During this scorching summer, which has once again confirmed the Premier League as the richest league in Europe, two trends have continued to define the relationship between the English and Italian leagues.
The first is increasingly attentive to, and willing to pay for, young Italian prospects, or players who have come through Italian clubs’ academies; the second, particularly among teams in the top half of the table, is instead looking to strengthen by picking up so-called surplus players from across the Channel, with English squads bloated with players they no longer use.
The new Milan, increasingly part of Jorge Mendes’ sphere of influence, is no exception to this rule. It was in the Premier League, in fact, that the Rossoneri found their latest reinforcement to place under Ruben Amorim’s guidance. Omari Hutchinson arrives to the Seria A without too much fanfare, with Milan reaching an agreement with Nottingham Forest on a €4 million paid loan with an option to buy set at €40 million in favour of the Italian club. It is therefore a very significant investment for the Rossoneri, who, even if they ultimately decide not to sign the young Englishman permanently, will still end up paying a hefty price for the current season.
With Hutchinson, Ac Milan are filling the void left by Rafa Leão’s departure to Galatasaray for €45 million, at least numerically, given that the Englishman is actually a right winger, while on the left Milan had already made a major investment in Diego Moreira.
Just a year ago, Hutchinson’s future looked bright. Last summer, the young Englishman moved from Ipswich Town to Nottingham Forest for £37.5 million, with the promise of becoming one of the most exciting prospects in the English top flight. All the signs seemed to be there for him to make his mark in the Premier League.
Of course, the step up from the Championship to the Premier League is never straightforward, either for players or teams. But the 22-year-old Londoner had already shown that he could disrupt the balance on which matches at the highest level are built, confirming the reputation for electrifying talent he had developed in the youth ranks.
After scoring 11 goals and providing four assists in 50 appearances for Ipswich during the season in which he helped them win promotion to the Premier League, Hutchinson produced a fairly encouraging performance on his first top-flight campaign as a regular starter, registering three goals and two assists in 32 appearances. Nothing extraordinary, but certainly an interesting foundation for a player barely into his twenties. Ipswich believed in him and decided to pay Chelsea £20 million to turn his loan into a permanent transfer.
From promising talent to a career crossroads
Hutchinson’s career began to veer off course last season, although it should be said that this was not entirely his fault. The first problem was his move to Forest, a club led by the flamboyant Greek billionaire Evangelos Marinakis, who is also the majority shareholder of Olympiakos, and one of the most dysfunctional and unstable clubs in the English game. That instability was confirmed last season, when Nottingham Forest went through four different managers.
Hutchinson, it must be said, had already struggled under the first of those four managers, Nuno Espírito Santo, who had been in charge at Nottingham Forest since the end of 2023. The Portuguese coach decided to leave the England Under-21 international out of the squad submitted to UEFA for the first phase of the Europa League, essentially showing that he did not place much faith in him. Things did not improve under Nuno’s successor, Australian coach Ange Postecoglou, who used him sparingly: just 43 minutes during his tenure, which lasted little more than a month.
Postecoglou was replaced by Sean Dyche, but it was only under the fourth manager of the season, Vítor Pereira, who arrived in mid-February, that Hutchinson began to receive more playing time. He made a major contribution to Forest’s survival bid and, once added to the squad list, also played his part in the club’s European run, which eventually came to an end in the semi-finals. From Pereira’s arrival onwards, Hutchinson was almost always a starter, adding two assists to a season in which, despite all the chaos, he made 41 appearances in total (albeit averaging just 60 minutes per game) while registering seven assists and one goal.
With a new summer came a new manager in Nottingham, and for Hutchinson that was not good news. Oliver Glasner left him in the stands for Forest’s first two Premier League matches, prompting the young English talent to take matters into his own hands and look for a new destination, eventually accepting a loan move to Milan.
How Hutchinson fits Amorim's Milan
So what can we expect from this new experience? Will Hutchinson find the peace he is looking for in Milan? And what can he offer the Rossoneri? Tactically, Milan have secured a player capable of operating both as a wide attacker and behind a centre-forward. An ideal role for him would therefore be on the wing or as a No. 10 in a 4-2-3-1, the system in which he predominantly played at both Ipswich and Forest.
An important factor in this regard is that Glasner uses a system similar to Amorim’s: the 3-4-2-1. Under the Austrian, Hutchinson was expected to occupy one of the two attacking midfield positions behind centre-forward Igor Jesus. In the first two matches, however, Glasner preferred Morgan Gibbs-White and former Bologna player Dan Ndoye. Of course, it would be wrong to draw conclusions too quickly, because there are differences between Glasner’s 3-4-2-1 and Amorim’s, while the competition for places is also different. The Austrian’s system is more vertical than the positional approach favoured by the former Sporting and Manchester United manager. Milan, meanwhile, have less experience in the attacking midfield positions, where Hutchinson arrives as a young talent to be tested in an already highly competitive league.
In this respect, Hutchinson will have to adapt to the intricate system of rotations and short passing that the Portuguese coach demands from his teams in possession. One of the typical patterns in Amorim’s football, already visible at Milan in these early matches, involves a quick, long diagonal switch of play designed to exploit a one-on-one situation on the weak side. With space opening up on that flank, Hutchinson will have the opportunity to make the most of his one-on-one ability. Last season at Nottingham Forest, he was the player who attempted and completed the most dribbles, averaging 1.39 successful dribbles from 2.74 attempts per 90 minutes, according to Hudl StatsBomb.
From this perspective, Hutchinson can provide different weapons to an attacking midfield unit in which different types of players are starting ahead of him, more associative players such as Cissé, or more direct finishers such as Pulisic. It is therefore not out of the question that Amorim could even use Hutchinson as a sort of attacking wing-back, perhaps alongside Moreira in the attacking midfield line. It would certainly be an ultra-attacking choice, and one that would probably only be used in specific situations - for example, when Milan need to recover a result against a team sitting deep - but it would fit the ideas of a coach who likes to deploy two different wing-backs, one more attacking and the other providing greater balance.
In either position, Hutchinson should be capable of cutting inside, perhaps starting from the right so that he can make use of his stronger left foot, before combining with teammates occupying central positions, particularly Gonçalo Ramos, with whom he could develop an interesting connection. From this perspective, Hutchinson will also need to learn to vary his game, becoming comfortable taking on his man down the line as well, attacking the flank and delivering crosses into the box for the Portuguese centre-forward.
It will not be easy. But Hutchinson, who came through Arsenal’s youth academy (playing as a full-back at Under-12 level) and is an admirer of Kobe Bryant, will hope to find in Amorim another Portuguese coach willing to put his faith in him, just as Vítor Pereira did at Nottingham Forest. After all, that is precisely what Milan are hoping for too, having made a significant investment in him.
