Tag: AC Milan

Massimiliano Allegri has been hired as the new coach of AC Milan following the sacking of Sergio Conceicao, the Serie A club said on Friday.

“AC Milan is pleased to announce that Massimiliano Allegri has been appointed as the Head Coach of the men’s first team,” said Milan in a statement.

“The Club extends a warm welcome and best wishes to Massimiliano and his staff.”

Milan did not reveal details of the deal, but Italian media widely report that Allegri has signed a two-year contract worth five million euros a season, with the option to extend for a further two years.

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Massimiliano Allegri has become the fourth coach in a year for AC Milan, who finished this past Serie A season in eighth place and outside the European places.

The 57-year-old led Milan to the 2011 Scudetto in his first stint in charge, between 2010 and 2014. He won five more league titles in two spells at Juventus.

Conceicao, a former Inter Milan and Lazio player, began at Milan by winning the Italian Super Cup after replacing sacked compatriot Paulo Fonseca, and then led Milan to the Italian cup final, where they lost 1-0 to Bologna earlier this month.

Conceciao, 50, won 16 of 31 games in charge at Milan, including 11 victories, seven losses and three draws in the league.

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Alvaro Morata signed for AC Milan from Atletico Madrid on Friday, the Spain striker returning to Serie A days after winning Euro 2024.

The 31-year-old has signed a four-year deal with Milan who brought him in to replace departed Olivier Giroud following the former France international’s transfer to Los Angeles FC.

“Morata has signed with the Rossoneri until 30 June 2028, with an option to extend for an additional year,” said Milan in a statement.

Italian media report that Milan paid Morata’s 13-million euro ($14.2 million) release clause and that the player will earn around 4.5 million euros per season.

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Morata played in every match in Spain’s triumph at the Euro 2024, netting his only goal of the tournament in La Roja’s 3-0 thumping of Croatia which kicked off their campaign in Germany.

He has scored 36 goals in 80 international appearances for his country.

Alvaro Morata will return to Italy after two spells with Milan’s rivals Juventus, where he won two league titles and three Italian Cups.

Morata has also won the FA Cup with Chelsea and featured in two triumphant Champions League campaigns with Real Madrid, in 2014 and 2017.

Milan, who finished second in Serie A last season but 19 points behind champions Inter Milan, begin the league season under new coach Paulo Fonseca with the visit of Torino on August 17.

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AC Milan captain Davide Calabria said on Wednesday that the departure of Olivier Giroud to Major League Soccer will leave a leadership void at the seven-time European champions.

Veteran French striker Giroud will play his final match for Milan in a post-season friendly against Roma in Perth on Friday in front of an expected crowd of 50,000 at the Optus Stadium.

The 37-year-old is heading to Los Angeles FC next season and will bow out of international football for France after the Euros, which begin in Germany next month.

Giroud was given an emotional farewell by the Milan fans as he signed off from Serie A with a goal in a 3-3 draw with Salernitana on Saturday.

American midfielder Christian Pulisic and winger Rafael Leao are missing from Milan’s tour squad but Giroud has made the long journey to Australia.

“He’s an important leader on-and-off the field … particularly off the field,” Calabria told reporters in Perth on Wednesday.

“He’s supported me a lot. I’ll miss him a lot, but am happy to have these few days together to celebrate his departure.”

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Giroud was a fan favourite at the San Siro and his three-year stint will be largely remembered for scoring key goals in Milan’s 2022 Serie A triumph, the only trophy he won at the Italian club.

Notably, Olivier Giroud is not the only departure at Milan, who are looking for a new coach after coming second in Serie A but failing to mount a serious challenge to fierce rivals Inter Milan.

Stefano Pioli, who had one year remaining on his contract, left at the end of the Serie A campaign after four-and-a-half years in charge.

Reports said he will be replaced by Lille coach Paulo Fonseca, who has also been linked with Marseille.

“I don’t know anything … we’ll see,” Calabria said when asked by AFP if he expected Fonseca to take the reins.

