Coppa Italia final: Reijnders and Milan have shot at redemption, while Bologna chase first trophy since 1974

Smoke will plume into the Roman sky again on Wednesday night. The conclave will move from St Peter’s to the Stadio Olimpico, where a group of calciatori (22 footballers) will take the place of cardinals and decide who gets to stand triumphant on a balcony amid a cheering crowd.

Less than a week after an American was elected Pope for the first time, Milan and Bologna have the opportunity to hold the golden chalice known as the Coppa Italia after what feels like an eternity. Milan haven’t laid hands on it since 2003 when Paolo Maldini thrust it into the air just days after hoisting the Champions League trophy at Old Trafford. For Bologna, the wait has been even longer — so long that Christian Vieri’s father, Bob, was part of the team that won a penalty shootout against Palermo in 1974.

Winning the competition would mean different things to its participants. Results-wise, Milan are finishing the season strongly. They’re on a run of four consecutive victories in the league. But Tijjani Reijnders, arguably Milan’s player of the season, does not believe a second piece of silverware would save his team’s season.

Sergio Conceicao, the Milan coach, would become the first manager since Carlo Ancelotti to lead the team to a couple of trophies in a single campaign. He has belatedly struck on a formula that kind of works, lining the team up in a 3-4-3. However, even he would probably think twice about performing another rendition of his cigar-puffing dance in the dressing room, as he did in Riyadh in January when his team came back from 2-0 down to beat Inter 3-2 in the Supercoppa Italiana.

Milan are ninth in Serie A and feel that while Wednesday’s game might help restore some dignity and lay a foundation for next year, it won’t be enough to turn a bad season into a good one.

“No, no, no,” Reijnders insists to The Athletic. “We cannot say it was a good season. Of course, you would have won two trophies, but in Milan you have to compete for the Scudetto and go further in the Champions League. That didn’t happen. Luckily, we have the final and we can add another trophy to this club. But no. It’s mixed feelings.”

In Bologna’s case, there is no such doubt. Aside from the 1998 Intertoto Cup, they haven’t won anything since.

“There are going to be a lot of tears” if Bologna win, the team’s cerebral midfielder Michel Aebischer tells The Athletic. Many thought last season was as good as it was going to get. Bologna finished fifth for the first time in over half a century and qualified for the Champions League via the extra spot Italian clubs earned from topping the UEFA coefficient.

But Juventus headhunted their head coach, Thiago Motta, Manchester United paid Joshua Zirkzee’s buyout clause and Arsenal signed Riccardo Calafiori. Compounding matters was an anterior cruciate ligament injury to captain Lewis Ferguson.

“I didn’t think we would be as good again,” Aebischer admits. “Not because some players left us but because with a new coach it’s always hard. First, to know him (the new coach Vincenzo Italiano), to know what he wants and how he wants us to play, how he wants to defend, how he wants to attack. We knew we needed time but then in the end…”

Aebischer looks astonished. Bologna went into the last gameweek having only lost twice in 2025. They had two points fewer than at this stage last season and, in addition to having a chance of winning the Coppa Italia, can qualify for the Champions League again.

Their managerial change — necessitated by Motta’s desire to leave — proved effective in a way Milan’s did not, despite theirs being a voluntary and mutual parting with Stefano Pioli.

Runners-up last season, Milan’s wish was to be more competitive against Inter, who clinched the title in the derby and finished nearly 20 points in the distance. On one level, it worked. Under Paulo Fonseca and Conceicao, Milan have gone five games unbeaten against the Champions League finalists and dumped them out of the Coppa. On another, they are 14 points adrift of where they were a year ago.

“It’s frustrating,” Reijnders sighs, “because we have quality.”

In the Champions League, for instance, Milan beat the holders Real Madrid 3-1 at the Bernabeu and were in the top eight going into the final matchday of the league phase. A bye to the round of 16 seemed like a sure thing. But Milan inexplicably lost in Zagreb and fell into the play-offs. In the meantime, they signed Santi Gimenez from opponents Feyenoord, who were amid a terrible injury crisis, but Milan were still eliminated.

Milan have, until recently, been consistent in their inconsistency as well as their tendency to make life difficult for themselves by going behind. Milan have trailed in 20 of their 36 league games this season.

“We won against Real Madrid, for example, and then we drew against Cagliari,” Reijnders says. Putting a finger on exactly why needs a whole hand.

