Living close to Milan – My evaluation of the challenges facing Malick Thiaw now at Newcastle United | OneFootball

Around this time last year, I was back on a budget flight from Italy to the UK – nothing anywhere near as fancy as the private jet guiding Malick Thiaw into the North East this week – and I’d been a second too slow to reply to the flight attendant; she’d just got done asking everyone in our aisle if we’d understood her safety instructions.

She took my delayed reaction as a cue to switch to Italian before I could even protest. Not to worry. There’d be a repeat demonstration in my “native language.”

I’d been living in Italy (close to Milan) for quite some time, but I didn’t risk pulling out my UK passport and letting her know I was perfectly English… and perfectly tired. I couldn’t tell if I’d have felt more sheepish for her or myself had I just opened my mouth and shattered the illusion, so instead I just nodded along like the good native Italian I was meant to play on that day.

That “I’ll be whatever you want me to be” scene reminds me of Thiaw’s three-year stay in Milan: He’s seen four different managers pass through the locker room. The defender’s been asked to go from man marking to zonal, then back again. From low block to high line… then back again. And from four men at the back to five.

Thiaw’s lived through more tactical changes in three years of Serie A football than most players see in the youth ranks of any country, and he’s also witnessed a Milan midfield completely broken up and sold for parts right in front of him. As a result, Thiaw’s career has gone nothing but sideways in Italian football.

Newcastle’s 35 million pound capture of the German defender represents a high-risk gamble, one that’s very similar to what Eddie Howe was trying to achieve with Lloyd Kelly last summer, though he was a free agent.

But it’s worth remembering that Malick Thiaw was the international prodigy that Milan signed in the summer of 2022, after they were beaten by none other than Newcastle United to their first-choice target Sven Botman in that same transfer window.

Both Botman and Thiaw ranked high on the list of transfer targets for (at the time) Milan director Paolo Maldini, a man who knows a thing or two about what it takes to be a defender at the highest level. So what will it take for Thiaw to turn the corner in this new chapter of his career?

Probably the only eye-grabbing set of numbers from Thiaw’s stay in Italian football are his possession stats. They both hint at the strength and limits of Thiaw’s character on the pitch; limits that Thiaw will have to learn to break through if he’s going to win over a Toon audience where Lloyd Kelly failed.

On the one hand, you can glance at a guy like Thiaw, who ranks in the extremely high percentile for keeping hold of the ball around Europe, and feel like he’s very useful at helping his side to play a controlled game at the back. Since the 2022/2023 season kicked off, only 6% of players in Europe’s top leagues are more accurate with their passing distribution. And yet that was also partially the appeal when Newcastle signed Lloyd Kelly last summer.

Although Kelly’s pass completion rate at Bournemouth was nothing like as steadily upward as Thiaw’s at Milan, both defenders contributed to their respective teams through their technical control of the ball. And therein lies a problem for these types of players: They can do dozens of tidy actions in the game that don’t stand out, and yet their mistakes are what grab the back page headlines when those fateful mistakes are made.

In Thiaw’s case it’s been events like the truly horrendous own-goal on the opening day of last season against Torino, where all Thiaw had to do was clear the ball first time. Instead, to the disbelief of everyone watching, the German decide to try taking a first touch on the goalline before clearing, and ended up tapping the ball across his own goal with his standing foot.

Mistakes like that tend to follow you around like a bad smell, unless you can learn some offensive weapons to your game to wipe out your mistakes. And that’s where I’m very optimistic that Fabian Schar can become the ideal mentor to Malick Thiaw, in a far more stable setup at Newcastle.

Fabian Schar and Dan Burn have simply played far more football than Thiaw over the last three years, and Schar’s growing influence over the Newcastle possession game shows in the numbers: Since Eddie Howe took charge of the team, Schar has seen his pass completion rate rise from 79.4% to 88.4% pass completion rate over the last three seasons.

Some of that will be down to tactical changes, but a lot of it down to Schar finding his place amongst that change. Schar’s 81% average pass completion rate over the last three years may be 10% lower than Thiaw’s, but the Swiss defender has attempted 41% more passes in that same period!

Fabian has simply played far more football and seen far more of the ball than Thiaw in the same period, without trading away too much safety in Schar’s game and delivering real impact on the scoreline: 9 goals and 6 assists from Schar since August 2022 until now, compared to Thiaw’s 1 assist in a Milan shirt over that same three-year period.

The numbers for shot-creating actions and goal-creating actions are also in a different league of influence between Schar and Thiaw: Schar ranking in with 143 shot-creating actions and 24 goal-creating actions since August 2022, compared to 55 shot-creating actions and just a mere 3 (three!) goal-creating actions from Malick Thiaw over the same three-year period.

In short: Thiaw is a controlled player but runs the risk of being far too safe a footballer. He could do well to learn from the guile of Schar’s game, then Thiaw will gain the power to mindwipe people’s collective memory of his mistakes in any given match.

While he showed flashes of more aggressive play during Paulo Fonseca’s brief tenure at Milan, the constant tactical changes at the Rossoneri never allowed him to develop consistency in that more progressive role. Thiaw has lived through four different managers and countless system changes in just three years, making it impossible to build the kind of sustained impact that Schär has developed at Newcastle.

Now finally moving on from new coach Massimiliano Allegri’s pleas for Thiaw to stay this summer, Malick finds welcome in a Newcastle squad that’s firmly rooted in the tactical imprint and stability of Eddie Howe.

Thiaw’s way into the team may be to guarantee Howe some control of the ball at the back, the kind that would help Newcastle to bait-and-switch opponents before the Magpies unleash the pace of their frontline on the counter. But it won’t be long before Howe, and teammates like Schär, push Thiaw to dig far deeper into his potential.