Assistant coach Daniele Bonera will take charge in Perth, but he had been earmarked to coach the under-23s next season.

Roma, who finished sixth in the Serie A, will be without several star players, including on-loan striker Romelu Lukaku who is reportedly set to return to his parent club Chelsea.

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Olivier Giroud confirmed on Monday that he will leave AC Milan at the end of the season to end his long career in Major League Soccer (MLS).

France’s all-time top scorer Giroud is expected to sign for Los Angeles FC, where his former Les Bleus teammate Hugo Lloris already plays, after three years with Serie A giants Milan.

“I’m here to tell you that I will play my last two games at AC Milan. My career continues, but in the MLS. I am very very proud of everything I have done for the club in these three years,” Giroud said in an interview published on social media by the club.

“It’s the right time to say it. Sorry, I’m a little emotional. My story with Milan ends this year, but Milan will remain in my heart forever.”

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Giroud signed for Milan from Chelsea in the summer of 2021 and won the Serie A title in his first season with the seven-time European champions.

The 37-year-old, a World Cup winner with France in 2018, has scored 48 goals in all competitions for Milan including 16 this season ahead of Euro 2024 in Germany.

Olivier Giroud will wave goodbye to Milan fans at the San Siro in their final match of the season against Salernitana in a fortnight.

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The future of Stefano Pioli at AC Milan is uncertain as the seven-time European champions prepare for Thursday’s first leg of their Europa League quarter-final with Roma.

Never in the fight for the Serie A title and dumped out of the Champions League at the group stage, the last-eight Italian derby will be the biggest two matches of Milan’s season so far.

They will also be crucial to Pioli’s chances of staying in the AC Milan dugout as the 58-year-old has been more under fire this term than at any other point since the troubled early months of his tenure back in 2019.

Pioli was expected to be replaced by Ralf Rangnick in the summer of 2020, but a sudden burst of hot form when that season restarted in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic and very public outrage from directors Zvonimir Boban and Paolo Maldini about how the talks with Rangnick were handled kept him in place.

Keeping him turned out to be a winning move as Pioli brought AC Milan the Serie A crown two years later, but Pioli is now out of favour with fans for not keeping up with Napoli last season nor with Inter this term.

A run of five straight Milan derby defeats has not helped, and neither has the prospect of officially conceding this year’s Scudetto to Inter in the next clash with their local rivals later this month.

Also exacerbating the situation is the feeling that Milan have been overtaken by Inter on the continent since Pioli dragged them back to the top table after years in the doldrums.

But a deep run in the Europa League, a competition Milan have never won neither in its current guise nor as the old UEFA Cup, would give Milan extra reason to be happy with the final weeks of a largely disappointing season.

Seven straight wins in all competitions have taken Milan to the last eight and to a likely second-placed finish in Serie A, helped by a remarkable drop-off in Juventus’ form.

“We’ve never stopped believing in what we do, we’ve never stopped believing in the players and they haven’t stopped believing in us,” said Pioli after Saturday’s 3-0 win over Lecce.

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“When a team struggles so long but doesn’t give up, it recognises when it’s got through the rough patch.”

Pioli will have Ruben Loftus-Cheek back after the England international was suspended for the weekend’s stroll past lowly Lecce.

Loftus-Cheek has been in the form of his life in 2024, netting nine times since the turn of the year from his advanced midfield position.

Four of those goals came in previous Europa League knockout ties with Rennes and Slavia Prague which were comfortably won by Milan.

The major decision Pioli faces is who to play alongside Matteo Gabbia in central defence with Fikayo Tomori suspended, with Simon Kjaer favourite over Malick Thiaw who is returning from injury.

Milan have already comfortably beaten Roma twice this season but that was while Jose Mourinho was still in charge, and the capital club promises to be a wholly different proposition this time around.

Pioli’s Roma counterpart Daniele De Rossi is coming into Thursday’s match at the San Siro on a high after winning the Rome derby at the weekend and keeping his team in the Champions League hunt.

