Gianluigi Donnarumma's return to face AC Milan: Why Italian fans still hold a grudge against the PSG keeper

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On Tuesday PSG will visit AC Milan at San Siro in one of the most important games of the UEFA Champions League's group stage. However, all the eyes will be on the comeback of Gianluigi Donnarumma in Milan, the city where everything started around eight years ago. The Rossoneri fans, after supporting him for six years, felt betrayed when he decided to leave and join Paris Saint-Germain as a free agent, but there is something more because the story between Donnarumma and AC Milan was anything but simple.

Let's work backwards and start at the end, when Donnarumma left AC Milan in 2021. The side, coached by Stefano Pioli, reached second place in Serie A and qualified for the UEFA Champions League's group stages, but their crucial win away against Atalanta also became the last game for Donnarumma as an AC Milan player. Only a few days later, the club announced the decision to not extend the deal of Donnarumma and signed French goalkeeper Mike Maignan from Lille, who became one of the key players who would win the Scudetto in 2021-22.

The choice to not extend the deal of Donnarumma was surprising for many, but it happened after many months of negotiations between the director of the club, Paolo Maldini, and the agent of the player Mino Raiola. Those negotiations never got finalized for multiple reasons, as Donnarumma's current age, Enzo Raiola, said to TuttoSport in a recent interview: "The only thing that Mino has always made clear for Donnarumma's renewal was this, ;We will never take away the boy as free agent, but he would like Milan to qualify for the Champions League.'"

"On May 2, 2021 we had a meeting in Genoa with Maldini. In Mino's mind there was the idea to talk about the situation because Milan had not yet qualified the Champions League and the alternative, given that we didn't want to take Donnarumma away as a free agent, was to continue with another club, Juventus, who would have resolved the situation with an exchange of players or with a fee".

In that meeting Maldini announced the decision of the club to not extend the contract of Donnarumma and to sign another goalkeeper. That was the last time the two sides talked about it, but that was only the last episode of a complicated relationship. AC Milan fans, in general, didn't like the fact that he didn't extend the contract regardless the Champions League qualification, that he wanted some guarantees to stay and also that he was ready to sign a deal with Juventus.

Donnarumma made his debut with AC Milan when he was sixteen years old, in October 2015, when former coach Sinisa Mihajlovic decided to start him instead of Diego Lopez against Sassuolo. From that moment on, his career quickly became one of the most successful of the recent era of Italian soccer and he became the youngest player to play 100 Serie A games.

I didn't take long for tensions to arise, however, when in the summer 2017, a new owner, Yonghong Li, took over AC Milan from the former Italian PM and businessman Silvio Berlusconi. Raiola didn't trust the new property and had some issues with the former sport director Massimiliano Mirabelli, who started to talk about the new contract that was expiring in the summer 2018. Raiola told the former director in that summer that his intention was to not extend the deal of the goalkeeper, opening the possibility of leaving immediately, if AC Milan didn't want to lose Donnarumma as free agent one year later.

Raiola wanted to know more about the future of AC Milan and didn't trust the new owners. In this case, he was right, and the Elliott Management Corporation took over AC Milan in the spring 2018 after Chinese owner Yonghong Li had financial challenges and couldn't keep the control of the club.

Summer 2017 was the first time that Donnarumma was disputed by some fans following the U21 Euro in Poland. At 18 years old, Donnarumma saw some fans throwing fake banknotes to him before the game started. A few days after, when the U21 Euro finished, the Italian goalkeeper extended his deal with the Rossoneri until the summer of 2021. From that moment on, the tension decreased, but suddenly escalated in the spring 2021, before the player left Italian soccer and joined PSG as a free agent. Donnarumma played 251 games with AC Milan and left the Rossoneri when he was only 22 years old.

On Tuesday, Donnarumma will play for the first time against his former club in Milan. The Rossoneri fans are preparing a similar welcome to the one that their crosstown rivals Inter prepared for Romelu Lukaku. In that case, Inter won and Lukaku failed to score. AC Milan fans hope that the outcome of the game will be similar, also considering the importance of the match.