AC Milan, Julen Lopetegui and the quandary of finding a new coach

Stefano Pioli’s voice trembled. It had broken during AC Milan’s goalless stalemate with Juventus at the Allianz Stadium. He put it down to shouting too many tactical instructions at his players and felt the need to interject when DAZN’s Stefano Borghi suggested his tone was down and one of resignation.

It has been a rough 10 days for Pioli. Knocked out of Europe by another Italian side for a second year in a row, Milan then lost a sixth straight derby and were reduced to playing deafening techno music to drown out Inter’s title celebrations.

Pioli says he stopped reading the newspapers a long time ago, but friends have messaged him about a few of Gazzetta dello Sport’s recent front pages. One claimed his four and a half year stint as Milan coach is over. Another, printed on the day of the Juventus game, presented Julen Lopetegui as the frontrunner to replace him.

Milan’s ultras did not make the short trip from Lombardy to Piedmont on Saturday, in protest at the ticket prices charged by Juventus. It wasn’t the only stand they took. A communique issued by the inhabitants of San Siro’s Curva Sud declared their patience with those running the club exhausted:

“The season is coming to an end and the mediocrity that has characterised it for almost the entire duration has given way to a woeful and disastrous end that, as if it weren’t already enough, has been amplified even more by the atrocious comments made by some executives, and the rumours regarding the name of the future coach that make us understand once again how the ambition to relive the past is not the primary prerogative of the club.”

Finishing second in Serie A isn’t enough, particularly when Milan’s likely placement as its 2023-24 runners-up comes without them ever mounting a title challenge. Leaving aside the allusion to president Paolo Scaroni’s spat with club legend and former technical director Paolo Maldini, who was sacked from that job a year ago, the whole episode lays bare the difficulty and delicacy a club of Milan’s history and tradition face when choosing a new coach in the current climate.

It is frankly surprising that Lopetegui’s candidacy became so advanced. Not on a technical level — nobody is disputing his coaching ability. However, it did show a loss of context and a lack of cultural awareness.

Italy remains a very insular football country. The way some pundits there talk about the game it is as if football on the other side of the Alps, the Dolomites and the Adriatic is still dramatically different; almost another sport. They call it “calcio europeo” as if Italy were not part of the European Union. Eighteen of Serie A’s 20 clubs are led by coaches with Italian passports. The exceptions — Torino’s Ivan Juric and Igor Tudor at Lazio — have been adopted as two of their own after spending a decade of their respective playing careers in Italy.

So to make it in Italy as a foreign manager, you either have to be familiar to the locals or an undisputed superstar.

Since the Second World War, only 13 coaches from outside Italy have won Serie A. Only two have done so since the turn of the century. The first was Sven-Goran Eriksson at Lazio, in 2000. And the Swede, by then, was a known quantity in Italy after stints at Roma, Fiorentina and Sampdoria. Later came prime Jose Mourinho, who made history by winning an unprecedented treble with Inter in 2010. But that’s about it.

Juventus have not had a foreign coach in Serie A since Zdenek Zeman’s uncle Cestmir Vycpalek was in the dugout in the early 1970s. Inter have thought better of it ever since Frank de Boer’s team were beaten by Israeli club Hapoel Be’er Sheva at San Siro in 2016. As for Lopetegui, he would have been Milan’s first foreign coach since the late Sinisa Mihajlovic who, like Tudor and Juric, had made Italy his second home.

Lopetegui last coached the Premier League’s Wolverhampton Wanderers in 2022-23 (Jack Thomas – WWFC/Wolves via Getty Images)

None of which is to say club owners, particularly U.S. investors, should limit their search to within Italy’s borders unless the chance to appoint a Pep Guardiola emerges; though even then, as Mourinho discovered in 2008, the cultural resistance would still be strong. Mourinho had to battle against what he called the “intellectual prostitution” of the media as reporters defended ‘their’ coaches, their contacts, their football movement against the interloper.

Such is the pride in the Italian coaching school at Coverciano, near Florence, the prevailing attitude has tended to be less, ‘What can we learn from the likes of Guardiola?’, and more, ‘Let’s teach people like him a lesson’.

Foreign coaches have to work doubly hard to prove themselves and, if they cannot counter the narrative, they are soon chewed up and spat out. A coach as good as Luis Enrique quit Roma after a year, citing exhaustion. The press was merciless with De Boer, in particular. The Dutchman’s tendency to speak a mix of English and Spanish while he learned Italian led to ridicule. “What is this? Esperanto?”

