Perhaps he will have to dust off that old note on his smartphone, kept as though it were a relic. Nicolò Tresoldi used to write down every goal he scored, even those in training. At the end of each session, he would grab his phone and update his statistics. “I recorded everything,” he revealed to Sportweek a year ago, before becoming Belgian champion with Club Brugge as the league’s top scorer. “Then I stopped. My head was about to explode.”
AC Milan Supporter
The feeling is that, after scoring a hat-trick against Inter at San Siro, he may have dug out that old list to take a look at how far he has come: nine goals in 11 matches, seven in the Champions League, 46 across Hannover and Club Brugge, and 16 for Germany’s Under-21 side, with whom he will play in the European Championship in Albania and Serbia in June 2027, as pointed out via La Gazzetta dello Sport in this morning's print edition.
After that, he will decide which country to represent. “I’ve expressed my thoughts to Mancini and Klopp. We’ll see. For now, I have a European Championship to play.”
It is the same tournament his father, Emanuele, won in 1994 (as a substitute) alongside Vieri, Inzaghi, Cannavaro, Toldo and many others.
Meanwhile, Nicolò has enjoyed his first Champions League hat-trick at the Meazza, as an AC Milan supporter. He fell in love with the club thanks to his grandfather, who was the golf instructor of Van Basten, Gullit and Rijkaard.
“Playing for Milan is a dream that pushes me to work hard. I think about it every day.”
Tennis
Who knows whether his smartphone also contains records of aces or drop shots.
Before deciding to focus exclusively on football, at around the age of 13, Tresoldi enjoyed playing tennis. He was part of Italy’s Under-12 national team, the only time he has ever worn the Italian national jersey, at least so far, alongside Luca Nardi and Flavio Cobolli.
His old ranking, last updated in 2018, can still be found online: 3.3.
“I was like Alcaraz: a two-handed backhand and drop shots.”
The turning point came at Hannover, in Germany, the country that gave him a helping hand and where he moved because of his mother Barbara’s work. She was born in Bergamo to an Argentine family.
Julian Battmer, the academy director, told LaPresse that they were the ones who steered him in the right direction:
“I met Nicolò through the German federation… the tennis federation. He played there for nine months, then we managed to change his mind.”
Fontanelle...
Perhaps that is also why the big clubs decided not to take a chance on him: Milan, Juventus, Bologna, Atalanta and Fiorentina.
At 13, Nicolò attended several trials around Italy, but without success.
“I was rejected by everyone, partly because I was too young to go and live at a boarding facility.”
During the 2016–17 season, he played two years above his age group in Fontanelle’s regional youth team. Fontanelle is a club from Gubbio, in Umbria, with a small stadium next to a sunflower field.
His coach was Marco Bedini:
“I remember a sensitive boy, always smiling, with a great team spirit. In one of the final league matches, he prepared a shirt for a teammate who had injured his shin.
“We were losing 2–0 at halftime, but we came back to win 3–2. Nicolò didn’t score, but in the dressing room he showed the shirt with the words ‘Come on, Carlo’ written on it.”
Marco compared him to Pippo Inzaghi, Nicolò’s idol, because “he scored goals in every possible way.”
Euro 2028
The inevitable question is: Will Tresoldi lead Italy’s attack at Euro 2028, or will he wear Germany’s shirt?
He will decide in the summer, with Argentina a distant third option because of his mother’s origins.
There are, however, a few clues:
“I feel connected to Italy. I was born in Cagliari, but Germany is the country that recognised my potential…”
Italy’s youth national teams have never called him up, while he kept recording every goal he scored. In Lower Saxony, he scored hundreds of them.
By now, a single note on his phone would no longer be enough.
