Fikayo Tomori walks into his local pasticceria and shows remarkable restraint. “I’ve got a sweet tooth. I can’t lie,” he tells The Athletic. “There’s actually a Neapolitan pastry, a sfogliatella, so I like that every now and then.”
It’s late afternoon in Milan, so he eschews the curly, crunchy goodness for some vitamin D instead. “We’re in February and you can sit outside. You can’t do that in London,” Tomori says, looking at the cloudless blue skies over us when we met towards the end of last month.
The 28-year-old is the quintessence of modern Milan. Home is the city’s newest neighbourhood, where some of the world’s leading architects have been able to play around building ‘vertical forests’. Inter’s glass offices are nearby but as Tomori says, “I try not to look over that side.”
He loves it here.
“In this part, there’s a lot of finance people, foreigners and people from outside of Italy,” Tomori explains. “Having that multi-cultural side of Milan accompanying proper Italian culture, it’s a nice mix. I’ve immersed myself here so I know what’s going on.” Skyscrapers and sfogliatelle. What’s not to like?
(Alessandro Belussi for The Athletic)
It’s five years since a Zoom call changed his life. “I didn’t really process it,” Tomori recalls.
The person he’d just hung up on was an all-time great, arguably the best player ever to play his position: Paolo Maldini. “It was a surreal moment. I used to watch him on TV, (I’d) heard so many stories. Milan legend! And he’s like: ‘Yeah, we want to sign you for Milan’.”
Pearls of wisdom soon followed his initial loan from Chelsea, as Maldini, the club’s technical director at the time, began offering him priceless advice.
“’In this situation, what were you thinking?’,” Tomori recalls being asked. “‘This is what I would have done. I see what you tried to do. This is what you could do better, etc’. Even having those little snippets from him were things I’ve held with me forever because it’s Paolo Maldini saying it to me.”
Fikayo Tomori celebrating with Paolo Maldini on his way to the trophy podium when Milan won Serie A in 2022 (Jonathan Moscrop/Getty Images)
It’s fair to say they have served Tomori well. Milan’s visit to Rome at the end of January marked his 200th appearance for the club; more than Carlo Ancelotti and the famous three Dutchmen of Marco van Basten, Ruud Gullit and Frank Rijkaard.
That he’d become so rooted and Milanese was unknowable at the time he accepted Maldini’s offer to pull on the famous red and black stripes. “When I first came, I signed on loan (and) with a loan, you never really know what’s going to happen.”
Here’s what happened.
A Scudetto, the first in 11 years, won at Inter’s expense on the final day in 2022. A Coppa Italia final. A Supercoppa in which Milan staged an epic comeback against Inter in Riyadh. A Champions League semi-final vexingly lost to Inter.
As well as an eighth-place finish in 2024-25. The contrast between title celebration and protests. The whole gamut of emotions.
At the club’s bucolic Milanello training ground, black-framed photographs hang on a red wall, showing moments from history, the highest points.
(Photo courtesy of Milan)
“That’s the first thing you’re hit with,” Tomori says. “Pictures of all the Champions League nights. You see Maldini, Franco Baresi, Andriy Shevchenko, Kaka. All these legends. All these trophies. All these memories. This place is history and legacy. It’s part of the culture. (It’s) a nice feeling purely because all these great players were here, walked these same steps, same hallways, saw the same things and played on the same pitches.”
Ate the same pasta?
“The chef Michele’s been here for a while,” Tomori beams. “He’s got loads of stories. At every away game, he’s got this big pot of pasta and he’s swirling it around, dishing it up for everyone. He’s part of the furniture.”
New pictures have been added since Tomori joined, showing the triumphs he’s been lucky enough to be involved in. Naturally, he hopes for more.
The bus parade when Milan won the league four years ago was something else.
“It was supposed to be two hours. We ended up staying on for five because there were so many people on the streets. We got to the Duomo and the only time I’d seen it before was with tourists taking pictures. We got there and it was full. You couldn’t see the floor. It was just people, fireworks and noise. I was like, ‘This is a real institution of football. This is real passion and love’.”
Milan celebrate in the city centre in May 2022 after winning their first Scudetto in 11 years (Matteo Rossetti/Archivio Matteo Rossetti/Mondadori Portfolio via Getty Images)
It’s intensified by one of football’s great rivalries in one of the world’s most influential football cities.
Only Madrid has had more Champions League wins — but trophies here have, historically, been far more evenly distributed between Milan and Inter than Real and Atletico Madrid.
In London, the passion is spread across 17 professional teams.
“I went to the centre (of Milan) one time with my friends and it was, ‘PICTURE! PICTURE! PICTURE!’. I was like: ‘What’s going on here?’. I’d never experienced that before,” Tomori says.
When it’s derby week, as it is this week, the air in the city changes.
These games aren’t as poisonous as the Derby d’Italia (Inter and Juventus) or as violent as the Derby della Capitale (Roma and Lazio). But they have a magnitude and a prestige that showcase the very best of Italian football, particularly when silverware or a place in a final has been at stake, as has often been the case in Tomori’s time in Milan.
