The Central Defender Dilemma

Romagnoli, what do we know about him? Who are the replacements? And how much they cost?

In the last month Milan’s mercato has been a pain for all rossonero fans. Now, with the money from Mr Bee to spend, Galliani has mentioned that our mercato’s focus is on signing a good central defender. Which for me is, more important than Witsel and if Galliani manages to sign a good defender, he could focus on signing a Midfielder like Witsel – who our lovely readers choosed as winner in our Witsel vs Gündogan poll.

Looking at the market in the last 5 years you can actually see that there’re no good defenders that are cheap out there, it’s like PSG got the last good one with Thiago Silva. After that you can see clubs paying so much for mediocre young defenders that might turn up to be great like Marquinhos £27m, David Luiz £50m and Thiago Silva £35.5m and ironically enough, they all moved to mega-rich Ligue 1 champions Paris Saint-Germain.

Now looking at the market in the last few years, you can see some more names are edging closer to the surface without you being forced to finance your rivals mercato with more than €45 Million. The list is long but I picked out some of the good names who are close to Roma’s Romagnoli and it’s like this: Nastasic, Utmanti, Stefan Savic, Ömer Toprak and at the end my personal favourites Aymeric Laporte and Inigo Martinez. 

So what’s so special about Romagnoli and his €30M price tag? If you think about it it’s only €10M less than the price we sold our Thiago Silva for, who was and still is one of the top three defenders out there “but as always we sell for cheap like idiots”.

We all know that the Romagnoli played for Sampdoria last season loaned from Roma and that he excelled in Serie A “which I agree with most of you”. But seeing Milan Management and Mihajlovic pushing so much for the player just because he supervised Romagnoli last year doesn’t justify him to keep Galliani under fire to pay that much for the player which we all agree no matter what, is valued at €25m and not a penny more. As we aren't the experts here I believe that Milan don’t want to pay that much for a defender to try him out in Serie A “which is the most tactical league in the world”. Paying €20m or more for any foreigner will start a fierce discussion between the new HC and the management if results don’t come that our “NEW” project really needs right now.

I would love it if Galliani snaps AS Roma at the last minute. It’s so obvious that they are playing hard ball so they can cash in as much as they can to spend on this mercato. Maybe Milan will consider one of the names we mentioned before, but no matter what will happen, I can assure you that next Serie A season is going to be wild and prepare yourselves for a Grand AC Milan as we are coming baby.