Gerry Cardinale has told Milan to change how they treat their young players, pushing for a clearer path from the academy into the first team, according to Gazzetta dello Sport.
Milan's recent model has been to buy potential from outside rather than grow it at home, and the Mattia Liberali episode showed the cost of that approach. Liberali, a gifted attacking midfielder from the academy, left for Catania in search of the minutes and trust he wasn't getting at Milanello. Losing a homegrown talent to a Serie C side is exactly the kind of outcome a club with RedBird's spending power shouldn't be accepting, and it's the case study behind Cardinale's demand.
The reference point now is Davide Bartesaghi. The left-back went from the youth setup to the first team without a loan detour and looked ready straight away, and Gazzetta frame him as the template: if you're good enough, you're old enough. That's the principle Cardinale wants applied more widely.
The message isn't that Milan should stop spending, they've already committed real money this summer. It's that recruitment should run on two tracks at once, external signings alongside genuine internal promotion, with Milan Futuro built to feed the senior squad rather than sit as a separate project.
The names to watch, per the report, are Andrej Kostic, Francesco Camarda, Alphadjo Cissè, Aurelien Guernier, Yahya Idrissi and Lorenzo Ossola. Camarda is the most familiar of them, a striker who has already trained and featured with the first team and carries the heaviest expectations of the group.
The obvious tension is that promoting kids requires patience, and Milan under Max Allegri are chasing an immediate return to the Champions League. A youngster's development curve rarely matches a manager fighting for results now, and Bartesaghi worked partly because he was ready. Whether the next Camarda or Kostic gets the same runway will come down to the coach, not the owner.