Only one Serie A team remains undefeated in 2023 and it is not the one you might assume. Napoli continue to swagger toward the Scudetto, 15 points clear at the top of Serie A, but they were beaten by Inter at the start of January. Monza drew with the Nerazzurri three days later and have not lost a game since 10 November.
A 1-0 win over Bologna on Sunday lifted them into the top half of the table. They are level on points with Juventus in ninth and while that situation owes to the Bianconeri’s points deduction, Monza have won both head-to-head games. Not bad for a club playing top-flight football for the first time.
OK, so this is not quite the underdog story it sounds like at a first hearing. Monza’s rapid ascent has been bankrolled by the former Milan owner – and former Italian prime minister – Silvio Berlusconi, who bought the club through his holding company Fininvest in 2018. His brother, Paolo, is the club president and Silvio’s long-time collaborator Adriano Galliani the vice-president and CEO.
Monza have been able to outspend most rivals on their climb from the third tier. Italian football finance website calcioefinanza.it calculated Fininvest’s total investment to reach Serie A at €116m, adding up the initial cost of purchasing the club with losses on the balance sheet since.
But money can also be spent poorly. Galliani’s connections and transfer market experience were just as essential. At Milan he was nicknamed ‘Condor’, a reference, as he tells it, to how he would swoop in like a bird of prey and snatch up a deal in the final days of each transfer window.
Galliani had a whole system back then, predicated on his belief that top clubs would always get themselves in a bind adding too many players during transfer windows, leaving bargains. Milan’s sales were always done as quickly as possible when a window opened, leaving him time to sit and wait for somebody else to panic.
The challenge at Monza has been different. At Milan, Galliani was mostly tweaking a successful side. Here, Galliani has built and rebuilt, constantly raising the level. Monza have relied heavily on loans with triggers that can make them into permanent deals: reaching the playoffs, securing promotion or, this season, avoiding the drop.
Upon reaching Serie A, Galliani tipped the old Condor model on its head, rushing to add high level know-how. Matteo Pessina and Stefano Sensi were signed in July, two players with Champions League experience and a combined 22 previous appearances for the Italian national team. So was Gianluca Caprari, a winger and forward who had scored 12 Serie A goals for Verona the season before.
The recruitment continued into early August, Pablo Mari arriving on loan from Arsenal, Andrea Petagna from Napoli and Marlon Santos from Shakthar Donetsk. We were not quite back to the 1980s, when Berlusconi’s Milan could scoop up Marco van Basten, Ruud Gullit and Carlo Ancelotti in a single summer but for a team making its first appearance on Italy’s highest stage it was quite some way to arrive.
The early results were disappointing. Monza lost their first five matches and drew the sixth, then fired manager Giovanni Stroppa – the man who had led them up from Serie B. Youth team coach Raffaele Palladino was promoted.
The next game was against Juventus. Monza won 1-0, with one of their Serie B holdovers, Christian Gytkjær, scoring the only goal. Palladino had not formally begun studying for his Uefa Pro Licence yet – he would be accepted on the course at Coverciano three days later – but had already claimed a win over Italy’s most domestically successful side.
Monza won the next two games, then lost a few, then picked up another pair of wins before the World Cup, clear improvement from that catastrophic start. Since January they have gone up another gear. Seven games and no defeats despite facing both Juventus and Inter in that run.
Berlusconi made a crass boast that he would deliver his players “a busload of prostitutes” if they could beat one of the big teams, later insisting that it had only been “locker-room joke”, even though he said it during an on-camera presentation to sponsors at a formal dinner. Monza drew 2-2 with Inter then won 2-0 away to Juventus.
Palladino had confessed his own surprise when beating the Bianconeri in September, but this time he came with a plan. He has cited Gian Piero Gasperini as one of his biggest coaching inspirations, and his Monza team plays with a similar intensity to Atalanta, pressing the ball aggressively, engaging in one-on-one duels, setting a high defensive line.
He did not abandon everything the team did under Stroppa but instead tweaked to better suit what he saw as the strengths of his team. Monza’s 3-5-2 became a 3-4-2-1 with Caprari typically stationed together alongside Pessina or another player behind the attack. Width became a priority, those two No 10s drifting in and out to overlap with the wing-backs.
Palladino met Marcelo Bielsa at Coverciano, the former Leeds coach hearing about his promotion at Monza and seeking him out to offer encouragement and ideas. “I’ve taken a lot of ideas from him,” said the Italian. “He always talks about ‘gambeta’, dribbling. That is the essence of football.”
Working as the team’s youth coach afforded Palladino plenty of time to observe the first-team squad and draw his own conclusions’ about players’ strengths. His greatest innovation so far might have been swapping Patrick Ciurria, a 28-year-old who previously played his entire career as a forward in the lower leagues, into a right wing-back. He opened the scoring away to Juventus from that position.
🎥⚪️🔴 Riviviamo insieme la bella vittoria di ieri contro il Bologna 👇🏼#ACMonza #Monza #BolognaMonza #SerieATIM pic.twitter.com/N9cmsqMiKv
— AC Monza (@ACMonza) February 13, 2023
Sunday’s visit to Bologna might not have captured the imagination in quite the same way but this still was a tricky fixture. The Rossoblu had picked up 10 points from their previous four games.
But Monza took all three points with an unlikely goal from journeyman wingback Giulio Donati – just the fourth of his career at 33. It was set up by what might best be described as a very Petagna run into the box, the centre-forward shedding one defender with a neat turn only to get distracted and forget to get his feet ready to shoot. He walked the ball into the goalkeeper and it rebounded straight into Donati’s path.
Perhaps it was emblematic, too, of where Monza are right now, a team that still has plenty of flaws but is finding ways to win thanks to good coaching that allows players to find themselves in the right spots at the right times. There was some backs-to-the-wall defending before the end, and perhaps Bologna might have equalised if they were more ruthless.
A couple of months ago, Palladino gave an interview to Corriere dello Sport in which he shared a wish that more teams would give young coaches a chance. “I think above all that Italian football needs to have a bit more courage,” he said. “You learn by messing up sometimes.”
We are still waiting for Palladino to mess up. For now, his Monza team just keeps hitting new heights.
Milan 1-0 Torino, Empoli 2-2 Spezia, Lecce 1-1 Roma, Lazio 0-2 Atalanta, Udinese 2-2 Sassuolo, Bologna 0-1 Monza, Juventus 1-0 Fiorentina, Sampdoria 0-0 Inter
| Pos | Team | P | GD | Pts |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Napoli | 22 | 39 | 59 |
| 2 | Inter Milan | 22 | 15 | 44 |
| 3 | Atalanta | 22 | 17 | 41 |
| 4 | Roma | 22 | 10 | 41 |
| 5 | AC Milan | 22 | 8 | 41 |
| 6 | Lazio | 22 | 18 | 39 |
| 7 | Torino | 22 | -1 | 30 |
| 8 | Udinese | 22 | 5 | 30 |
| 9 | Juventus | 22 | 17 | 29 |
| 10 | Monza | 22 | -2 | 29 |
| 11 | Bologna | 22 | -4 | 29 |
| 12 | Empoli | 22 | -7 | 27 |
| 13 | Lecce | 22 | -3 | 24 |
| 14 | Fiorentina | 22 | -6 | 24 |
| 15 | Sassuolo | 22 | -7 | 24 |
| 16 | Salernitana | 22 | -17 | 21 |
| 17 | Spezia | 22 | -18 | 19 |
| 18 | Verona | 22 | -13 | 17 |
| 19 | Sampdoria | 22 | -26 | 11 |
| 20 | Cremonese | 22 | -25 | 8 |
