AC Milan’s Moneyball Approach Angering Fans As 125th Birthday Celebrations Fall Flat

It was meant to be a special night, but AC Milan didn’t match the occasion with a special performance.

The Rossoneri were celebrating their 125th anniversary, an event marked by the return of some of their greatest players from a glorious past. A past that feels ever more in the rearview mirror.

Marco Van Basten and Filippo Inzaghi, with a combined 255 goals in red-and-black colours, were in attendance and given a special applause from the Curva Sud. Both of the former Milan greats, along with Andriy Shevchenko, were 2024 inductees into the club’s hall of fame, and how the Rossoneri could’ve done with just one of them in their prime against Genoa.

Under the watchful eye of not just Van Basten and Inzaghi, but icons Ruud Gullit, Frank Rijkaard, Franco Baresi and Andrea Pirlo — in addition to other invitees such as Alexandre Pato, Christian Abbiati, Riccardo Montolivo, Dario Simic and Christian Brocchi —the current iteration of Milan toiled, failing to produce any kind of joy inside San Siro.

“Let’s honour our champions, symbol of a Milan that no longer exists!” Read a banner unfurled by the ultras before kick-off. After 90 dull minutes against a side who’d won just twice in the last 10 league games, it’s suffice to say they weren’t.

The closest Milan come to scoring was when Alvaro Morata, a player usually lethal inside the penalty box, smashed his shot off the crossbar with 12 minutes remaining. Genoa manager Patrick Vieira, a man who briefly wore Milan colours at the very start of his career, was happy to pick up a valuable point and continue his unbeaten start to life with the Ligurian side.

A chorus of boos echoed around San Siro following the full-time whistle, and anger is growing from the Milan fanbase towards the RedBird ownership, especially Gerry Cardinale. 

“Milan: we have waited and supported you endlessly, we’ve had enough of your mediocrity,” read a banner that was made in impressively rapid fashion after the game and displayed outside San Siro.

The 2022 Scudetto champions now find themselves in eighth place and eight points off a Champions League place. Yet the mere fact that this is Milan’s objective for the season is perhaps symbolic of the shifting attitudes at the club.

For a club with 19 Scudettos and more European Cups and Champions League trophies than any club not called Real Madrid this is, to all Milan fans, unacceptable. The lack of ambition, from their point of view, isn’t befitting of a club with their history.

Chants of ‘we’re not Americans’ and ‘Cardinale, you must sell’ could be heard outside the ground after the game. Zlatan Ibrahimovic, who’s also come in for criticism since taking a general manager role at Milan, wasn’t afforded special treatment when he appeared on the big screen before the Genoa game, with fans booing. 

On the face of it, criticism of the RedBird regime is a fair one. Since the company took over from Elliott Management in the weeks following the last Scudetto win, Milan haven’t broken the €20m (£16.5m) barrier on signings. Samuel Chukwueze has been the club’s most expensive signing at €20m plus a further €8m in add-ons.

Christian Pulisic, Yunus Musah, Tijani Reijnders and Youssouf Fofana all arrived for the same figure, while many others have been in the €10m-€18m range. Most of these signings arrived on the back of the club selling Sandro Tonali to Newcastle, which angered a large portion of the fanbase.

It’s one thing to sell a crown jewell in order to buy world class players (à la Juventus in the summer of 2001), but it’s quite another to offload Tonali and use the money to reportedly ‘improve’ the squad with mid-range players.

Pulisic and Reijnders have been the standout signings, but Milan haven’t seen much of a return on their investment. And this, in essence, is the problem with the ‘Moneyball’ approach to football. Sometimes the gambles work, but often it doesn’t.

There appears to be a genuine lack of ambition from the Milan hierarchy, a resistance to push beyond the boundaries. A club more focused on turning a profit than winning trophies. Milan posted marginal profits in the last two years, with 2023 being the first time the club had been in the black since 2006.

Yet as Atalanta have proven time and again, it’s not all about spending money if you have a world-class coach. Milan’s apparent refusal to entertain the idea of bringing Antonio Conte to the club, and the remarks made in the aftermath of his decision to join Napoli, were telling of the club’s vision. 

Conte, a proven winner who would’ve fit seamlessly in Silvio Berlusconi’s Milan, would’ve no doubt demanded signings and would’ve also had no problem venting his frustrations in public. Conte is nobody’s fool, and this is what the RedBird hierarchy didn’t want.

“Milan needs a coach, not a manager,” Ibrahimovic said last June when asked why the club didn’t enter talks with the four-time Scudetto winner.

“We didn’t discuss Conte because with the criteria we had, he wasn’t what we were looking for, his name didn’t come up.”

Reading between the lines, Milan want a coach who’ll work with what he’s given, and not raise his head above the parapet. It’s highly debatable whether Paulo Fonseca is an upgrade on Stefano Pioli, considering the latter won Serie A and the former’s best finish was fifth. 

The club’s decision to sack Milan royalty in Paolo Maldini in the summer of 2023 was a major own goal and a PR disaster. Maldini didn’t get everything right during his run as sporting director (handing Divock Origi a €4m-a-year contract being the main one), but he understands the DNA of the club and what it takes to maintain excellence.

Maldini was invited to the club’s 125th anniversary celebrations but rejected it, showing there’s still bad blood between him and RedBird.

Looking at all the decision made in the last two years, it’s easy to see why Milan fans feel there’s a lack of ambition emanating from Milanello. The club’s finances might be in healthy order, but to quote Tottenham boss Ange Postecoglu when asked about the very topic earlier this year: “We’re not banks, we’re football clubs.”

On a night where Milan celebrated it’s glorious past, the insipid draw with Genoa served as a brutal reminder of where the modern incarnation stands.