AC Milan were proud to launch Milan Futuro prior to the 2024-25 season, but around one year on the project has become a symbol of incompetence.
As
MilanNews writes, the relegation to Serie D is a historic, because for the first time in Italian football a second team is relegated to the amateur level. Seven years ago, Milan had to suffer the shame of the relegation of its Primavera team to the second division, but that situation was resolved immediately.
Yesterday evening’s
defeat to SPAL is a resounding shame, the certification of a programmatic failure of an initiative ‘born under dire omens already in its primordial gestation’. To understand what happened, we need to go back to a year ago, when the birth of Milan Futuro came.
The first cracks appear
Originally, the project for the second team had been assigned to Antonio D’Ottavio as sporting director, who would have detached himself from the operations alongside Giorgio Furlani and Geoffrey Moncada to dedicate himself 100% to Milan Futuro.
The choice of coach had already been made and had fallen on Ignazio Abate, who had done so well with the Primavera. He took them to the Final Four of the UEFA Youth League twice, exiting in the semi-final in their first year while and then losing in the final to Olympiacos the next year.
Abate’s profile was perfect because he knew the Primavera squad well, which would then be promoted to the Futuro squad, and the players would start from importance certainties in terms of daily work.
Instead, the arrival of Zlatan Ibrahimovic to intervene in the Milan Futuro project shuffled the cards.
Abate was sacked because he was guilty of not giving space in the Primavera to Zlatan’s eldest son, Maximilian.
As proof, after Ignazio’s dismissal came that of his father Beniamino, who in the meantime had become goalkeeping coach for the women’s first team.
D’Ottavio’s departs
In addition to the parting with Abate, Ibrahimovic had a series of clashes with D’Ottavio on various issues relating to the creation and management of Milan Futuro. This difference of opinion would be the beginning of an increasingly difficult relationship between the two.
D’Ottavio was thus unable to go to Milanello and to Milan Futuro matches and was relegated to a purely office job. While this was going on, the figure of Jovan Kirovski emerges, Ibrahimovic’s trusted man, who is put in charge of the Milan Futuro project, but without any experience in Italian football.
It would be Kirovski who convinced Ibrahimovic. During the latter’s November trip to New York with Furlani and Moncada, he pushed Cardinale to sack D’Ottavio and he was indeed booted out. In doing so, the project was put in the hands of somebody who was a complete rookie with regards to calcio.
Mismanagement of the players
The season started with Daniele Bonera on the bench, in his first experience as head coach. But even here the club’s line on how to develop the players’ was not clear. The likes of Torriani, Bartesaghi, Zeroli, Jimenez and Camarda were taken away to fill the bench of the first team, for example.
Liberali is another case study: the playmaker did not find a fixed position, being tossed around between the first team, Milan Futuro and Primavera. This constant coming and going led the players to find neither continuity of use with the Futuro nor game time in the senior side.
There are many examples of players on the bench on Saturday night in the first team and then forced to travel at night to play 500-600km away for the Futuro, arriving more tired. The result is the results seen on the field.
All this continuous whirlwind created confusion within Milan Futuro and the impossibility of being able to give the top talents the appearances necessary for the post season. Camarda and Jimenez, for example, were not able to be used against SPAL.
Then there was the timing of the change of coach. With Bonera perhaps showing all his limitations the club firstly turned to Italy U19 boss Bollini, then the promotion of Guidi from the Primavera (Vergine did not agree) and then eventually went for Massimo Oddo, who did the most with the mess inherited.
The cost of it all
Now we come to the other sore point, namely the costs taken on by Milan to achieve nothing but a drop in division on the field. The start-up of Milan Futuro, with everything considered, cost €12m, which then became over €15m after the winter market.
It is a budget that dwarfed most other clubs at the third-tier level, and in fact has been enough for certain teams to fight for promotion from Serie B to the top flight. It was wasted money, evidently.
Here too, as with the first team, heads will have to roll (
Kirovski could depart) and Milan Futuro will also have to start again with a director who knows how to move properly. Here too, the American management model has failed.