Milan and Napoli take Italian rivalry into the Champions League

Luciano Spalletti's team have stormed ahead in Serie A but AC Milan have pedigree in European competitions

AC Milan's Rafael Leao celebrates scoring against Napoli at the Stadio Diego Armando Maradona in Naples. Reuters

An unfamiliar view of the future looms over San Siro, Milan, on Wednesday. It is a semi-final place in club football’s most esteemed competition.

Of the 22 AC Milan and Napoli footballers likely to be reaching for it at kick-off, only one, Milan’s Olivier Giroud, has been in that territory before.

At the same time, the players of Milan and Napoli, contesting the first leg of the all-Italian last-eight clash in a Champions League that has advertised Serie A’s renaissance in the European club hierarchy, might feel so familiar with one another as to be uncomfortable about it.

Milan, Italy’s league champions, need only look at the domestic table to know how utterly their defence of the title has been shattered: Napoli tower 22 points above them in Serie A.

Easy then, to pick the favourites? Not if you measure the clubs by their history, and weigh up whatever aura transmits around a youngish squad for being at a club who have won seven European Cups in their storied history, as Milan have. And then compare that with a Napoli who have never before reached a European Cup quarter-final and none of whose players, man for man, have gone beyond that stage in the competition with their previous employers.

Even to update the form guide is to challenge and confuse the hierarchy of the current domestic rankings. Only ten days ago Milan went to Naples and won 4-0.

How to explain that out-of-the-blue thrashing suffered by Serie A’s runaway leaders in their own stadium where in the course of a brilliant season, they have put four goals past Liverpool, four past Ajax, beaten Juventus 5-1 and last month swept away Eintracht Frankfurt 3-0 – and 5-0 on aggregate – to stride into the last eight of the Champions League?

Napoli must hope that dismantling by Milan can be filed in the archive as an isolated accident, a symptom of complacency in a league campaign that, with a 16-point advantage over their nearest challengers, has been all but won for many weeks.

Milan must hope that 4-0 win acts as some sort of template to guide them through this evening and through the second leg at the Diego Armando Maradona stadium next Tuesday.

“We need to feel confident, certainly,” said Stefano Pioli, the Milan head coach, “and our league matches against Napoli [who won 2-1 at San Siro in September] tell us we are both strong sides, and these will be tough, balanced games.

"We have to be ready to work out what spaces there are to exploit, but what we can’t do is expect to photo-copy of what happened in the last league game. This is a different competition, and the opposition could well line up differently.”

Napoli will be hoping forward Victor Osimhen regains fitness soon. AFP

Napoli and their head coach Luciano Spalletti would like above all to make one major change to his XI from that surreal evening: He’d like a fully fit Victor Osimhen, the talismanic centre-forward and the leading scorer in Serie A.

Osimhen sustained a muscle problem while on international duty with Nigeria last month and, although he is back in light training, he may have to wait until the second leg to take part in the tie, with Giovanni Simeone primed to spearhead the forward line.

Pioli will stick closely to the line-up whose youth was on vibrant show in Naples – the four goals there came from three 23-year-olds: two for Rafael Leao, one from Brahim Diaz, another from substitute Alex Saelemaekers – and whose know-how at this level of European competition is concentrated in Simon Kjaer, the veteran defender, and in the evergreen Giroud, a Champions League gold-medallist with Chelsea in 2021. Zlatan Ibrahimovic, 41, misses out with injury.

“What’s important is which Milan we see,” said Pioli, hinting at the exasperating inconsistency that has undermined the defence of their league title. They were solid and stoic enough to keep Tottenham Hotspur goalless over two legs in the last-16 phase of the Champions League, squeezing through 1-0; yet no team in the top half of Italy’s top division, where Milan are fourth, have leaked more goals.

“We’re always talking about Milan’s fantastic history, with the European Cup wins,” said Pioli. That history should not daunt his young players, he suggested, but they should focus on the more recent past, and the uptick in their European fortunes.

Last season, Milan finished bottom of their Champions League group.

“This season we have done much better,” Pioli points out. “We now know the difficulties. We won the scudetto because we believed in it so strongly. That belief can be a good thing again.”