Juventus. With Empoli, Vasquez seized the right moment and on Saturday he will show up at San Siro as the third best goalkeeper in Serie A for save percentage (75%) after Di Gregorio (82.6) and De Gea (82.5).
Perhaps it could be an audition of sorts, because the player recently admitted that he is open to the idea of returning, despite a rather strange spell with the Diavolo.
He was bought almost solely for the purposes of filling the Non-Euro spot. It was the best possible purchase at 500k or around that iirc (could be wrong but he was Cheap and filled the spot). Otherwise we would have lost the spot and unable to sign one of the non euro players we have now.
Similarly with Mirante and Sportiello, those are low cost options to fill homegrown quotas. Not everything will be players intended for the first team.
However I’m happy he’s doing well and he himself didn’t want to just be a number so kudos there.
Agree. He was never seriously bought to play for the club.
The real missed opportunity was in the first 6 months Pioli never had guts to give him a game when Mike was injured. Which was often. Instead we kept playing that old Romanian reserve keeper (can’t recall his name). Who we knew was not getting his contract renewed. Was well past it. And what confidence he had was shot by Tomori constantly berating him on the field.
He will be a bargain for Empoli.
But there is never going to be space for him at Milan unless we sold Mike. With our lack of Italian players. Reserve goal keeper spots need to be occupied by Italian/youth players.
Trasharusanu lol 😂 he was the Romanian keeper who I’ve sullied his name there a bit. But to be fair I wasn’t going to expect anything from a 500k keeper, so in some weird way this was one of those ones where the “algorithm” worked but the club is unable to see through the growth due to lack of space. We can’t buy and play everyone so we really need a SD to meld it all together. But yea I’d definitely field him or even right now with Torriani I’d put him as Mike’s deputy easily. He’s another one that has great skills
Hardly an “own-goal”. Europe is littered with players who have seen success after leaving a big club. This narrative of former Milan players who have any success being a huge mistake on Milan’s part is just nonsense.
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