Marked for Fabio Pandolfi
From our football correspondent
Upbeat
Squad19 Oct 2026
18 days on the announcement, and a year of quiet, unwatched rehabilitation behind it. AC Milan lose a player for a season; he loses something harder to name.
Player ratings19 Oct 2026
Successful dribbles: 32. There is a particular sort of despair on a full-back's face by the seventieth minute, and it was on display.
Squad19 Oct 2026
A fracture rules Denzel Seedorf out for 95 days
Bones knit. That is the one merciful thing about this injury and the reason AC Milan will talk about it more openly than they would about a knee. He will be back, and roughly when they say.
Squad19 Oct 2026
Some afternoons a goalkeeper is the whole of the defence. 7 saves, several of them the kind nobody expects to see made, and ten outfield players who owe him a drink.
Player ratings19 Oct 2026
Age has not caught Luka Modrić yet — 8.28
At 41 he is supposed to be managing his minutes. Instead he was marked 8.28 and looked, for ninety minutes, exactly like the player everybody remembers.
Match17 Oct 2026
Hard to beat is not the same as winning, but 7 matches without defeat is a foundation AC Milan did not have in the autumn.
Squad19 Oct 2026
Dino Delkić is a better footballer than he was
Not a run of form — an actual step up, held for months. At 17 he is doing things at this level he could not do at the start of the season, and the coaching staff will tell you exactly which of them.
Match17 Oct 2026
A 2‑1 win over Napoli, earned rather than given, and the sort of afternoon that sends everyone home talking about next week instead of this one.
Player ratings19 Oct 2026
Marked 8.15 — the sort of number a correspondent writes down twice to be sure. Everything he tried came off, and what he did not try was not worth trying.
Back issues
From our football correspondent
Upbeat
Squad12 Oct 2026
28 days on the announcement, and a year of quiet, unwatched rehabilitation behind it. AC Milan lose a player for a season; he loses something harder to name.
Squad12 Oct 2026
102 days out for Denzel Seedorf after a fracture
A bone, which is the one injury with a calendar attached. AC Milan will name a return date and, unusually for this business, will probably be right about it.
Squad12 Oct 2026
Form comes and goes; this has not gone. Lorenzo Torriani is 21, and the version of him training now would not have got into the side he was in a year ago.
Squad12 Oct 2026
Ardon Jashari has improved at 24, which nobody expected
Careers are supposed to plateau and then decline, and the players who ignore that are always the ones who were listening on the training ground. 3 points of it, over months, at an age where the direction normally only goes one way.
The dugout12 Oct 2026
The manager makes an example of Ardon Jashari
“If you cannot run for the shirt, somebody else will wear it.” No name was used and none was needed; every player in that room knew who it was for.
Market12 Oct 2026
Every press conference now starts and ends the same way: with Adrien Rabiot’s future. The manager has run out of new ways to say nothing.
Looking ahead12 Oct 2026
Napoli next, and one man in the AC Milan dressing room knows their training ground better than his own. The reception will tell him what they thought of him.
The dugout12 Oct 2026
Nothing in writing and nothing in public: a word about playing time, given face to face at AC Milan. The team sheets over the next month will show whether it was worth having.
Loan watch12 Oct 2026
6 appearances at Porto and the goals keep coming. AC Milan are watching this more closely than the borrowing club would like.
From our football correspondent
Upbeat
Squad5 Oct 2026
38 days on the announcement, and a year of quiet, unwatched rehabilitation behind it. AC Milan lose a player for a season; he loses something harder to name.
Squad5 Oct 2026
111 days out for Denzel Seedorf after a fracture
A bone, which is the one injury with a calendar attached. AC Milan will name a return date and, unusually for this business, will probably be right about it.
Squad5 Oct 2026
Diego Moreira is a better footballer than he was
Not a run of form — an actual step up, held for months. At 22 he is doing things at this level he could not do at the start of the season, and the coaching staff will tell you exactly which of them.
Squad5 Oct 2026
Adrien Rabiot was at the centre of it, and by the time it was pulled apart there were three or four others involved. Training grounds are small places and long seasons make them smaller.
Market5 Oct 2026
“I want to win things, and I would like to do it here.” Nothing has been demanded and nothing has been threatened — but a boardroom at AC Milan hears a sentence like that exactly as it was built.
Player ratings5 Oct 2026
Successful dribbles: 21. He went past people as if he had been told there was a prize for it, and by the end the full-back had stopped pretending to try.
Match3 Oct 2026
Whatever happens, AC Milan do not lose
6 games unbeaten now. Some were earned and some were survived, but a habit is forming — and habits are the hardest thing in football to play against.
The dugout5 Oct 2026
There is no complaint available here and everybody involved knows it, which does not make the walk to the bench any shorter. Form is the only currency in football that cannot be borrowed against.
The dugout5 Oct 2026
“There are things I liked and things we will be doing on Tuesday until they are right.” 0‑0, and a manager who had already decided what Tuesday looked like.