• Written by Michael Knight
• Categories Football, Italy Serie A

Milan finished the Serie A 2016/17 season on a mediocre 6th place. They once again failed to fight for the top three, which leads to Champions League. Like every summer in the last five years, Milan hopes that this is the comeback season. Perhaps they are right this time.

Wealthy Chinese consortium bought the club and gave Vincenzo Montella a pile of money for reinforcements. Milanese coach isn’t a cheapskate, and he already smashed all club transfer records by bringing in many hot prospects.

Italian international Leonardo Bonucci was paid 42 million euro to Juventus which made him the most expensive Italian center back ever! Milan also bought Lucas Biglia for 17million euro from Lazio, Andrea Conti and Franck Kessie from Atalanta, HakanCalhanoglu from Leverkusen for 22 million euro, Andre Silva from Porto for 38 million euro, and Ricardo Rodriguez from Wolfsburg and Mateo Musacchio from Villareal for 18 million euro each. It is interesting that Fabio Borini also joined the club on loan from Sunderland.

Only Mattia De Sciglio left the club out of important first team players. The young Italian transferred to Juventus for 12 million euro, while Juraj Kucka left the club for Trabzon, which paid him 5 million euro. Luca Bangioni was sold to Monterrey, Ricardo Ely to Alaves for 3 million euro, while Keisuke Honda completed a free transfer to Monterrey.

Milan had a solid summer friendly tour – they recorded two victories and two defeats, and they added two wins in the Europa League qualifying matches against Romanian Craiova. Milan was beaten against Betis and Borussia Dortmund, but the highlight of their summer tour is the 4:0 victory against mighty Bayern Munich!

Young home-grown attacker, Patrick Cutrone scored two goals against the Bavarian giants and the whole display we saw from Milan paved the way for the successful start of the Europa League qualifiers. Milan will face Macedonian Shkendija in the last qualifying round, and they should have any troubles to eliminate them and qualify for the group phase of the competition.

Watch AC Milan and Italy Serie A football highlights (Juventus , Napoli , Lazio , Roma)