Olivier Giroud’s goals in this fixture in 2022 not only catalysed Milan’s title surge, but they also became the subject of a chant and derby folklore.
Olivier Giroud, Tomori and their Milan team-mates celebrate the derby win in February 2022 (Pier Marco Tacca/Getty Images)
Inter then won six in a row, including a European derby to reach a Champions League final and another to clinch their 20th Scudetto, a feat that earned them a second star, something Milan, for now, remain a league title short of emulating.
Milan have since gone six derbies undefeated, including the turnaround from 2-0 down to win the Super Cup 3-2 last year.
Remembering his exhausted ticket allocation for the last derby in November, a 1-0 win for Milan, Tomori says: “I used 15 or 20. There’s a lot of demand. People say, ‘I’ve heard of the Milan derby. I’ve seen it on TV’. But being in the stadium is a totally different experience.”
His first was a Coppa Italia quarter-final tie just a few weeks after his move to Milan.
“It was Covid but the fans came to the training ground. That doesn’t happen in England. They’re waving flags. They’ve got banners and everything. Immediately, that happens and you think: ‘This is a different game. This is a different derby’. Then you come to the stadium. You’re on the bus and you hear the fans banging on it. At first I was like: ‘Hold on, what’s going on here’.”
Tomori celebrates after Tijjani Reijnders’ opener in last year’s 1-1 draw with Inter (Nicolò Campo/LightRocket via Getty Images)
San Siro still gives him goosebumps, particularly when it’s the Madonnina.
Those concrete ramps, red girders and twirling towers.
You wonder how many derbies this ground has seen. Sentimentally, you ponder how many it has left with a new stadium planned for the 2032 European Championship, which Italy will co-host with Turkey. To play in the last of them is a tremendous privilege.
“I remember the first game we played here,” Tomori says, recalling the return of supporters to the stands following the pandemic. “I think it was Cagliari. The stadium was full and I just thought: ‘Phwoar’. I used to play FIFA when I was younger. You could choose the stadium you played in and — I don’t know — it’d be Manchester United vs Chelsea but you could choose to play at San Siro. I used to do that a lot with my cousins and I was thinking: ‘Wow! This is it. This is the San Siro!’.”
Tomori scored in a derby, as did one of his best friends in football, Tammy Abraham, who spent last season on loan at Milan from Roma.
He got to hear the roar of the Curva Sud, paper bombs going off, faces backlit by coral red flares, the smoke hanging over the pitch in San Siro’s own micro-climate.
Tomori was on the scoresheet against Inter in April 2024 (Jonathan Moscrop/Getty Images)
“The Curva Sud! It’s not a thing in England,” Tomori says. “Having these ultra passionate fans who just sing for 90 minutes. Not even 90 minutes. They’re there before we’re out warming up. They’re there after the game. Even that in itself is another nuanced thing that makes it so special. I feel like, even my friends, I used to tell them about it but they never really understood what I was saying until they actually came to the stadium.”
The choreographies unfurled by the ultras were performance art, a major part of derby tradition.
“We realise your dreams” was a famous Milan one, depicting the European Cup they have won seven times, more than twice Inter’s total of three.
They have, for two years, become less of a feature after the Doppia Curva investigation rounded up and then handed out almost 90 years in prison sentences to some of the leaders of Inter and Milan’s ultras for a combination of the Nord’s infiltration by the ‘Ndrangheta, Calabria’s fearsome mafia, and elements of the Sud acting like hired muscle and private militias.
It is a nuanced thing.
Atmospherically, you don’t want to lose the spectacle they bring. Equally, it couldn’t go on as it was.
Sunday’s game is layered too.
On the one hand, Milan go into it on 57 points, the same total they had at this stage of their last Scudetto-winning season. They went unbeaten in 24 league games for the first time since their undefeated campaign in 1991-92 as well.
For a team that finished eighth last year, it has been a remarkable turnaround under Massimiliano Allegri.
Massimiliano Allegri directs his players during Milan’s 1-1 draw with Como in February (Piero Cruciatti/AFP via Getty Images)
Tomori remembers one of the Mister’s first meetings after taking charge last season.
“He said: ‘Last season, we scored, I don’t know, 80-something goals. That’s Champions League statistics. However, we conceded 40-something. That’s sixth place or maybe in a good year fourth’. He said: ‘That’s not to say the defenders are bad and the defenders aren’t doing their job, the goalkeeper’s not doing his job. It’s to say the whole team needs to have the mentality that we cannot concede this many goals because if we don’t concede that many, we’ll be top of the table, especially with the players we have up front.”
Players such as Rafa Leao and Christian Pulisic, both of whom are in double figures for goals and assists this season.
Leao, in particular, was the player who surprised Tomori most when he first moved to Milan.
“It was almost like he didn’t know how good he was,” Tomori says, “because everything came so naturally to him. He came out of the womb and this is just how he knew to play football. He just didn’t know how to use what he had. Everyone saw it the year we won the Scudetto, almost like he realised: ‘Wow. I can do this! I can do this!’.”
Those performances in the run-in four years ago set a standard Leao has been judged on ever since.
