Identifying Alessio Romagnoli's Areas of Improvement at AC Milan

Alessio Romagnoli was arguably the most important signing AC Milan made during the summer transfer window. After protracted negotiations, he joined the club from Roma for €25 million as Sinisa Mihajlovic sought to bolster a vulnerable defence.

However Milan’s defensive issues have remained in spite of Romagnoli’s presence. The Rossoneri have the joint-second-weakest defensive in Serie A, with only Carpi (19) having conceded more than the 14 they have allowed so far.

Romagnoli has had difficulties at times, such as his sending off in Milan’s away loss to Genoa, but generally he has shown incredible maturity to handle such a high-profile move to a club as ambitious as Milan at the tender age of 20.

That sending off apart, he has looked solid on the left side of a central-defensive pairing within Mihajlovic’s back four. Furthermore, he appears to be getting better with every passing game, with his latest display in Milan’s draw with Torino his best of the campaign.

His presence alone may not be enough to improve Milan’s back line, but Romagnoli is certainly relishing the challenge and may well be growing personally as a result.

Statistics are a valuable way of indicating a player’s individual capability and can thus be used to help measure Romagnoli’s development by comparing his Milan performances to his displays for Sampdoria last season.

However, before we make these statistical comparisons, we must first take into account certain variable factors.

Firstly, while Mihajlovic was also Romagnoli’s coach with Sampdoria last season and has employed the same formations (4-3-1-2 and 4-3-3) with Milan as he did there, the defensive lines are slightly different.

With Milan, Mihajlovic tends to encourage a slightly higher, more aggressive defensive line. This means there is greater space in behind for opponents to try and exploit and that the defenders must also possess nous in one-on-one situations.

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Romagnoli has also had to deal with being one of the pillars of an ever-changing back line. With Sampdoria, he played alongside Matias Silvestre every week, but he has had three different partners in the opening eight league games of this season with Milan.

Rodrigo Ely, Cristian Zapata and Alex have all been given starts as Mihajlovic searches, rather forlornly, for a consistent partner for Romagnoli.

Despite having to deal with inconsistency and a more influential role, Romagnoli has shown improvement in several areas.

He has maintained his tackling success rate of 50 per cent and has begun to win more of his aerial duels. With the Blucerchiati, he won just 60.98 per cent of his aerial battles; since joining Milan, he has won 84.21 per cent.

This statistic in isolation could be assigned various meanings, but one thing it clearly points out is that Romagnoli is winning more of his attempted headers. This suggests he is maturing into a more imposing force.

Standing at 6'2", Romagnoli is tall but quite slight for a central defender. His technical ability has always impressed, though he seems to lack the grizzled edge of more experienced compatriots such as Juventus trio Giorgio Chiellini, Leonardo Bonucci and Andrea Barzagli.

He doesn’t appear any different physically, so his improved aerial statistics could instead point toward a development in his reading of the game.

This is backed up by other statistics. For example, he now makes 2.67 interceptions per game as opposed to the 2.10 he made at Sampdoria. This indicates Romagnoli is improving in his awareness of his positioning and movement when in the defensive phase.

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Romagnoli has also shown enhanced capacity to contribute to building attacks. He has maintained an 83 per cent pass-completion rate since moving to Milan but has done so while making more passes (36.33 per game compared to 31.76 last season).

In addition, he is averaging 0.17 key passes per game with Milan, a slender improvement on his 0.10 rate with Sampdoria. These figures show Romagnoli is far from fazed by the greater technical requirements of Milan players.

He’s still very young and has a huge amount of potential left to fulfil, but Romagnoli is showing clear signs of development despite the uncertainty around him in Milan's defence.

All statistics kindly provided by Squawka.