The Anatomy of a Transfer #1: How Aaron Hickey spearheaded the Scottish Serie A invasion
The Scotland international and his father speak exclusively to Nutmeg on their life-changing decision to snub Bayern reserves and the Celtic bench for Bologna
By Stephen McGowan
In September 2020, Scottish sports journalists gathered on the steps of the Holiday Inn Express at Glasgow Airport.
Aaron Hickey, an 18-year-old defender with Hearts, was en route to Italy to complete a £1.75million move to Bologna.
Posing for photographs as he awkwardly hoisted an Italian tricolour over his head, the full-back’s forced grin masked the natural anxieties of a teenager on the cusp of a life-changing move to a new country.
“When we first went out to Italy, we were a bit unsure,” he reflects now. “It was totally new to us; the culture, the lifestyle, etc.
“As a kid, I always wanted to play abroad. We’d go on holiday and I’d be kicking a ball around thinking, ‘I want to go and play in the sunshine some day…’”
Celtic would have allowed him to stay in his comfort zone, but offered no certainty of a place in the starting XI at the expense of Greg Taylor. While Bayern Munich pitched for his services on the day they overcame Paris Saint-Germain to become the champions of Europe, there was an issue there as well. While he would train with the first team he would play for Bayern Munich II in 3. Liga.
Hickey’s father Neil, a Glasgow-based quantity surveyor, had always been the most influential figure in his career. Conducting a cost-benefit analysis of the interested clubs, Hickey senior compiled a list with one question underlined in bold at the top: Which club offered the highest probability of first-team football?
Bologna, seven-time champions of Italy, held out more hope than the others. And, as the Hickeys waved farewell to the assembled media and dragged their bags towards the departure lounge at Glasgow Airport they had no concept of how influential and transformative the move would be. By boarding a flight to Italy, they were prising open Serie A for a new generation of Scottish footballers.
“The main thing for a young player is that you need to make a name for yourself by playing first-team football and I thought Bologna was the right place for me to go and do that,” says Hickey.
“I thought, ‘No one has really gone there [Italy] since Liam Henderson.’ I wanted to try something different and it was a really good opportunity for me.
“I went to Bayern and it was kind of their reserve squad they were talking about. They were also telling me that I would be training with the first team, but it seemed to be more like reserve-team football.
“So it was either that or Bologna, being involved with the first team and hopefully getting my opportunity and taking it when it came.”
The opportunity arrived sooner than expected. Scots-born players were as precious and rare in Serie A as a ray of sunshine over Greenock. Denis Law had made a British record move to Torino way back in 1961. Nicknamed Lo Squalo — ‘The Shark’ — Joe Jordan played in Italy for three years for AC Milan, then Verona in the early eighties. Former Scotland captain Graeme Souness had won a Coppa Italia during two seasons at Sampdoria.
Henderson had broken new ground by making the switch from Celtic to Serie B Bari in 2018, then moved up a league to Verona a year later.
While Henderson was a trailblazer, Hickey was the gamechanger.
Nailing down a first-team place, the teenager became the first Scot to net a goal in Serie A for 35 years in September 2021. Curious Italian teams began to cast covetous eyes at the SPFL in search of the next Hickey. And a slow trickle gradually became an influx.
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That was never part of the Hickey masterplan. There was no blueprint centred on triggering a stampede for Scottish footballers. A happy accident, the relationship developed organically.
Lewis Ferguson and Josh Doig moved to Bologna and Verona respectively in 2022. Jack Hendry spent a season at Cremonese. Scotland striker Che Adams left Southampton for Torino in 2024 as Scott McTominay and Billy Gilmour made the move to Napoli which secured both players a Scudetto title a year later. Last year, Motherwell raked in a record transfer fee when Udinese signed Lennon Miller. Hibernian did the same when they sold Kieron Bowie to Verona in January.
When Scotland head for the World Cup finals in the United States in June, manager Steve Clarke could select five, possibly six, Serie A players in his 26-man squad. While Hickey is open to the idea of a return to Italy at some point, he won’t be one of them. After 48 appearances over two seasons for Bologna, Scottish football’s missionary man joined Brentford for £14m in 2022 and stands on the cusp of qualification for next season’s Champions League.
