Sandro Tonali: The Milan fan and €70m Newcastle target who is more De Rossi than Pirlo

In the end, there was still enough room on his left forearm.

Sandro Tonali has tattoos of his dog Margot, his grandmother’s birthdate and his old jersey number from when he started his professional career with Brescia. A year ago, he decided to get another one, of the Campioni d’Italia trophy. Tonali had recently lifted the real thing under fluttering ticker tape. It was AC Milan’s first league title since 2010-11 — a time when local lad Tonali first started going to San Siro as a fan.

His father, Giandomenico, is “one of the Curva” — an ultra from nearby Lodi who used to stand in the Sud at home matches and go on the road to support the team. That love for Milan was passed down to his son. The first replica jersey Tonali owned, however, was from the Premier League. Not a Newcastle United one, which he will very likely pull on next season after more progress in talks on Wednesday, but a Chelsea one with Frank Lampard’s name and number on the back — a detail Todd Boehly and Behdad Eghbali could have used when expressing their own interest in the player — but, as a boy, in his heart it was “Sempre Milan”. Milan. Always.

He had just turned seven when they beat Liverpool in the 2007 Champions League final and attended his first game at San Siro a month or so before his 10th birthday. It was Milan vs Chievo. Thiago Silva was at the back. Andrea Pirlo, David Beckham and Ronaldinho took it in turns on set pieces. Clarence Seedorf won the game in stoppage time with a laser-like finish into the top corner. “It was an awful game,” Tonali recalled. But for that goal, it was worth it.

“I never imagined I’d get to play there in that jersey,” Tonali said.

As a boy, he wore their colours at Lombardia Uno, a soccer school on the edge of town affiliated with Milan. Paolo Maldini’s sons, Daniel and Christian, were on their books as well and scouts from Milan used to show up and hold trials. Tonali was a striker in his early days, becoming a midfielder only a little later. Milan didn’t know what to make of him. Twice they decided against offering him an academy place. “Lots of people have made the same mistake with other players,” Davide Gatti, the head of Lombardia Uno, told The Athletic. “It’s not easy to judge a player and know exactly how they’ll develop at that age.”

Nearby Piacenza, the hometown of the Inzaghi brothers, gambled on Tonali. When they went bust in 2012, one of his coaches Gianluca Balestri flagged him up to another of the region’s clubs, Brescia.

It didn’t take long for Tonali to generate a disproportionate amount of hype.

He made his debut aged 17 against Avellino in Serie B. His position in front of the defence, long brown hair and that swallow-necked jersey led to a lot of projection, a lot of cognitive bias, a lot of mischaracterisation. The YouTube supercuts, social media threads and Football Manager forums billed Tonali as the next Pirlo.

(Photo: Alessandro Sabattini/Getty Images)

“It became a bit burdensome,” Tonali admitted. The media wanted it to be true and it was easy enough to spin. Tonali had more time on the ball in Serie B and could play the odd Hollywood pass. The diamond in midfield that Brescia played contributed to this mythology about the regista role — the film director whose vision is everything. It confirmed what people wanted to see.

A free kick he scored against Genoa in October 2019 following promotion to the top flight did the rest. People overlooked the fact his intention was obviously to cross to the far post. “The new Pirlo?” Serie A’s official highlight of the goal asked.

Whether it was to deflect attention or not, Tonali began claiming that the player he modelled his game on was, in fact, Gennaro Gattuso. When Milan signed him from Brescia, initially on loan, in September 2020, the number he requested was Gattuso’s No 8.

Tonali called the former midfielder to ask permission and got some advice in return. He was told to be “antico”. The literal translation is ancient but what Gattuso meant was for Tonali to live by old family values and show the jersey and the club the respect it deserves. He had to uphold tradition and standards not just at San Siro but also around their Milanello training ground too.

Gattuso remembers getting a telling-off for not cleaning up after himself following a shave. Milan’s former owner Silvio Berlusconi used to offer him pay rises if he cut his hair and got rid of the beard for Milan’s annual team photo. Tonali has followed that advice in his own way. Grounded by the honour of playing for Milan and his tifo (support), he has the stereotype of the Golden Boy who can do no wrong.

But little went right for Tonali in that first season at Milan. Playing at San Siro is different from Brescia’s 16,000-capacity Mario Rigamonti. Historically it has meant competing for the Scudetto and the Champions League. The jersey feels heavier, bigger. Carrying it, filling it out, is a test that has been flunked by more talented players than Tonali and he needed a re-sit. At the end of his loan, Milan let their option to sign him on a permanent basis expire. They then re-negotiated a lower fee with Brescia and Tonali, to his credit, humbly accepted a pay-cut to secure a second chance.