Enduring pride in Italian coaching isn’t misplaced. After all, no nationality has had more different winners of the Premier League than Italy (four). Carlo Ancelotti is the most successful coach in Champions League history, also winning all five of Europe’s top five domestic leagues, and this summer’s European Championship will have four Italian coaches, in charge of Italy, obviously, as well as Hungary, Slovakia and Turkey.

So what do Milan do? Cave in and hire an Italian?

Historically, the club, at their best, have chosen three kinds of coach. First is the ideologue-innovator. Imagine, for a moment, if social media had been around in 1987 when Silvio Berlusconi decided to make a former shoe salesman, who had never managed outside the second division, his first new coach. Would he have changed his mind amid the backlash and picked a safer, more established name than the ‘Alien’, Arrigo Sacchi, whose ideas changed football?

Sacchi celebrates Milan’s 1987-88 Serie A triumph (Alessandro Sabattini/Getty Images)

Second, is a coach with ‘physique du role’, a trait Berlusconi’s former chief executive Adriano Galliani felt was imperative. It means someone with broad shoulders and gravitas, a figure able to command authority with star players and stay unflappable in front of the Curva and the media. That was Max Allegri in 2010. It feels like a long time ago now, but Galliani hired Allegri after his peers voted for him to win the Panchina d’Oro, the country’s coach of the year award, after his first top-flight season with Cagliari.

That Allegri has that award on his mantlepiece at home instead of Mourinho, who won the league with Inter that year, was, in part, another example of the aforementioned cultural resistance to the outsider.

Domestically, Allegri became the most dominant Italian coach of his generation. What his critics today fail to realise as they focus exclusively on his football is precisely his physique du role. When the Juventus board resigned last season amid the Prisma investigation and points deductions were applied, suspended, then reinstated, he still led his players to a top-four finish and gave them a chance of European football if appeals were won and UEFA decided not to impose a ban from its competitions. Other coaches would have been overwhelmed and their team would have spiralled.

Juventus’ gratitude for the job Allegri did in those extreme circumstances helps explain why he remained in-office this season.

To coach a top club you have to be built differently and it’s something for Milan to bear in mind, even if the investigation into their change of ownership in 2022 is not on the same scale as everything Juventus went through last season.

Allegri in 2010 after getting the Milan job that summer (STR/AFP via Getty Images)

The third kind isn’t too dissimilar to the last one, as the former player also tends to possess the physique du role for the job. Not to fall into the cliche of ‘someone who knows the club’, some of the greatest titles in Milan’s history were won by coaches who had once pulled on the red and black shirt.

Nils Liedholm was the manager when Milan won their first star. He introduced the zonal marking system that laid the foundation for Sacchi’s work. People forget Fabio Capello went away and worked in Berlusconi’s business empire before returning to make Milan Invincible.

Then came Ancelotti, who made Milan a force in Europe again after the ill-fated dabbles with Uruguay’s Oscar Washington Tabarez and the Turk Fatih Terim on either side of Alberto Zaccheroni’s Scudetto in 1999. Ancelotti combined innovation with physique du role. He followed Carlo Mazzone’s intuition in playing Andrea Pirlo in front of the defence and went to three Champions League finals with Milan playing a Christmas-tree formation.

Now don’t get it twisted. Nobody is suggesting Milan’s owner RedBird follow the Capello model and turn Zlatan Ibrahimovic from executive to coach. A twilight Berlusconi tried to repeat that trick with Leonardo and it did not work. Neither did giving rookie coaches Filippo Inzaghi and Clarence Seedorf the keys to a declining, stripped-back Milan with which to start their coaching careers.

Not so long ago, perhaps Pirlo would have appealed to Milan’s owners, a la Ancelotti, particularly as the data from his one season at Juventus is actually pretty good and he seems to have got a grip on now second-division Sampdoria after a rough start.

The blinky Basque, Lopetegui, did not fall into any of these three categories.

What is equally interesting amid the clamour for Milan to hire a name commensurate with the club’s stature as seven-time Champions League winners is the small matter that, in nearly 125 years of history, they have never done such a thing. Berlusconi, for instance, did not try to hire Johan Cruyff to replace Sacchi in 1991 or Vicente del Bosque instead of Terim 10 years later. What has distinguished Milan is the club’s vision, and their ability to identify the next big thing.

