Just when you think things cannot get any crazier in Serie A, we had the drama and excitement of round 20. But while the on-pitch excitement remains high, the league’s big clubs have kept their hands in their pockets this January. Here’s our Italian football expert with three takeaways from the weekend.
By Matteo Bonetti, US Serie A expert
Milan’s disastrous start to 2023
Just when you thought things couldn’t possibly get any worse for Milan this calendar year, they go and outdo themselves. The club has had an involution for the ages. After enjoying a competitive first half of the season where they were right behind Napoli in the standings for first place, they’ve now gone six matches without a win. It isn’t so much the losses though – it’s how they’ve been losing. You have to go back to 1997 to find the last time Milan conceded five goals in a single league match, and good luck finding another streak where they concede 12 goals in a three-match stretch.
Losing 5-2 at San Siro to a Sassuolo side that hadn’t WON a game since mid-October is simply inexcusable. For all the plaudits that Stefano Pioli has received for overachieving and winning the Scudetto last season, the recent criticism is just as warranted. Milan suddenly look unable to carry out simple elementary tasks. Last season’s best defensive unit has become an abomination. A team that has battled through adversity and always responded with personality has seemingly now entered a black hole they’re unable to get out of. If you thought the 2-2 draw to Lecce was bad, they followed it up with the meekest of performances in the Super Cup, losing 3-0 to Inter. Pioli was interrogated by the media asking if he had fixed the problems, he said he had. A few days later, Milan get trounced 4-0 by Lazio. Then, the magnum opus of this current run – five goals conceded against Sassuolo at home, a performance that became so dire that fans started waving white flags in the stands.
If you read this article to any Milanista just a month ago, they would’ve recommended you see a psychiatrist. It’s hard to blame the injuries – Milan have dealt with them all season long. It’s easier to blame last season’s summer transfer market, which now looks to be one of the worst on record. Milan added plenty of youngsters to the mix without first finding quality and proven depth. Stefano Pioli now looks stubborn, refusing to experiment with some of the youngsters that haven’t had a chance when it’s clear that a change in both personnel and tactics is sorely needed.
Why hasn’t Yacine Adli, who was perhaps Milan’s best player in last summer’s friendlies, been given a chance? Why is the 4-2-3-1 still being used when it looks like balance is needed and there’s very little being offered from both the no.10 position and right wing? There’s a lot of unanswered questions for Pioli, and he needs to figure this out fast, or else a top four spot is genuinely at risk.
Palladino’s Monza upset Juventus
In a weekend of upsets, Monza followed Sassuolo by picking up three points away to one of the Italian giants. This time, it was Max Allegri’s Juventus who fell victim to another provincial Italian side. Monza’s new manager Raffaele Palladino has completely changed this club’s mentality since taking over. He’s beaten Juventus twice in the league now, while drawing against Inter and dragging the club up to eleventh place in the standings.
Palladino has followed the playbook used by many other young Italian managers – a modern brand of football characterized by possession, high press and taking a lot of chances at the back. Essentially, this is the antithesis to the old school Italian mentality of Catenaccio. It used to be only Zdenek Zeman, the self proclaimed inventor of the 4-3-3, whose provincial sides would take tons of risks which would lead to incredibly entertaining games. Now it seems that most of these teams getting promoted from Serie B are led by managers who try to play football, rather than sitting deep in a low block and praying for a draw.
Monza certainly have the tools to succeed in Serie A. Led by the former Milan duo of Silvio Berlusconi and Adriano Galliano, the pockets are deep enough to fund this team to a level where they’ll become Serie A mainstays. The transfer market from last summer was intelligent (and the complete opposite of the one I talked about with Milan earlier in the column) – they bought Serie A ready talent that was proven in this league. The likes of Matteo Pessina, Gianluca Caprari, Stefano Sensi and others had logged plenty of games in Italy’s top flight and offered the experience needed to a team that had never before played in the top tier. It was also a team set up to play the style of football that works in 2023 – modern, attacking possession. Bringing in Sensi, a “Marco Verratti-lite” type player when he’s healthy, alongside another promising regista in Juventus owned Nicolo Rovella, is a clear signal of the type of football you want your midfield to play. While it took a few months to get going, the Berlusconi/Galliani duo finally found the right coach to project their ideas onto the pitch and it looks like Monza are here to stay in Italy’s top flight.
Quiet transfer windows
The January transfer window in Serie A has been anything but electric. While the Premier League has been able to spend hundreds of millions of pounds – just in January – to bring in fresh talent, the Italian league has sadly had more negative news. It looks like Inter’s best centre-back Milan Škriniar is headed to PSG, while Juventus sent USMNT international Weston McKennie to Leeds, a club that already has an American manager and two other US teammates of McKennie. With the negative news aside, let’s look at a few underrated moves that have been made in January which could prove interesting for the second half of the season:
Eldor Shomurodov (Roma to Spezia): The Uzbek striker showed his promise at Genoa, when he led the line in the Grifoni attack and had some wonderful performances, showcasing his pace, directness and eye for scoring some incredible long range goals. At Roma, he never clicked with José Mourinho and thus hardly played. At Spezia he’ll be the main man in the attack and it should revitalize his career.
Josip Brekalo (Wolfsburg to Fiorentina): I was really impressed in Brekalo’s play at Torino, but sadly it was just a loan spell and he was sent back to Germany at the end of the season. Brekalo can play wide or behind the striker and should offer even more creativity to a possession heavy Fiore team. The Croatian also has an eye for goal, having scored seven league goals in his one season with Torino.
Francesco Caputo: (Sampdoria to Empoli): The 35-year-old striker goes back to Empoli, the place where he really started making a name for him self as a player who has flourished late in his career, only getting the chance to play top flight football in his early 30s. Caputo has been part of a chaotic Sampdoria team that doesn’t play great football and has cycled through different managers. At Empoli, Caputo should prove to be a capable goal scorer once again in a place that he knows well.
(Cover image from IMAGO)
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