Milan have agreed a deal for Sankhoun Diawara and are set to make the 20-year-old French defender their third signing of the summer, with Fabrizio Romano confirming the "here we go" on Thursday night.
The interesting part is how quickly this one came together. Diawara wasn't on anyone's radar as a Milan target until two days before it was done, when it emerged the club were trying to gatecrash his proposed move to Rangers. They pulled it off. For a reported fee of around €2m, that's the kind of low-risk gamble Milan should be making more often, plucking a young talent out from under a rival at the last moment.
There was early talk that Diawara would slot into Milan Futuro, but that never quite added up. He's a France U19 international who started regularly for a side that won promotion to Ligue 1 last season, and players with that profile don't usually get parked in the reserves. The current word is that he'll join the first-team group as cover behind Strahinja Pavlović.
On the pitch, the appeal is easy to see. Diawara is a left-footed centre-back who's already physically developed for his age, and the numbers back up the eye test: 67% of his duels won and 74.1% of his aerial duels won last season. Being left-footed matters for this squad specifically, because a back three needs a natural left-sided centre-back and Pavlović is the only senior option who ticks that box.
That profile is why the suggestions of him as a wing-back feel off. Everything about him, the frame, the aerial dominance, the left foot, points to the left of a back three rather than a role that asks him to get up and down the flank.
The fee weren't officially confirmed, but at the ~€2m being reported this is a signing with almost no downside. If Diawara develops into genuine cover for Pavlović, Milan solved a squad-depth problem for pocket change and beat Rangers to it.