Milan cannot get their outgoing business moving, and until players leave the incomings stay frozen, according to Corriere dello Sport.
The bottleneck sits with the management team Gerry Cardinale appointed just after mid-June, a group whose careers have been spent, in the paper's words, "exclusively in the scouting department." Selling is a different craft, and the concern from the start was whether directors built for spotting talent could shift the surplus that funds the rebuild.
The list of players on the market is long: Fikayo Tomori, Pervis Estupiñán, Ruben Loftus-Cheek, Youssouf Fofana, Samuele Ricci, Yunus Musah, Santiago Giménez and Rafael Leão. None of them, at the moment, is close to leaving.
Offers cannot be conjured out of nothing, but experience helps in placing players nobody is queuing for. Corriere points to Igli Tare as the contrast, crediting the former sporting director with what it calls "minor miracles" in raising funds last summer.
The knock-on effect is the one that matters. With no sales, there is no room to buy, and that leaves the coach working with a squad that does not yet fit what he wants on the pitch.
Cardinale, the paper says, had "promised explicitly to support him" with signings early, rather than dragging the business into late August as Milan have done in recent windows. That promise is now running into a market the ownership appears to have underestimated.
Milan open the Serie A season in 20 days against Ignazio Abate's Torino, with the squad still in Perth. The mood on tour is described as calm and confident, but the calendar is not waiting for the sales department to catch up.
From here, the pressure is on Cardinale's directors to prove they can close deals, because every incoming target depends on them clearing the decks first.