The trip north will show just how much has really changed for Roma under De Rossi as it was their most recent defeat away to Milan in January that did for Mourinho.

Since then Roma have only lost two of 15 matches, one to champions-elect Inter and the other to Brighton in the previous round of the Europa League after killing their last-16 tie against the English team in the first leg.

De Rossi’s future is also in doubt as he was only hired until the end of the season, but such is the positivity surrounding Roma with their former captain in charge that a decent showing in this tie could get him the job on a permanent basis.

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Zlatan Ibrahimovic has returned to AC Milan as an advisor to the Serie A club’s management, owners RedBird Capital Partners confirmed on Monday.

In a statement, American investment firm RedBird said that the former Sweden striker, who won a host of trophies as a player in Italy, will “serve as a senior advisor to AC Milan ownership and senior management”.

The 42-year-old has also been hired as “Operating Partner” for RedBird’s “sports and media and entertainment investment portfolio”.

RedBird said that Ibrahimovic’s mandate at Milan “will include player development and high-performance training, advancing AC Milan’s global brand and commercial interests, and supporting special projects of strategic importance, including the club’s new stadium.”

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Within RedBird, Ibrahimovic “will help source and evaluate new investment opportunities for the firm, and will advise RedBird portfolio companies on commercial projects, digital content strategies and strategic brand building initiatives”.

Zlatan Ibrahimovic brought the curtain down on his eventful playing career at the end of last season, in which he was dogged by injury and netted just once for Milan.

That goal came in a 3-1 win at Udinese in March and made him the oldest goal scorer in Serie A history.

Ibrahimovic was a key figure in Milan’s resurgence to the top of Italian football after his return as a veteran forward in 2019, helping to bring them back from the doldrums and eventually win the Serie A title in 2022.

He was also key to the club’s previous Scudetto 11 years before, which was followed by a long period of stagnation and financial problems before revitalisation under current coach Stefano Pioli.

Over the course of his illustrious career, Ibrahimovic won league titles in the Netherlands, Italy, Spain and France, although his only major European trophy was the 2017 Europa League with Manchester United.

Zlatan Ibrahimovic rejoins Milan with the team nine points behind Serie A leaders Inter Milan and facing a group-stage exit from the Champions League.

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Kylian Mbappe, Randal Kolo Muani and Lee Kang-in were all on target as Paris Saint-Germain (PSG) got back to winning ways in the Champions League with an impressive 3-0 home victory against AC Milan on Wednesday.

PSG were eager to bounce back from their 4-1 defeat away to Newcastle United three weeks ago and they ultimately had too much attacking quality for their Italian visitors at the Parc des Princes.

Mbappe opened the scoring just after the half-hour mark with his 10th club goal this season, and his France teammate Kolo Muani added another shortly after half-time.

Lee then came off the bench to net the third late on, the South Korean star’s first for the club.

PSG thoroughly deserved their win, with the Ligue 1 side a different proposition from the disjointed team that was overloaded with forwards and overrun in midfield against Newcastle.

“We are very proud of our performance,” Kolo Muani told broadcaster Canal Plus.

“Winning these games gives everyone confidence and we need to carry on this way.”

Having started their European campaign with a 2-0 home win against Borussia Dortmund, PSG top Group F with six points ahead of a trip to Milan next.

The seven-time European champions are bottom of the section with two points and a big concern for Stefano Pioli’s side will be that they have yet to score in the group.

“Obviously we are not in a good position,” Pioli admitted.

“I was hoping Newcastle wouldn’t beat Dortmund because that would help us but we can’t just hope for other results to go our way.”

This game saw French international brothers Lucas Hernandez, the PSG defender, and Theo, the Milan captain, come up against each other.

It also saw PSG goalkeeper Gianluigi Donnarumma and his Milan counterpart Mike Maignan face the clubs with whom they started their careers.