“It’s always different when a new coach comes in,” Reijnders tries to explain. “Because he has another vision on how he wants to play and has to transfer that to the team as soon as possible. But yeah, for us, it was a discussion about what was going on. Sometimes we were unlucky. Sometimes we weren’t there from the beginning of the match. And there are things we have had to develop much better and much quicker.”

Bologna did not experience the same trauma in moving from one coach to another. How Italiano wasn’t more in the frame for the Milan job is a bit of a mystery beyond a certain esterofilia (a passion for or admiration of foreign things). Italiano has overdelivered in every role — achieving promotion at every level, returning Fiorentina to European football after five years, and reaching back-to-back Conference League finals. Wednesday’s Coppa Italia final is also his second.

Maybe his face doesn’t fit — but neither did Arrigo Sacchi’s when Silvio Berlusconi hired him from second-division Parma in 1987.

Accepting the Bologna job in the off-season required real courage, as it appeared there was nowhere to go but down. But the presence of sporting director Giovanni Sartori — who has worked enough miracles at Chievo, Atalanta and Bologna to be a better candidate for Pope than Robert Prevost — was a guarantee.

Calafiori’s replacement, Juan Miranda, for instance, has very quickly emerged as one of the best full-backs in the league, while Zirkzee’s successor, Santiago Castro, was sourced already 18 months ago and is one of the most promising forwards too.

The culture fostered by Bologna is very healthy, thanks to players such as Lorenzo De Silvestri and Riccardo Orsolini, who have a soulful connection with the club and the city itself.

“Our biggest point is our team,” Aebischer argues. “There’s no player who is bigger than the other. It’s really the team that’s the biggest thing. This already helped us last year and it’s helping us this year. Whoever is playing is doing good, helping the other. This is the main reason we’re back where we are.”

He calls it a family — and you can see it on the pitch.

“You do that extra metre for your team-mate. You run more. You fight more. That’s what makes us strong.”

This, by contrast, has not always been the image Milan have presented to the world this season — with Rafael Leao and Theo Hernandez’s cooling-break dissent away at Lazio, Fonseca calling out a lack of effort after Red Star, and then Conceicao and Davide Calabria’s tiff after the Parma game. (Calabria, Milan’s captain, bid a tearful farewell and joined Bologna in January.)

Bologna beat Milan 2-1 in February at the Dall’Ara. It was the start of a five-game winning streak in all competitions. They humiliated Lazio 5-0, held league leaders Napoli to a 1-1 draw, and, as was the case three years ago, dented Inter’s title chances in a 1-0 upset.

On Friday, however, defeat blunted their Champions League hopes. At whose hands did it come? None other than Milan’s, who came back from behind — they know no other way — and won 3-1.

Only time will tell how much should be read into the game. Italiano rotated his team, resting Ferguson and Miranda. He begrudgingly had to risk his best centre-back, Jhon Lucumi, when Martin Erlid went off injured. Late fitness tests for Dan Ndoye and Jens Odgaard will have Italiano sweating.

A final is always a big game — but for Bologna’s coach, who has never won one, the eagerness to throw off the veil of always the bridesmaid is palpable. His Fiorentina team lost Conference League finals against West Ham United and Olympiacos and a Coppa Italia final to Inter.

Nevertheless, Reijnders still anticipates a difficult game.

“They’re a tough team,” he analyses. “They play man-to-man all over the whole pitch, so we need a lot of movement in that game. Besides that, they have quality with the ball. They have wingers doing very well. We should not go there with fear of Bologna. We are AC Milan and we have to show it, for sure.”

Regardless of Milan’s ups and downs, Reijnders has enjoyed his best season. The Dutchman returned from Euro 2024 determined to score more goals, and he has realised his ambition. Fifteen in all competitions from midfield is an excellent return.

Reijnders’ father, Martin, was a forward in the Eredivisie. He also spent a season in the United States with Nashville Metros. Eliano, his younger brother, has followed in his old man’s footsteps in playing for Dutch side PEC Zwolle.

“I have to give credit to my father for learning about the game and my way of playing,” Reijnders says. “After every match, we call one another and ask: ‘What did I do good? What can I do better?’.”

From these conversations — family analysis sessions — he learned to be more composed in front of goal.

“The problem is not the technique, the way I was shooting. It was the calmness before I got the ball because I had a couple of situations where I was like: ‘Oh, I need to shoot’. When I got calmer in front of goal, you realise you have more time. That’s what was lacking last season.”

