MN: Why the interest in Reijnders and Pulisic will be a test of RedBird’s ambition

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·12 de mayo de 2025

MN: Why the interest in Reijnders and Pulisic will be a test of RedBird’s ambition

With the summer window approaching, reports about interest in AC Milan’s star players are beginning to ramp up again.

As MilanNews write, it is a situation that Milan fans have been used to living for years now but with a bit more ease than this time around. Why? Since Milan returned to being competitive on several fronts, no important player from the first team had been sold in the summer.

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This was until Paolo Maldini’s sacking in the summer of 2023, the same one that saw Milan accept an offer from Newcastle United for Sandro Tonali. Leaving aside the issue of the ban, which was evidently a big problem that the Rossoneri avoided, a star was sold abroad for the first time in years.

Does this mean that in previous years the key Milanplayers were off the radar of other important clubs? Absolutely not. The answer was given today by Zvonimir Boban in an interview with Andrea Longoni.

“And the Tonali thing had a big impact, Paolo [Maldini] would never have let him go. We are looking at a difference of 70 million, I don’t know how much specifically. A lot of money but it should never have come to Milan because Tonali shouldn’t have left Milan,” he said.

Reijnders: Another dilemma?

Was it the right or wrong move to sell Tonali? Could the money earned have been invested better? These are all more than legitimate questions and considerations and on which there are many different points of view.

Today the warning signs started going off again because of reports about Manchester City’s concrete interest in Reijnders and Christian Pulisic’s desire to know the club’s plans for next season. Now the time has come for the club to offer assurances.

if you have a minimum of sporting ambition, especially after two seasons in which your eternal city rivals have thrown a Scudetto in your face and have reached a second Champions League final in three years, the best players must be kept.

Not only that, but the stars must be put in the conditions to express themselves at their best, intelligently enriching the player pool that surrounds them. That is most likely what Reijnders and Pulisic will be searching for guarantees about.

Photo by Marco Luzzani/Getty Images

From Casa Milan, the line has been coming for years about how the club is healthy, self-sustaining and with accounts that everyone would envy, almost like pioneers of the Italian football movement. Now the much vaunted men of accounts will have to prove that they deserve all this self-praise.

It is easy to remedy the disastrous failure to enter the Champions League, the result of failed sporting choices, by selling the prized pieces. Everyone is capable of doing that. In times of difficulty, the group must be united, those who deserve to be valued must be made responsible and valued.

Reijnders is one of these. Midfielders with 15 goals for the season (and counting) are not common in Europe, selling him would be another own-goal and yet another demonstration that RedBird Capital have not yet understood what it means to own a football club of such stature.