The story that Ibrahimovic’s time inside Milan was over flashed through Italian football media on Monday. By the end of the day, the Sky Sport correspondent who follows the club day in and day out was telling viewers the opposite.
Peppe Di Stefano went on Sky Sport 24 to knock down the exit framing attached to his own network’s reporting.
“There is no news regarding Ibrahimovic. He is and remains a RedBird executive, and he is and remains one of Cardinale’s men.”
The nuance matters. Ibrahimovic has never been a Milan director, as Di Stefano underlined. The deal signed when he returned to the club after retirement put him on the books as a Senior Advisor to RedBird Capital, the Milan ownership vehicle run by Gerry Cardinale. Everything that followed, from his public pronouncements to his sporting-project press conferences, was done in that advisory capacity.
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The Milanello visits have dried up
That contract has not changed. His visibility has.
Milan Reports noted that Ibrahimovic has effectively faded from day-to-day sight around the club. His last appearance at the Milanello training base was on 14 September, and before that he had not been there for roughly six months.
Di Stefano framed that absence as a feature, not a crisis. Ibrahimovic works for Cardinale and for RedBird, he said, with the Milan universe reached through that relationship rather than through a desk at Casa Milan.
Cardinale now runs the room himself
What has shifted is who is physically in charge. Cardinale has spent much of the summer and early autumn in and around the first team, attending matches and sitting in on the big calls that in the recent past would have fallen partly to Ibrahimovic.
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The context around the room has been overhauled too. Milan closed last season by dismissing head coach Massimiliano Allegri, sporting director Igli Tare, technical director Geoffrey Moncada and chief executive Giorgio Furlani. Rúben Amorim was brought in as head coach this summer, and Cardinale’s own fingerprints are now visible on the project.
The timing of the exit rumours was not accidental. They arrived on the back of a flat 1-1 draw at Sassuolo that reopened questions about where Milan stand in Amorim’s first months. Di Stefano used the same broadcast to say Cardinale’s confidence in the Portuguese coach is intact, and that the owner wants patience with a project only a few months old.
What is actually sourced, and what is not
Strip the noise away and the sourced position reads like this. Ibrahimovic’s RedBird contract is in place. He is not a Milan executive, and never formally has been. He has been in the building once in seven months, and the operational weight has moved to Cardinale.
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