Only Christian Pulisic (17 goals) is outscoring Reijnders for Milan this season. His influence in their attacks is critical, as this graphic shows.

“I’m a typical box-to-box player, helping the team build up and find the connection to the attack — either serving my team-mates with passes or being in the box myself and being important with goals,” the 26-year-old says.

There isn’t a more elegant player in Serie A, except perhaps Roma’s Paulo Dybala. Reijnders glides up the pitch. Is it any wonder Barcelona were interested before his move to Milan, and Manchester City have recently made contact with the Italian club?

Reijnders has always been their sort of player while also, as a Dutchman, being quintessentially Milan. When he was a kid, “it was the time of prime Barcelona”, and he modelled his game on Andres Iniesta.

“Then when I got older, I looked (up) a lot to Kevin De Bruyne. I watched his games, YouTube clips, especially the way he was scanning the pitch before he gets the ball so he always knows where the space is. I try to do the same.”

Milan fans hope his new long-term contract until 2030 means he will stay. The fear, without Champions League revenue, is that Milan may be tempted to sell one of their best players in the summer.

That said, for every Sandro Tonali sold, there is a Hernandez or Leao, players Milan have held onto far longer than anyone expected.

Reijnders talks about next season as if he will still be there.

“The important thing is to go back to basics and start from there,” he says. No one is getting ahead of themselves and thinking too far into the future — Wednesday is all that matters.

Aebischer believes Bologna’s Champions League experience has made them a better proposition in domestic knockout football. Despite not winning a game in Europe until the penultimate league-phase match against last year’s runners-up, Borussia Dortmund, the team acquitted itself well away against Liverpool and Aston Villa.

The start of the competition came too soon, in Aebischer’s opinion, for a side learning a new style and integrating new players.

“We did good in all the games,” he says. “There was still a little difference in quality. You need to do something more to win in the Champions League. You need to defend better and be more precise. But maybe if the tournament had started two months later, we would have got more points because we needed time to adapt to Italiano and with the Champions League, we had a lot of games and you can’t train a lot.”

While Bologna’s trajectory has continued upward from Motta to Italiano, the team’s patterns of play are markedly different.

As the following graphics show, they play a higher line. “Not like Barcelona,” Aebischer laughs. “But really high.” Territorially, Bologna are more dominant in the opposition’s half.

Aebischer’s Swiss team-mates offer different lenses through which to see the style shift. Take Remo Freuler, the Pac-Man in midfield, whom Sartori brought back from Nottingham Forest in the Premier League, having signed him in the past for Atalanta.

“Remo is really important for us because he wins us a lot of balls,” Aebischer says. “He already plays this man-against-man with Atalanta for six years so he knows what he is doing and you can see this. He can read the next play, read the opponent.”

Then there is Ndoye, who, like Freuler, is in his second season at the club and has carried his Euros form into his club football.

“Dan’s a really good player, really fast,” Aebischer says. “With Motta, we really tried to build up every ball. We tried to play on the ground, from the back. A lot of passes, short passes and get chances like that. Now it’s more direct. We also do long balls. We go straight to goal, to our wingers to create chances and put in crosses. We still want to play out from the back but with less risk than before.”

There’s a lot on the line on Wednesday. The winner secures a Europa League place, offering an alternative route into Europe. For Conceicao, a second trophy in four months would strengthen his case to stay on next season. For Italiano and Bologna, it’s a chance to make history — and even the North American owners are desperate for it.

Bologna’s Italian-Canadian president, Joey Saputo, the longest-standing foreign investor in Serie A, has weathered protests and is now basking in the sunshine. A trophy would be extremely fulfilling, given the club was in the second division when he bought it.

Milan’s owner, Gerry Cardinale, has been subject to vociferous criticism by fans this season, and if Inter win the Champions League, whatever happens on Wednesday won’t matter to many of the management’s detractors.

If a down year ends with two trophies, it speaks to two things — one, the expectations at Milan, two, it’s not all bad. A tweak here to the team, a tweak there to the club’s structure and they promise to be very competitive, very soon.

Whether the Coppa Italia final generates as much intrigue as the conclave remains to be seen. Milan go into it seeking a measure of redemption. Bologna, on the other hand, hope to enter heaven.

(Additional contributor: Mark Carey)

(Top photo: Florencia Tan Jun/Getty Images)

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