Sandro Tonali, midfielder of Newcastle and the Italian national team, gave an interview to Cronache di spogliatoio. Here is the preview of the full version, which will be released in the coming hours. The midfielder also spoke a lot about Milan, his years with the Rossoneri, and his departure.
On the suspension:
"I know I made a mistake, I know I paid for it, I know I worked to become a better man. But at first, in the first 5-6 months, when I hadn't yet understood my mistake, my mind was telling me: 'Sandro, you didn't make a mistake.' That was the danger. If you don’t go through the same kind of path, if you don't lose anything, it's hard to understand the mistake. If tomorrow I lost my job and family, I would immediately realize I made a mistake. An automatic self-reflection would kick in. In my situation, it was a bit different: no one took my salary, they just blocked my work. How can you say: 'Yes, for a year, I’ll go to the psychologist four times a week even though it’s not mandatory, instead of staying at home'?"
On returning to the field, Tonali said:
"When I came back, I played the first 3-4 games with passion, energy, adrenaline. I reached a huge peak, then from the following matches, I felt the sprint. At some point, people expected that type of performance, and when I declined, in England, they asked: 'Oh, what happened?' In reality, it’s a normal thing. We found a path, we managed it. Between August and November, I played 2-3 games as a starter, but I still got a lot of minutes because I came in for 45 minutes or half an hour. Never just for one minute, because it would have been useless."
On the psychological journey:
"I worked for a year with the psychologist, meeting him 4 times a week. When I started, it wasn’t easy: I couldn’t take medication because of anti-doping rules. It’s hard to make someone understand their mistake when they have no basis for it because they already have everything. In the first 2 months, I trained but didn’t see the final goal: I had no motivation. When you don’t have to compete with anyone, when you don’t have to train better than your teammate or you won’t play, there’s no motivation. I found myself, around the second or third month, in a situation where I had no motivation. In the morning, I went to the field and asked myself why. With the psychologist, I worked for two weeks on finding those motivations again because sometimes I didn’t even want to go."
On being away from Italy:
"I was lucky to be in England. I lived 7 months without a phone, without a tablet. I only watched TV for the matches and movies. I didn’t watch the news, no updates came to me. Also because I imagine that during that time it wasn’t... 'Sandro Tonali made a mistake.' Not looking at social media and TV completely lightened me. I have no idea what happened during those months, and I don’t care, that’s the beauty. I know I made a mistake, I know I paid for it, and I worked to be a better man, but I wasn’t interested in updating social media to search for my name. Living without the phone was a bit problematic, especially in contacting my family. Every time they had to contact my girlfriend, and she had to be with me. Then I would drive to the field without a phone, and it didn’t bother me. I had my training schedule on my girlfriend’s phone. After a few months, when I understood that using it alone was no longer a danger, I took it back."
On Juventus' interest before joining Milan:
"We were in Sardinia, me, Cistana, and Torregrossa, the Brescia group. At a restaurant, we met De Ligt. It was the year we played against them in Serie A, the Covid year. He spoke highly of Juventus, and as a player, he advised me to consider it. It was the time I was negotiating with Milan. We stopped to talk after a game. Sometimes, for a few seconds, you find yourself chatting with an opponent even if you don’t know him, more out of respect. Some you remember, and when you see them again, you think: 'I’ve already seen this guy.' It was the summer when I was in the papers because a return to Serie B with Brescia seemed unlikely. Milan, Inter, and Juve were all in the mix the entire summer. So everyone told me: 'Come to Inter, come to Milan, come to Juve.'"
On arriving at Milan, Tonali commented:
"To be very honest, when Milan bought me, I was coming off the last year at Brescia, where I had a €200,000 contract. I spent a summer not knowing with whom I would sign, until the last five days, I really didn’t know which team I was going to."
On the difficulties of adapting:
"And in the end, I found myself at Milan, the team I had always supported as a child, with a contract of about two and a half million euros. I said: 'Okay, I made it, I’m here, that’s it. What should I do? What’s left?' Then for me, coming from a city, from a family that wasn’t rich, I told myself: 'Okay, that’s it, now I have fun, I don’t think about anything else.' So, I was a 20-year-old kid in Milan with my girlfriend, making a lot of money, playing for my favorite team, and I had no more goals in life. And I had difficulties because these thoughts and reflections outside the field were reflected on the field."
On the difficulties of the first year on the field:
"But people didn’t expect the same things as in Brescia. I started normally in the first games, nothing special. Then I had the middle period, which was the most difficult, with so many games, to which I wasn’t used. We played once a week at Brescia, and I found myself doing Europa League qualifiers, Europa League, Coppa Italia, Serie A. I was exhausted, so I really struggled with it. Sometimes, that season, I preferred not to play, so that shows you what kind of moment I was in. If today I don’t play a game, my girlfriend knows it’s a disaster!"
On the awareness between the first and second seasons at Milan, Tonali said:
"At the end of the season, we qualified for the Champions League, and I said: 'That’s it, now I need to play,' because I had played 37 games, but never one where you could say 'Wow, what a game Tonali had!' From the second year, everything changed a bit. I went on vacation, a special one because I didn’t know yet if Milan would redeem me or not. I stayed in Brescia, by the lake, spending every day looking at my phone for 20 days, there was this heavy atmosphere."
On the second year at Milan:
"I didn’t want to leave Milan. That weighed on me a lot. They called us and said: 'Okay, but we need to sacrifice, we need to talk.' I think I took away the difficult moment in the first two games of the second season, which were a bit of a make-or-break. It was like: either you’ve changed, or we relegate you back to what you were before."
