The American has grabbed headlines with goals in his first two Serie A games but other new recruits are making an impact tooChristian Pulisic is listed on the Milan website as weighing 73kg or 161lb, but Rafael Leão lifted him off the floor like a dad with his kid at school sports day, hugging him right up into the air. When you have been carrying a team’s attack for as long as the Portuguese has, anything else feels light by comparison.Leão has been Milan’s top scorer and assist-provider in Serie A for two seasons running – though he did share the first of those titles with Olivier Giroud in 2021-22 – a blessing and a curse for his team. He...
Juventus, Inter, Lazio, Milan and Atalanta are queuing up for a crack at the Scudetto after a summer of change in ItalyThe post-Scudetto cleanup in Naples took more than a month, local authorities reporting they had gathered up enough banners and blue and white ribbons to cover the length of 400 football pitches. Those were just the ones hung on public property. In bars, restaurants and the windows of homes all over the city, Napoli’s first Serie A title in 33 years will continue to be celebrated as long as there are people to remember it.Now, though, they must defend their crown. Easier said than done: Italy has had a different champion in each of the past four seasons. A...
Milan’s narrow victory in Turin sealed a top-four finish but for Juventus the scandal over alleged false accounting rolls onIt should have been blood and thunder, two of Italian football’s biggest clubs squaring off on the penultimate weekend with Champions League football on the line. Juventus and Milan instead gave us dull, with blunders, in front of a listless crowd.Significant sections of the Allianz Stadium were empty at kick-off. Fewer than 500 Milan supporters had made the short trip to Turin, others balking at the €80 ticket price in the away section. Juventus Ultras from the Curva Sud, meanwhile, were staging a protest outside against what they perceive as heavy-handed treatment from their club, including restrictions on flags, banners and...
After a little extra ‘motivation’ from their fans following defeat to Spezia, Stefano Pioli’s side need a turnaround against InterDefeat was a disaster, but it was the aftermath that made international headlines: Milan’s players and manager silently facing their supporters in the away section of Spezia’s Stadio Alberto Picco while one fan addressed them with a monologue. There were no TV microphones close enough to listen in but bowed heads and solemn expressions made it appear as an act of submission: disobedient students being scolded by a master.Those present told it differently. “What happened beneath the Curva was something positive,” said Stefano Pioli. “They were only motivating us, pushing us to give our all.” The defender Simon Kjær echoed that...
The Italian sent on Davinson Sánchez when a goal was needed on a night of trapped rage and basic patternsBefore this last-16 second leg, Son Heung-min had announced that Tottenham Hotspur intended to “make a statement” And so they did. That statement was: this is not a very good Tottenham Hotspur team. Rather this felt like a Spurs team reaching the end of something, without clarity or craft or any real sense of life; a team that is facing up now to another season of chasing another season of chasing another season of … well, what exactly?There are good 0-0 draws. There are heroic exits, games where you chase the sun and come up short. This wasn’t any of those...