But the stars of the show were elsewhere, with Mbappe –- who was hugged by a pitch invader in the first half — looking arguably sharper than he has done at any point up to now this season for PSG.

Meanwhile, the 17-year-old Warren Zaire-Emery was exceptional in PSG’s midfield and his performance will not have gone unnoticed by France coach Didier Deschamps, who was watching from the stands.

“I am very pleased to be the man of the match, but it is a team effort first and foremost,” Zaire-Emery told Canal Plus.

“He does everything well, defensively and in attack. He is aggressive, good technically, has good vision, can score and set up goals,” said coach Luis Enrique.

“He is the perfect example for all young kids who want to be footballers and want to get to the highest level.”

Zaire-Emery made the opening goal in the 32nd minute when he collected possession in midfield, burst away from Tijjani Reijnders and found Mbappe, who advanced into the box before beating Maignan with an early, low shot into the corner.

That was a blow to Milan, who had started well and upset the Paris defence with their high pressing.

It was not just Zaire-Emery who impressed in the home midfield, with Vitinha continuing his fine form this season in a position close to Mbappe on the left.

Meanwhile Manuel Ugarte is the man who holds it all together, but his physical approach denied PSG a second goal three minutes after half-time.

Ousmane Dembele thought he had scored his first goal for the Qatar-owned club since signing from Barcelona in the close season, as he ran through to plant a low shot beyond Maignan.

However, Slovenian referee Slavko Vincic disallowed the goal following a VAR review for a foul by Ugarte on Yunus Musah in the build-up.

PSG didn’t have to wait long to make it 2-0 though, as Kolo Muani turned the ball into an empty net in the 53rd minute after Maignan had pushed out a Dembele shot.

Milan tried unsuccessfully to find a way back into the game, while Maignan intervened more than once to stop Mbappe from scoring again, notably touching a shot onto the outside of the post.

But the home side made it three in the 89th minute as Zaire-Emery powered down the right and set up Lee to score with a first-time strike.

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Olivier Giroud was officially made a goalkeeper by AC Milan on Sunday after the France striker’s heroics between the sticks at Genoa helped his team take the top spot in Serie A.

Veteran forward Giroud took Mike Maignan’s place in the Milan goal after his Les Bleus teammate was sent off in the seventh minute of injury time and did enough to ensure the away side won 1-0 and moved two points ahead of local rivals Inter Milan.

“Last night Olivier Giroud became part of Milan history by courageously defending the Milan goal in the final minutes of our match with Genoa,” Milan said in a statement.

“The club has decided to honour his performance in our last line of defence by putting him in the list of goalkeepers.”

AC Milan also said that fans could buy a replica goalkeepers’ jersey with “Giroud 9” on the back as an homage to an incredible ending to Saturday’s tight victory.

Giroud can be seen on AC Milan’s website smiling in the goalkeeping kit — which on Saturday night he said he would frame — above a perfect record of zero goals conceded in his seven league appearances this season.

He was brought on as a substitute midway through the second half at the Stadio Luigi Ferraris to help Milan break down a stubborn Genoa.

But instead, Giroud was key to holding off a stoppage-time siege from Genoa after Christian Pulisic put Milan ahead in the 87th minute.

Olivier Giroud could only watch on helplessly as Albert Gudmundsson clipped a free-kick off the crossbar right after Maignan was dismissed and the 37-year-old pulled on the goalkeeper’s jersey and gloves.

And he capped an incredible ending to a match, in which Genoa’s goalkeeper Josep Martinez was also sent off, by rushing out of his goal to twice deny Genoa and ensure Milan took the three points back to the San Siro.

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NAPLES: AC Milan reached the semi-finals of the Champions League on Tuesday after Olivier Giroud struck the crucial goal in a 1-1 draw at Napoli which completed a 2-1 aggregate victory over their fellow Italians.

Giroud tapped in what turned out to be the decisive goal two minutes before the break after a blistering run from Rafael Leao, who was once again key as Milan beat Napoli for the third time this month.

