Why 15 Goals Is a Realistic Aim for AC Milan's Luiz Adriano in 2015/16 Serie A

Luiz Adriano chose the No. 9, the number worn by Filippo Inzaghi and Marco van Basten. The number, like the team, has been let down in recent years, going to Pato, then Alessandro Matri and Mattia Destro. It was even left vacant for a brief time.

The burden of the No. 9 has turned into a cancer. Adriano doesn’t care.

“The number nine shirt has an incredible charm and it’s time for it to be scoring goals again,” Adriano told La Gazzetta dello Sport (h/t Football Italia).

It’s just a matter of how many goals he will score.

The profile of Adriano is similar to his new teammate, Carlos Bacca. Both of them are your typical penalty-box poachers. There is some concern about how they will share the field, whether there is enough room and service for the both of them.

The 28-year-old Brazilian hit it off in Ukraine with Shakhtar Donetsk, becoming the club’s all-time leading scorer. But his goals tend to run like a tap: all at once or nothing at all.

He turned heads after scoring five goals in a Champions League match against BATE Borisov last October. He was briefly the top scorer in the competition.

But the goals were sparse after that.

“He tends to go missing in numerous games and his passing leaves a lot to be desired,” wrote ESPNFC’s Michael Yokhin.

So it is fair to say Adriano will need support from players like Andrea Bertolacci and Keisuke Honda to perform at his best.

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It’s unlikely that he will be the primary target, as Milan did not spend €30 million on Bacca for nothing. Luiz Adriano came as a secondary option, much like Robinho did in the summer of 2010 after the arrival of Zlatan Ibrahimovic.

Funny enough, Ibrahimovic may soon arrive this summer, as president Silvio Berlusconi told Milan Channel earlier this month about his desire to see Ibrahimovic “playing again in our shirt” (h/t Goal.com). And that would also affect Adriano’s standing in the team.

Even Robinho managed to score 14 league goals that first season, including an important strike away at Brescia toward the end of the campaign that all but sealed the club’s 18th Scudetto.

But there is a nagging feeling that, like Robinho in his latter years with Milan, Adriano will not be able to truly flourish at Milan.

Adriano partly chose Milan because of their “great tradition of Brazilian players,” he said to Italian media (h/t Goal.com). It’s just that Brazilian players have not thrived so much in recent years.

Nonetheless, he should score in the double digits this season. He managed to do that in six consecutive seasons in all competitions with Shakhtar.

His first year with the Ukrainian club in 2007 was tough in many ways: cold, lonely and foreign. It was his first professional experience in Europe.

With Milan, it should not take so long to adapt. Even though Serie A is a different proposition altogether, Adriano appears to have the right mentality heading into the new campaign. He has a coach in Sinisa Mihajlovic whom he called the “professor” in the interview with Gazzetta. He has Brazilian teammates Alex and Rodrigo Ely to help him along, and he even spoke to Pato for advice.

The environment is there for the newest Brazilian to succeed and perhaps lift the curse from the number on his back.