Milan need him to rediscover that form if they are to chase down a relentless Inter, who, having won 14 of their last 15 league games, sprinted 10 points clear in Serie A.
Pulisic was also an MVP candidate in the first half of the season. He averaged a goal every 78 minutes until the end of 2025 but is yet to score in 2026, as he manages bursitis, the inflammation of a small fluid-filled sack that reduces friction between bones, tendons and joints.
He got the only goal in the derby last November and has scored in three of them.
“People underestimate him,” Tomori says. “People don’t realise how fast he is. They don’t realise how sharp he is with the ball, how good he is with the ball, how intelligent he is. You only realise it when he’s scored a goal against you. I knew him from Chelsea.
“Puli’s a top, top professional. A really top guy. He always wants to improve. If he misses a shot in training, he’s like: ‘Why did I do that?’. But he’s really calm and nice to be around, very level-headed even, you know, (as) the best player America’s had in god knows how long. But he’s very calm, level-headed, very simple, I’d say.”
Christian Pulisic, one of Milan’s key players (Marco Bertorello/AFP via Getty Images)
Inter’s Federico Dimarco has overtaken Pulisic in the MVP stakes. The wing-back has acted like a No 10 this season, scoring a sublime and acute volley against Genoa last weekend. He has improbably hit 20 goal involvements for the season and will pose a major threat from corners.
Nevertheless, Tomori still believes Pulisic can challenge him for the award.
“I hope so. His goal-per-minute ratio is unbelievable and even though he’s been carrying injuries this season every time he’s been called upon, he’s done the business.I know for him it’s been frustrating to be injured and even for us, it’s been frustrating because he’s been unbelievable.”
Pulisic will be one of the faces of the World Cup in the U.S., Canada and Mexico this summer. Perhaps no one will be under more pressure to perform.
The Calgary-born Tomori wants to experience it too with England.
“Very much so. I haven’t done it yet,” he says. “I’ve had the feeling I’ve been close.”
England head coach Thomas Tuchel has echoed that sentiment.
“We spoke a few months ago and he kind of said what I said. That I’m close and there’s not a lot in it, just to keep going. In football (and) in life anything can happen. I’m focused on myself, doing the best I can to help myself, to help Milan. And then, like I said, hopefully I’m on the plane in June.”
The most recent of Tomori’s five international caps came in November 2023 against Malta (Bryn Lennon/Getty Images)
Tomori is part of a defensive unit that has kept 12 clean sheets this season. He also looks set to play more minutes than their other centre-backs and will have even more responsibility now Mattia Gabbia is out injured.
Over Tomori’s time in Milan, he’s done it all. He’s played in a back four with a high line and, under Allegri, a back three often in a low block.
The notion Italian football is slower than the English game is, in his opinion, “a myth.”
“I’m not sure the stats are available but if you see the stats of the running we do it is very, very high,” Tomori says. “We’ve played against Premier League teams in the Champions League. Obviously the Premier League is a high, high level. But we’ve beaten Premier League teams. We’ve lost to Premier League teams and it’s not like we lost to them because we’ve been over-run or lacking in intensity. Maybe the other team was better than us. Sometimes that happens in football but to say that Italian football and Serie A is lacking in intensity, I don’t agree.”
It’s a different type of intensity. “Coming here I was thinking maybe it will be a little slower. Naaaah! It’s a different type of running,” Tomori explains. “In the Premier League I’d say there’s more space. If the ball goes between the lines (in England), it doesn’t matter because then we’ll just run and get it. But in Italy it’s like ‘No. Why do we have to run after it when we can prevent it from happening before’. It may seem slow because of the detail and the structuring of the team so we don’t have to run too much.”
The speed is in the reading of the game. The ferocity in unflinching focus. “In England intensity is we’ve got to be at them,” Tomori elaborates. “Run harder than them. Everything like that. Here it’s mental not only in the preparation for the game and dealing with outside pressures and fan expectation. What they value so much here is being concentrated and locked into the game for 90 minutes. It seems easier than you think. But it’s a lot harder to be in the game for 90 minutes because here there are a lot of things where teams are waiting for that one moment when one player out of 11 makes a mistake and then they strike
“Having that intensity, in terms of concentration, in terms of we can’t make a mistake, or we have to make as few mistakes as possible. Obviously it’s impossible to not make a mistake, but to make the least mistakes possible to win this game. That is an intensity in itself and something I had to get used to when I first got here because there is so much information.”
On Sunday, Tomori will have to be locked in not only to stop Marcus Thuram, Dimarco and Francesco Pio Esposito but Inter’s title charge.
When the bus snakes towards San Siro, crawling through the fans, Tomori will feel a familiar emotion. He can’t wait to step off it and described it as, “Get me on the pitch right now.”
“I don’t know how many derbies I’ve played in now but every single one has that feeling. When you win it afterwards, I wouldn’t say it’s a relief, it’s just pfffff. We did it. Obviously for us we’re happy. But knowing the fans are happy and the whole of AC Milan is happy, it’s a great feeling.”
Especially for a Milanese Milanista like Tomori.
