A coach who plays with the 4-3-3 or 4-2-3-1, who knows Italian football, who already has experience in the weekly management of the double championship-Champions League commitment, who is able to work in a team with the management and who has a style on and off the pitch. This, over the days, is the identikit that has emerged around the future Milan coach who will replace Stefano Pioli starting from the 2024-25 season. Clear, sharp, precise characteristics, which denote clarity in the choice that is about to be made by the Milan management, who after having abandoned Julen Lopetegui (who had created a popular uprising among the fans) has chosen to hermetically cling to the name of the new AC Milan coach.
All roads lead to Fonseca
As the days went by, the list of profiles approached or proposed to Milan has gradually lost several petals, with that of Paulo Fonseca remaining attached to the stem. And if you reread the instructions at the beginning of the article carefully, you can see how the identikit can actually lead to him. The Portuguese coach, however, declared after the last championship match that he had not yet made a final decision on his future, Lille is very interested in continuing the technical project with him but there is also an important courtship to part of Olympique Marseille, which has been appreciating Fonseca’s work for months: in this sense, the meeting between the coach and Lille scheduled for next week will be decisive. News had also spread regarding AC Milan’s interest in Marcelo Gallardo, former River Plate coach now at Al-ittihad in Saudi Arabia, but although appreciated by the Rossoneri managers, the former Millionarios star has not had in-depth contacts with the Rossoneri and also has a strong interest from Sevilla on his plate.
With Milan in his heart: the van Bommel idea does not fade away
Mark van Bommel is another profile that reflects the characteristics revealed, with the additional factor of being a player who entered the hearts of the Milan fans after the 2010-11 scudetto and the following season, where he bid farewell to Milan with a tearful interview, before Milan-Novara, given in Milan Channel. It now seems certain, however, that the next Milan coach will be a foreigner. A situation that has not occurred since the 2015-16 season, when the late Sinisa Mihajlovic sat on the Rossoneri bench. In any case, there will be no direct communications from the club on the name of the next coach until the end of the championshipgiven that there is also the contractual issue with Stefano Pioli at stake, who yesterday saw Mike Maignan back in the group just as both Simon Kjaer and Ruben Loftus-Cheek left the medical area and it will be clear in the next training sessions whether they will be drafted for Turin or if they will look at the last match of the championship against Salernitana.