The France striker’s 13th goal of the season saved his blushes after he missed a penalty midway through the first half.

Stefano Pioli’s side now have the prospect of a local derby in the last four as Inter Milan hold a two-goal lead ahead of their second leg with Benfica on Wednesday night.

“I’m very proud of this team, with that spirit we can dream of anything,” said Giroud to Mediaset.

“In the next round there will be another hard match whether it’s against Inter or Benfica, but if we keep this spirit we can go anywhere.”

After the match Mediaset showed Leao a video of Ruud Gullit setting up a goal with an almost identical run at Napoli in 1988.

“It’s the same,” said a shocked Leao.

“It’s what I try to do, go at players, it’s how I can make difference. If I can’t score I look for my teammates. I saw Giroud there.”

Milan have not contested a Champions League semi-final since they were crowned kings of Europe for the seventh and most recent time in 2007.

Victor Osimhen scored in stoppage time but it was not enough for Napoli who are creaking as they come towards the end of what has been a phenomenal season.

Luciano Spalletti’s once freewheeling team are  struggling for goals and Khvicha Kvaratskhelia also had a penalty saved with 10 minutes remaining, a miss which condemned his team to defeat.

Napoli are on the verge of their first league title since 1990, but after being placed on the easier side of the draw Tuesday’s exit was an underwhelming end to their European adventure.

– Well-organised Milan –

Their hardcore fans had agreed a truce in an ideological battle with owner Aurelio De Laurentiis which had made the atmosphere at home matches poisonous, and on Tuesday a packed Stadio Maradona was initially in fine voice.

Their team went straight at Milan, dominating possession and pushing the opposition back towards the vibrating stands.

However, the best they could muster was two long-distance efforts from Matteo Politano which crept wide. On Milan’s first serious attack Mario Rui clattered into Leao and handed Giroud the chance to give the away side a huge advantage from the penalty spot.

However Giroud’s weak effort was easily stopped by Alex Meret, whose save unleashed a roar from the stands, a colossal racket repeated when he prevented Giroud netting a more than presentable chance shortly afterwards.

Napoli had scored at least three goals in all of their previous Champions League home games this season but looked short on ideas against a well-organised Milan defence which kept a tight lid on Osimhen.

And as the hosts pushed to level the scores on aggregate, Milan pounced at the end of the first half.

Leao scooped up the ball after Tanguy Ndombele’s sloppy control and charged from deep his own half, breezed past three Napoli players and rolled an unmissable chance across to Giroud, who fell to his knees in a mixture of joy and relief.

Napoli were again on the front foot after the break but struggled to create much, with Mathias Olivera’s header wide from a 64th-minute corner the best chance until Fikayo Tomori handled Giovanni Di Lorenzo’s low cross as he put in a challenge in the penalty area.

Kvaratskhelia fluffed his own spot-kick just like Giroud, meaning Osimhen’s bullet header in the 93rd minute meant nothing for Napoli who will wonder what might have been after wasting so many chances in the first leg.

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MILAN: Sweden striker Zlatan Ibrahimovic signed a one-year contract extension with Serie A club AC Milan that commits him to stay at the franchise till June 2023.

Ibrahimovic, who led his team AC Milan to the Serie A title victory after 11 years will be staying with the club till after his 41st birthday.

“AC Milan is pleased to announce the renewal of Zlatan Ibrahimovic’s contract until June 30, 2023. The Swedish forward will continue to wear the number 11 shirt,” the team said in a statement.

The Swede, however, is out of action till at least the early next year following the anterior cruciate ligament in his left knee reconstructed in May.

The former Paris Saint-Germain (PSG) and Manchester United forward revealed in May that he endured six months of sleepless nights due to the pain in his knee but remained committed to AC Milan delivering their first Serie A crown in 11 years.

 

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It is pertinent to mention here that Ibrahimovic was also a part of AC Milan when the club last won the Scudetto, joining on loan from Barcelona and scoring 14 league goals in 29 appearances to fire them to the 2011 title.

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