The journey began with four years in the Celtic academy system where the progress of Kieran Tierney rendered Hickey’s prospects of first-team exposure at Parkhead slim to non-existent. In 2018 he moved to Hearts and, a year later, became the youngest player to appear in a Scottish Cup final in the modern age.
Despite a 2-1 defeat for Hearts to Celtic at Hampden, the Parkhead club acknowledged their own misjudgement. A year after they sold Tierney to Arsenal for £25m they made multiple attempts to sign Hickey back.
“It was going well at Hearts,” recalls dad Neil. “Aaron was playing 90 minutes and got 11 sponsors’ man of the match awards. Because he was only 17, he used to come out with the bottle and hand it straight to me.
“There was a bit of Manchester City chat. But that was only really chat and they would have wanted him down for their reserves more than anything.
“There was also the interest from Celtic. The question with that was, ‘Is he going to start?’ The Celtic directors were really good; they were really open about things. You could tell by the wages they were offering Aaron that he was not necessarily going to be a starter.
“That’s when they went out and brought in Diego Laxalt, a proven, experienced left-back from AC Milan. It was funny because, as it transpired, Laxalt moved from Serie A to the Scottish Premiership just as Aaron left the Scottish Premiership for Serie A.”
Italy had never really been on the radar. During a family holiday in the south of France, Neil took a random call from an Italian agent asking what he knew of Bologna. One of the founding members of Serie A, I Rossoblù — ‘The Red and Blues’ — were founded in 1909. The last of their seven titles to date had come in 1964.
“Aaron and I took a drive to meet them and have an informal chat,” Neil recalls. “They took us for lunch and Aaron had just turned 18, but we went to quite a sophisticated restaurant down by the river and it was elegant food.
“The training ground looked unimpressive so we went to the stadium and you could feel the history of the club. It was quite a unique stadium. Aaron got to walk on the pitch, then we stayed the night and drove back with no real firm thoughts.”
There was also an invitation to speak to Bayern Munich. The Bundesliga giants flew the Hickeys out to their state-of-the-art Säbener Strasse training complex to show them around the five grass pitches — two of them with undersoil heating. The 80,000-square-metre site also boasted two third-generation artificial turf pitches, a beach volleyball court and a multi-purpose sports hall.
“The training centre alone was like a small town,” recalls Neil. “They had all these state-of-the-art residences for players and so on.
“After that they took us down to the main stadium and gave Aaron the number three top, which I still have a picture of.
“They were playing a Champions League final against PSG that night. They won the cup and we went into the boardroom the next day and they Zoomed us from the hotel in Lisbon with the European Cup and so on.
“We were asking questions and they told us, ‘You will be training with the first team, but you will be playing for the B team.’
“That’s when I thought, ‘Hmm.’ While Aaron was still just 18, he was man of the match in the Premiership often and I didn’t want him to drop down a level.”
Around that time, Bologna sporting director Ricardo Bigon came back on the phone to follow up a lengthy, detailed WhatsApp message outlining the plans the club had for the young Scot. Mitchell Dijks, an experienced Dutch left-back, had joined the club in 2018 and Bigon threw open a door of opportunity and invited Hickey and his father to step through.
“He didn’t say Aaron was a starter, he just said, ‘You will be in full competition with Dijks.’
“He had to play. I knew he was special, but you have to assess who in the team has your slot. You look at who he is up against in that position because there is a competition for every spot. I knew Dijks and researched him and saw that he was good, but versatile. He could play in the centre of defence if Aaron played well.
“At that time, the English Premier League was quite a physical league and Aaron had just turned 18. I felt he would be better going to Italy. He had two feet, played the ball on the floor and never, ever punted the ball. He tries to play out from the back and I thought, ‘Let’s go back and see them.’
“They convinced Aaron because when they talked about the football, they spoke about it as if they were going to watch the opera. It’s all about the beauty of the game and we thought, ‘Right, let’s go to Bologna...”