Milan's threadbare XI could not survive Ferencvaros despite Amorim's reasoning
Ruben Amorim explained why Adrien Rabiot had to captain a patched-together Milan side against Ferencvaros, but a 2-0 home defeat exposed exactly the depth problem he was trying to solve.
Milan lost 2-0 to Ferencvaros at San Siro in the Europa League, a result that undercut the explanations Ruben Amorim had given before kick-off for the team he picked, according to the Guardian.
The defeat means Ferencvaros maintain a perfect record in the competition, the Guardian reported, while Milan remain stuck in the group phase's lower half after two heavy early defeats were only briefly interrupted by a 4-1 win at RB Salzburg.
Before the match Amorim had framed the game as a chance to show strength in depth, telling Sky Sport Italia, as reported by Football Italia, that the feeling inside the squad was good after Saturday's 3-1 derby win over Inter and that the Europa League tie was "massive for us".
That optimism had to be squared against a genuinely threadbare squad list. Mike Maignan was suspended after his sending-off in the 3-0 defeat to Bournemouth, and with Pietro Terracciano injured, the gloves went to third-choice goalkeeper Lorenzo Torriani, 21. Fikayo Tomori, Matteo Gabbia, Samuel Chukwueze, Ruben Loftus-Cheek and Alexis Saelemaekers were all unavailable, and Strahinja Pavlovic was rested after playing almost every minute of the season.
Why Rabiot got the armband
With Maignan, Luka Modric and Christian Pulisic all absent, Amorim turned to Rabiot's experience to captain the side, saying that if something went wrong on the pitch Milan needed "someone on the pitch who can lead them, give that sense of security".
That reasoning reflects a familiar tension for coaches managing a thin squad across three competitions: the need to protect fitness without diluting the leadership and organisational structure that keeps a patched-together XI coherent. Amorim was explicit that he did not regard the selection as a rotation for its own sake, insisting Milan "want to win this game and the next game after it", not simply manage minutes.
That is a meaningful distinction. Rotating personnel while still fielding a team built to win is far harder than resting players and accepting a weaker result, and it is precisely the gap that caught Milan out against a Ferencvaros side with nothing to lose and a flawless record behind them.
Diawara's switch and the defensive reshuffle
Sankhoun Diawara had played as a full-back in the derby against Inter but was moved into central defence for the Ferencvaros match, taking Pavlovic's place alongside Koni De Winter. Amorim admitted the absence of Pavlovic felt unusual given his importance to the side, but said Diawara had "proved in the last two games he is competitive and up to the task, both in central defence and on the flank".
Shifting a player between full-back and centre-back within the space of a week is itself a marker of squad strain rather than tactical flexibility chosen from strength. It asks a defender to adapt his positioning, his relationship with midfield cover and his reading of wide threats almost overnight, and against a Ferencvaros team that came into the match with a 100 per cent record, the margin for that kind of adjustment to go wrong was always going to be thin.
The result bore that out. A 2-0 home defeat to a side unbeaten in the competition is a heavy scoreline for a team that had just won a derby convincingly, and it leaves Amorim's pre-match language about strength in depth looking more aspirational than descriptive on the night itself.
A pattern repeating across competitions
This was the latest instance of Milan's form splitting sharply between Serie A and continental competition. The win over Inter arrived off the back of two heavy Europa League defeats in the first three rounds, interrupted only by that away win at Salzburg. The pattern suggests a squad that performs when at or near full strength domestically but struggles to replicate that level once injuries and suspensions force changes across multiple positions at once, as they did against Ferencvaros with a debutant-level goalkeeper, a reshuffled back line and a makeshift captain.
Elsewhere in the competition, Bournemouth extended their winning run to seven matches with a 3-1 victory away to a 10-man Sparta Prague side, a result that leaves Marco Rose's team on course for four wins from four and direct passage toward the knockout rounds, the Guardian reported.
For Milan, the defeat leaves little room for further slippage in the League Phase table. Amorim's own words before the game acknowledged as much: competitiveness across all competitions required proof of depth, and on this occasion that proof did not arrive. The next continental fixture will again test whether the players asked to deputise can do so without the collective structure cracking the way it did against Ferencvaros.