Team Focus: AC Milan Going the Distance - Long Balls per Game

An interesting statistic from the current season's passing distribution shows that AC Milan are the team with most long passes per game in Italy, and rank second in the top-five European leagues, just behind Bayern Munich. That is quite surprising, as Milan's recent history has been built on prolonged ball possession in the midfield.

During his management in Milan (2001-2009), Carlo Ancelotti based his diamond midfield on ball possession and to his credit pulled off a moment of magic by moving world-class playmaker Andrea Pirlo in front of the defence from his former position of attacking midfield. Milan basically had two main attacking options: when the opposing defence was set, the Rossoneri patiently built their attacks in the midfield, moving the ball around and waiting for the right chance. Pirlo quickly became the key to give the team the right timing. A different solution was to counter-attack with quick players up front. Milan always gained ball possession pretty deep on the field, but a sudden long pass by Pirlo could find Shevchenko, Kakà and Inzaghi's runs and catch the opponents unprepared. That second option proved to be extremely useful in top European clashes, though too much ball possession didn't help Milan win the domestic league (they only did it once, in 2004). Milan were lethal against bigger rivals all over Europe, but too slow to find weaknesses in smaller Italian teams' defences.

In 2009 Ancelotti's playing style had become weary and the club went in a different direction: Leonardo took over, with a very different football philosophy. The Brazilian coach managed to bring Milan back into the fight for the title, but his tactical experiments were quite disappointing. His preferred line-up was a 4-2-3-1 (re-named by the press "4-2 and Flair") with 4 pure attacking players having no defensive duties. Pirlo's role in the team became a problem. As his ability is limited in the defensive phase, when he was on the pitch the team often looked unbalanced. However, when he sat out they struggled to build attacks and Leonardo had to rely only on Ronaldinho's creativity. The manager tried to tweak and fix things, but in the end Roma became the real challengers for the title and Inter won it once again, turning Leonardo's management into a failure.

Then came Allegri in 2010, who switched back to the diamond midfield, but changed the team's tempo, pressing and pace. The midfield became more dynamic, and every player had defensive instructions. The coach often chose two defensive midfielders to partner Pirlo or Seedorf, fielding both of them together only a few times. Milan then recovered the ball closer to the goal, so Pirlo's skills in long passing were not necessary anymore to spring a counter-attack. Also, the midfield was no longer the zone where Milan would build an attack against a set defence, as basically all attacks focused on Ibrahimovic and his assistance for midfielders' runs from deep.

Allegri's domestic playing style may have been inspired by Josè Mourinho's Inter, as the current Real manager often asked his players to perform long passes and quickly reach the attacking half (especially in 2008/2009, when he could rely on Ibrahimovic as well), caring less about attack-building and then pressing hard with a strong midfield to gain the ball back in the attacking third. The graph (above) shows the progression of Milan's use of long passes in last three seasons (the post-Ancelotti era: Leonardo-Allegri-Allegri), peaking in the current campaign with 80 long passes per match.

Pirlo was ultimately sidelined when the club took Mark van Bommel on loan in the 2011 January transfer window, to grant the midfield more aggressiveness. The Italian playmaker did not renew his contract and Juventus signed him last summer. Allegri had to put somebody else in charge of delivering Ibrahimovic some long passes, so Thiago Silva became a key player for his team even in the attacking phase. The Brazilian currently comes third in the top-5-leagues ranking for accurate long passes per game, with an average of 11.3. After 28 gameweeks, he and Andrea Pirlo have the same average, which is more than anybody else in the Serie A.

In the end, some stars came and went in Milan, like Shevchenko, Rui Costa, Kakà, Ronaldinho, but Pirlo was the real symbol of a football era that Milan had to end to start afresh. His departure was the mark for a deep change, which is expected to slowly bring the Rossoneri back amongst European superpowers.