There was a promise written in the numbers before it was ever written in the dreams of the fans. €32 million paid to Feyenoord in February 2025 to bring in a striker who did not simply score in the Eredivisie, but devoured matches: 23 goals in a single league campaign, a rare instinct for goal, the kind Italian clubs have been chasing for years without ever truly finding.
The Gimenez story at Milan
Milan had identified him as Giroud’s successor, the missing piece that was supposed to solve a chronic problem in the Rossoneri attack. Gimenez arrived midway through the season with the label of potential saviour attached to him, while the San Siro faithful were already imagining his name among the leading scorers.
Reality, however, took a completely different path, and it did so with an almost cruel slowness. The Mexican started as a regular, receiving the trust of a coach who built tactical certainties around him. He put in the hard work that ultimately benefited his team-mates more than himself. The goals, however, never came. Just one goal throughout the entire season, against Lecce in the Coppa Italia on 23 September: an isolated flash in an increasingly deepening darkness. In the league, he made 16 appearances, scored no goals, registered just one assist and attempted 27 shots, with only nine on target.
The numbers tell the story not only of bad luck, but also of a striker who had lost his composure in front of goal, that ability to turn chances into goals that had made him so desirable only a few months earlier. In many ways, it recalls the nature of poker online, where even a strong position can unravel without warning. To make matters worse, an ankle injury then kept him out for months, from late October until the spring.
His return failed to provide the spark that had been hoped for. Gimenez featured in a series of brief appearances but was never able to convince, make an impact or make up for his lengthy absence. Milan’s season, meanwhile, ended in an atmosphere of widespread disappointment, with qualification for the Europa League feeling like a bitter consolation prize and the boos at San Siro following the defeat to Cagliari confirming a campaign that had fallen well short of expectations.
In that context, Gimenez’s trajectory appeared to be a faithful reflection of a team that had never found any consistency, but also a case in its own right: a significant investment that delivered nowhere near what had been promised.
Not even the World Cup, the tournament that was supposed to restore his confidence and give him visibility away from the pressure of Milan, changed the script. Gimenez had arrived at the tournament with clear ambitions: to establish himself among its leading figures and even challenge for the Golden Boot. Instead, he returned with another injury, suffered against England, and an overall record that pushed him even further away from the Rossoneri project. The widespread feeling is that his troublesome ankle has become a symbol of a story that never truly got off the ground.
What is Santiago Gimenez's future looking like?
Today, the Mexican striker has returned to Milanello to complete his rehabilitation, but his future appears to lie elsewhere. The transfer rumours suggest that Milan, under Amorim and Cardinale's guidance, are ready to consider his departure, with the club already beginning to envisage an attack without him, while Francesco Camarda remains in the hierarchy as the first alternative behind Goncalo Ramos.
Just over a year after his arrival was hailed as a turning point, Gimenez’s name is once again being mentioned not among the expected protagonists, but among the departures still to be resolved. It is a trajectory that says a great deal about how, in football, the gap between the potential glimpsed and the actual return can prove impossible to bridge, and how quickly a signing intended to solve problems can, through no fault of his own, become one of the problems that needs solving.