Did he ever doubt himself? “No,” he insisted. But that loan season was tough and at the end of it Tonali, who had made his senior debut for Italy in October 2019, was overlooked for the squad that won the European Championship. “I think it was partly down to me being a fan, my dad and my family being Milanista. My brothers and mates being Milanisti,” he said of that debut year. “I found myself in a situation where I didn’t want to be a disappointment to them all.”

(Photo: Marco Luzzani/Getty Images)

Tonali played tentative. He was, he says, “a bit scared”. But Milan coach Stefano Pioli believed.

“More than a coach, the Mister (Pioli) showed himself to be a good person,” Tonali said. “I think he spoke to me more than anybody else that year. He knew what I was going through and he’s doing the same with other players we’ve signed (like Charles De Ketelaere, last summer’s arrival from Club Bruges in Belgium) who are now going through the same phase I went through then.

“I was lucky that my second year was behind closed doors (because of crowd restrictions during the Covid-19 pandemic). It might seem like nothing but San Siro’s a big deal. Maybe that helped me settle in. I wanted to smash it in my second year and as soon as the season started… you just feel it immediately. You just know when things are going to start going well for you.”

Tonali never looked back.

He established himself in the double pivot next to Franck Kessie and scored the stoppage-time winner away to Lazio last April that made everyone believe it was going to be Milan’s year in Serie A. Tonali stood out for his athletics rather than the aesthetics. He’s the player who covers the most distance for Milan, and while he lacks the pace of colleagues Theo Hernandez and Rafael Leao, he does more work at high speed than anyone in their team apart from cocker spaniel turned winger Alexis Saelemaekers.

While Maldini claimed to see a hybrid between Pirlo and Gattuso, and Pirlo himself remarked on Tonali’s ability to look up and play forward, he is not a playmaker — unless you follow Jurgen Klopp’s line that the gegenpress is football’s best playmaker.

If we consult StatsBomb’s line-breaking passes metric, Tonali is 44th out of 70 midfielders in Serie A and ranks close to the bottom of the list when it comes to the completion rate (48 per cent) for that kind of pass.

None of which is to diminish Tonali. He laid on more assists (seven) than any Milan player other than Leao in the league last season. But if you look at how they came about it’s a mix of energetic carries, regains, and passes lifted into the path of Leao for him to go on a dribble, as well as some sweetly-struck set pieces. Had he been born in the capital and come through Roma’s system, the parallels would be less with Pirlo and more with Daniele De Rossi, even though that too feels slightly sacrilegious.

Tonali seemed destined to become a Milan stalwart. He is one of the club’s captains and for Italians who grow up supporting a member of Italy’s Big Three, making it at one of them is the pinnacle. Anything else represents a come-down.

Only last year he said: “I know what I went through to get to here, and I’d never make the mistake of leaving. I dream of becoming a ‘bandiera’ at Milan” — the flag-bearer, as Maldini, Franco Baresi and Gianni Rivera were in the past. But romance is largely dead in football and the days of the bandiera are over. Other Milanisti have been led into temptation by transformative salary offers from Europe’s super-rich and state-wealth clubs.

Gianluigi Donnarumma was supposed to be a new a one-club man too — the Milan captain for a new generation. But his boyhood support for the club counted for little when the Qataris behind Paris Saint-Germain offered to double his money.

Mike Maignan has shown in the two years since that there was more to life than Donnarumma and Milan will move on from Tonali if the Saudi Arabians behind Newcastle make an offer the player and his club consider to be in their mutual interest. After making a €50million (£43m; $54.9m) offer in writing yesterday, Newcastle’s determination to close a deal was evident today (Wednesday) when a delegation held face-to-face talks in Milan and drew up the framework for a transfer worth in the region of €70m — which would be a record for an Italian midfielder.

Any anger a sale might provoke within the Milan fanbase and punditocracy should be directed at city hall and the lack of progress on a new stadium, rather than the club’s ownership.

GO DEEPER

If you build it, they will come: Serie A's stadium problem

If Milan were allowed to build one, the revenue uplift would help retain players such as Tonali. Instead, the year-on-year shortfall in match day income compared with their peers around the continent forces the club to entertain offers like this one from Newcastle, so they can generate more transfer budget that way.

Let that be the parable of Tonali and a move to the Premier League that edges ever closer.

(Top photo: Nicolo Campo/LightRocket via Getty Images)