Tare was supposed to bring competency back, but you can’t just wisk away a management full of incompetency

AC Milan have been trying to sign Ardon Jashari for months now, and have yet again hit an impasse. The impasse being Club Brugge has sold several players already, and have no need to sell the Belgian league MVP. He wants to leave, but Milan aren’t willing to make an offer above the 32.5 + 5 offer they reportedly sent weeks ago. The hope is Jashari will force his way out, but it’s like these very same people weren’t involved with the club last time they tried this with Charles De Ketelaere.

CDK was a massive fumble by the Milan management and Stefano Pioli. By the time they sorted out the final contract details and brought him in, he had missed pre-season. This meant he had to adapt to a new position, into a team with a years-long tactical structure, and it went poorly. I thought he played well with what he was given, but clearly there was a mental blocker there that had to be resolved.

Milan didn’t bother trying to fix that. They loaned him to Atalanta, where he immediately blossomed. Go figure. Who could have seen this, except Maldini, the guy that was in the process of being scapegoated.

Fast-forward to negotiating with Brugge again. Fast-forward to a required Belgian transfer record. Fast-forward to another missing pre-season, if this happens.

Brugge have no need to sell him either. Jashari signed a new deal till 2029 last season. Sure he wants to leave, and it looks poor if you don’t let your stars leave when they want to — it makes you look like a prison where you have to serve your sentence. But…it’s also fairly clear, that there is a middle ground to be negotiated here.

Milan rushed to sell Reijnders so City could have him for the Club World Cup.. which was a nice gesture to the player, but never required City make any meaningful concessions. The bonuses won’t trigger beyond 65m, and so Milan find themselves spending more than half of those proceeds to buy his replacement. That’s fine, except it isn’t when the club has an unofficial ceiling of 20m in negotiations.

Reportedly this window they were SHOCKED to find out that they’ll probably have to spend more than 20m to replace Theo Hernandez. But they only made 25m, that’s a big hit to the profit that the spreadsheet creators were hoping to present to their boss. The boss who was shocked that it’s so hard to build a stadium in Italy. The boss who was shocked that the fanbase was unhappy he fired Paolo Maldini. The boss who thought Zlatan could replace anything but the squad’s sense of entitlement. The boss who is looking for investors to give him a ladder out of the club.

Nobody was fired after last season’s catastrophe. Milan Futuro saw Bonera fired, and that was it. Conceicao fired for the first team. And everybody who was REALLY at fault was given another year in their jobs. Moncada took a step back and Tare is here to run the show, right?

Good luck outmaneuvering the incompetency that hovers around this club like a cloud. They have learned nothing from the lessons of the past, and they are doomed to repeat it.