TBF, raise your hand if you never doubted if Maldini after his first three months at the whelm, after handpicking GP, after loosing 5:0 to Atalanta and after sitting on 13th place with the Scudetto out of reach, wasn't out of his depth.
Mind you, that wasn't the year Leao took off (Rebic was our star). Bennacer was picking up red cards left and right. We were hoping that Maldini would do his fucking job and sell off Kessie to Westham for 25M. The club was bleeding somewhat like 200M per year iirc before Covid and we barely challenged for an EL spot despite having nothing but Serie A to fight for. If you think things look dire now, try to remember how desperate things really were back then. Of course Elliott was concerned and asking its management for explanation!
Now Maldini using words like delegitimation and so forth is his somewhat emotional POV, but tbh, that he was challenged at that point in time makes absolute sense.
Its impossible for some people to be impartial about Maldini, that’s why I’m really glad he’s finally out so we don’t keep having these types of conversations, as they are rather unproductive since it’s just getting people to admit to factual things.
When you point out that picking Giampaolo given the squad that he assembled was a humongous error that really set us back, they will say:
“We were doing bad but at least Maldini realized it was a mistake and steadied the ship early in the season”.
Not to mention it has nothing to do with the original statement but it also ignores:
- it put the team at 13th place. People make no big deal about that while pretending us being in 3rd right now is the same “dire situation” as back then and need a new manager asap.
- morale is like center of the earth low since we are already at rock bottom now while we sit in 3rd place
- had to find a replacement coach midway instead of having a larger pool of candidates. On top of that, ownership was more conservative and cheap when it came to Spalletti, than they would have been had we just kept going with Gattuso and was revisiting this decision end of next summer.
People also conveniently forget that before the new year and especially when we got dominated by Atalanta, Pioli almost lost his job and we were almost in the position of having to replace the manager twice (borderlining Genoa level).
But hey we went 13th to 6th, we should be happy, ignoring that we were in 5th the season before, and congratulate Maldini on his immense ability to recognize things aren’t working and stopping it early. And also finding a great candidate, who some of the very same people calls clueless bc he needs Ibra. Who knows what Gattuso could have done if he got the squad upgrade and what would have happened if we got a “real manager”, maybe we could have gotten more out of the last 3 years.
With Maldini you literally have to work harder to get people to admit the truth. I’m going to play someone’s favorite card and call these people supporters of other teams since they clearly can’t think with Milan’s best interest in mind.