Tonali has returned to his very best this season after serving his betting suspension last year.
Speaking to Cronache di Spogliato, Tonali concedes he took everything for granted when with Milan.
He said, “I didn't want to leave Milan. And that was a huge burden for me. They called me and said, 'Okay, but you have to give something up, we need to talk.'
"If we're being completely honest, when Milan signed me, I was coming off my final year at Brescia, where I had a €200,000 contract. I spent a summer never knowing which team I was going to sign for; honestly, until the last five days, I had no idea where I was going to play.
"And in the end, I found myself at Milan, the team I'd always supported since I was a kid, with a contract worth around €2.5 million. I said to myself, 'Okay, I've made it, I've arrived. That's it. What else do I have to do? More than this, what's there?'
"And of course, for me, who didn't come from a big city, who didn't come from a rich family, I kept saying to myself: 'That's it, now I'm having fun, I'm not thinking about anything else.'
"I was a twenty-year-old boy in Milan with his girlfriend, earning tons of money, playing for his dream club... I had no more goals in life. And I struggled, because all those thoughts I had off the pitch were reflected on it."
On his suspension, Tonali also said: “I know I was wrong, I know I paid for it, I know I worked to become a better man. But at the beginning, in the first five or six months, when I hadn't yet understood my mistake, my head told me: 'Sandro, you weren't wrong.' That was the real danger.
"If you don't follow a path like mine, if you don't lose anything, it's very difficult for you to understand the mistake. If you lost your job and your family tomorrow, you would instantly understand that you had done something wrong. A kind of soul-searching would automatically kick in.”