Milan finished last season with 53 league goals — fewer than any other top-six side in Serie A. That number explains everything about what Ruben Amorim is walking into, and why the summer at San Siro is going to be one of the most consequential in recent memory.
The new manager inherits a forward line that didn't work. Santiago Gimenez flopped after his move from Feyenoord. Christopher Nkunku's debut Serie A season was quietly forgettable. Christian Pulisic, who looked like a genuine find after arriving from Chelsea, went six months without scoring in the league. And Rafael Leao, supposed to be the cornerstone of everything, spent most of the campaign looking like a man with one eye already on the exit door.
There's a lot to fix. The question is how much of it is fixable with the players already there.
The Leao question is the only one that actually matters
Everything else in this rebuild is secondary to what happens with Leao. Several Premier League clubs are circling, and after Milan missed out on Champions League football, the temptation to leave is obvious. His cryptic social media post about his future last month didn't exactly scream "I'm staying."
But Amorim is reportedly planning to sit down with his compatriot when he returns from the World Cup. Whether that conversation changes anything is genuinely uncertain. Leao is 27, still one of the more electric forwards in European football when he's engaged, and Amorim clearly believes he can get that version back. Building a new attack around a player who just had a dismal season requires a degree of faith — but it might also be Milan's most realistic path forward given the other available options.
If Leao goes, Milan's market value and their identity in attack go with him. His odds of staying have shortened since Amorim's arrival, but don't book it yet.
The striker problem doesn't have an obvious answer
Milan needed a reliable center-forward last season. They still do. Gimenez is likely to be moved on, which clears space but creates a new problem — who fills it?
Robert Lewandowski was the obvious answer. He isn't coming. Reports suggest the free agent Pole has agreed personal terms with Chicago Fire, which means Milan burned time on a target that was always a long shot. Now they're looking at Nicolo Zaniolo, who completed a permanent move to Udinese from Galatasaray and scored five goals in 32 Serie A appearances last season. That's not a striker. That's a gamble dressed up as a signing.
Francesco Camarda is back from a loan spell at Lecce and could get more responsibility next term. The 18-year-old is one of the more exciting young Italian strikers around, but asking him to solve a first-team goalscoring crisis immediately would be a stretch. Francisco Trincao from Sporting CP is another name being mentioned for the wide areas, contingent on sales happening first.
Pulisic, Nkunku, and the question of what to do with fading assets
Pulisic's contract expires next summer, which makes this transfer window Milan's last realistic chance to recoup anything meaningful. He's drawn interest from Liverpool and Tottenham, and a return to England makes sense on paper — he was genuinely good at San Siro in his first 18 months, just not recently. His dry spell since December, combined with some costly misses at critical moments, has eroded confidence on both sides.
Nkunku is a different situation. Only a year removed from leaving Chelsea, there's talk that new Blues boss Xabi Alonso has made tentative contact about a return to Stamford Bridge. That feels thin. A move to Roma, freshly back in the Champions League, sounds more grounded and more likely to actually happen.
Milan's midfield picture is equally unsettled — Modric has already said his goodbyes before heading to the World Cup with Croatia, while Rabiot and Fofana are both expected to follow him out. Allegri, now at Napoli, is keen on Rabiot.
Amorim is inheriting a squad that underperformed last season and is now losing several of its senior players at once. The 3-4-2-1 system he favours needs specific profiles, and right now Milan don't obviously have them. The rebuild is real, the budget is constrained by missing European football, and the answers in the market aren't clean. Fifty-three goals in a season tells you where Milan are. The summer will start to tell you where they're going.