Fans understandably did not see that in the grey Lopetegui. Nor did they discern the physique du role in him after an old clip of the now 57-year-old fainting on live TV went viral on social media. No surprise, then, that #Nopetegui has been trending.

Io leggendo la notizia di Bianchin

Si quello è Lopetegui pic.twitter.com/NRFFETsIRU

— Rafatar🐅 (@Anteriano) April 26, 2024

The Milan supporters vox-popped outside the stadium on Saturday afternoon named two coaches, and two only. Both, of course, happen to be Italians: Antonio Conte and Roberto De Zerbi.

The former is a serial winner and, irrespective of his past with Juventus, a self-proclaimed Sacchi disciple keen, no doubt, to become the first coach to win the league with each of Italy’s big three clubs. The latter is the former Milan youth-team player, the innovator, the Italian coach Guardiola most sees himself in, which is perhaps a problem for his candidacy when Ibrahimovic is among the evaluators.

Both, however, are considered expensive either in salary or, in De Zerbi’s case, to extricate from Brighton & Hove Albion of the Premier League. Both expect to be listened to over transfer strategy. Both are not shy in letting their feelings known in press conferences. The same can be said of a Champions League winner such as Thomas Tuchel.

And what of Maurizio Sarri? It wasn’t so long ago that he made Napoli play a style of football so avant-garde the term ‘Sarrismo’ even entered the dictionary. He made tactics stans send a flurry of eggplant emojis to each other and went for dinner with Sacchi and Guardiola as the ultimate meeting of football minds. But Sarri has not been mentioned in relation to Milan since the time Berlusconi reportedly overlooked him because he a) always wore a tracksuit and b) apparently voted communist.

Thiago Motta and Sarri (Valerio Pennicino – Juventus FC/Juventus FC via Getty Images)

Looking at Serie A this season, Milan should perhaps have acted with more urgency to hire Thiago Motta; a young, naturalised Italian familiar to the league with cutting-edge ideas on the game.

The notion he is ‘too Interista’ as a member of Mourinho’s treble-winning team in 2010 is a weak one given Trapattoni, a legendary player at Milan, dominated as a coach with Juventus and Inter, a club who, many years later, would hire Conte, a former Juventus captain, to knock down the house he built.

Motta, by the same token, is now expected to join Inter’s most bitter rivals, Juventus, in the summer.

The shine has also been taken off Francesco Farioli’s remarkable season at Nice, after their totally unexpected title challenge faded. Nice are now down to fifth in France’s Ligue 1, but are still six points better off than they were on April 29 last year, when they eventually finished ninth. Perhaps they would have sustained their form from the first half of this season if owner INEOS had invested in the team over the winter when its attention was instead taken up by the purchase of a minority stake in Manchester United.

Milan’s owner, Gerry Cardinale, has a big decision to make. He inherited Pioli, so this is his first appointment. It will not define his ownership, but it is one he will not be able to take back, either.

Conte would no doubt get the Curva Sud and the media on board. De Zerbi has a cult following in Italy and would capture the imagination. But Milan are run on the same basis as Liverpool, and Liverpool did not consider either of them when finding a replacement for Jurgen Klopp.

While his name will not generate the same hype and enthusiasm as a Conte or a De Zerbi, Lille coach Paulo Fonseca is the most compelling compromise.

Fonseca has impressed with Lille in Ligue 1 (James Baylis – AMA/Getty Images)

Fonseca speaks Italian, has managed in the most scrutinised media market in the country (as Roma coach from 2019-21) and conducted himself with class during the COVID-19 pandemic despite an injury crisis and a change of ownership, and with a team terribly assorted by sporting director Monchi, who wasted the money earned from a run to the Champions League semi-finals, not to mention the sales of Mohamed Salah and Alisson to Liverpool in successive summer windows.

His style of play and work with young players match up well with the club’s search criteria, probably more than that of the Curva.

When asked whom he would recommend if Milan were to miss out on Motta, none other than Capello, an Invincible and the mastermind of that famous night in Athens 30 years ago, was unequivocal when it came to his endorsement.

“A coach who knows Italy. Someone like Fonseca.”

(Top photo: Seb Daly/Sportsfile via Getty Images))