AC Milan: Would Selling Mario Balotelli or Stephan El Shaarawy Benefit the Club?

Two years ago, AC Milan's front line boasted one of the three or four best players in the game today.  Zlatan Ibrahimovic was running roughshod over Serie A, scoring 42 goals and assisting 22 times in league play over two seasons.  He even added nine goals in 16 games in the Champions League—a stage where he had been inconsistent in his career.

Then, on July 17, 2012, the walls crashed in.  Desperate to pare down their wage bill, Milan sold Ibrahimovic to Paris Saint-Germain in a package deal with defender Thiago Silva.

While the wage books may have been balanced, the sale did nothing to help Milan on the field.  From the day of the sale on, Milan spent a total of €12 million, €7 million of it included in a swap deal with Inter involving Antonio Cassano and Giampaolo Pazzini.

Pazzini was the most valuable part of the window for the Rossoneri, scoring 15 goals in the league and helping the team to an improbable comeback to secure a spot in the Champions League.  The rest of the players acquired in the window—loan deals for Cristian Zapata and Bojan Krkic and purchases of M'Baye Niang (undisclosed) and Nigel de Jong (€5 million)—were inconsistent, injured or nonexistent.

Milan will soon be faced with a similar decision with its current duo of young forwards.  Do they sell one—or both—of the pair of Stephan El Shaarawy and Mario Balotelli, or do they hang onto them and let them develop the chemistry everyone was hoping they would?

The former option could give them the financial ammunition to retool the squad into a better unit the way Roma and Napoli did this year when selling Erik Lamela and Edinson Cavani, respectively.  The latter could give them the most dangerous forward tandem in the league—but still leave the team lacking quality and depth from the midfield back.

Of the two, Balotelli would be the easiest to justify selling.  Despite his incredible run after arriving at the San Siro in January, his off-field problems continue to manifest—to the point that Milan has assigned him a minder.  Recently, his play on the field has hit a skid as well.  He hasn't scored a goal since Milan's October 1 Champions League match against Ajax and hasn't scored in the league since a week before that.  He does have an assist in that span, but he's also garnered three yellow cards.

El Shaarawy is contributing little on the field as well, although his lack of productivity is due to injury.  The youngster was rated at €30 million or more during his torrid start to 2012-13 but has only scored four times in all competitions since the end of last season's winter break.  Milan's brass must be asking themselves if it's worth seeing if he can regain his form or if the best option is selling him for as much as possible and seeing him potentially fail elsewhere.

On the other side of the argument, both are still fantastically talented.  If Balotelli could keep his head and focus he'd probably already be on the list of the top six or seven forwards in the world.  El Shaarawy's potential is seemingly unlimited, particularly if he's played on the left wing, where his ability to cut inside to both create and finish brings to mind a sort of Cristiano Ronaldo Lite.  They're the best forwards on the team, and to part with them could mean setting an already fading team back years.

In the end, there really isn't a clear-cut yes-or-no answer to this question.  Selling either of the two talented forwards would deprive the club of extraordinarily talented players, but it could also give the team the means to reinvent itself and emerge from the depths of their struggles, the way the clever use of Bosman transfers allowed Juventus to rise out of the ashes of Calciopoli.

But that scenario only works if the team actually spends the money they make on a sale.  Some of the €63 million megasale of Ibrahimovic and Silva was spent on Balotelli that winter, but it was a paltry fraction of what could have been used to balance out the extreme talent drop.  By comparison, Aurelio De Laurentiis took a similar sum from his sale of Cavani this summer and turned it into four impact players for Napoli.

Milan didn't go that route, and there are reasons why.  Club owner Silvio Berlusconi has denied that his personal legal troubles are impacting the way the team operates, but in the opinion of this writer he is blowing smoke.  Milan's abrupt shift in transfer policy—from a team that solved their problems with money to a team that sold before it spent—coincides closely with when Berlusconi's serious legal problems began.

If the owner's financial position is compromised by his personal matters, it may be that any sale of Balotelli or El Shaarawy will be made not for the purpose of rebuilding, but just to keep the team going.  If that's the case, they're doomed.

Selling one of their two prized young strikers could be Milan's ticket back into contention in Serie A.  It's likely that one of them will go in the near-to-intermediate future.  The question of whether it will benefit the club, however, will only be answered when fans see how the proceeds are used.