The Anatomy of a Transfer #2: 🗣️ ‘I was too young to appreciate Italy… now I’d love to go back’

Despite Covid, Brexit, loneliness and homesickness, Scotland star Aaron Hickey made a rapid and memorable impact for ‘I Rossoblù’

By Stephen McGowan

Orchestrator of the transfer which triggered the influx of Scots to Italian football, Neil Hickey would offer one piece of advice to Lennon Miller, Kieron Bowie or any other young player preparing to join Serie A: panning for gold takes patience. Time-intensive and physically demanding, it offers no guarantee of instant payback. La Dolce Vita won’t necessarily transpire in Year One.

“Aaron was fortunate because he hit the ground running,” says his father now. “Even Lewis Ferguson took more time at Bologna. [Late former Bologna head coach] Siniša Mihajlović didn’t start him for a while.

“So I would advise boys to be like Lewis and be prepared for the possibility that you might not start immediately. Listen, learn and work. Lewis has a great career at Bologna but he had to dig in at first and go through the football change.

“That was part of the reason I took Aaron there. I knew that his style of football would suit Italy.”

Bologna days: Hickey played for I Rossoblù 48 times over two seasons

A move which opened up a new frontier for Ferguson, Josh Doig, Scott McTominay, Billy Gilmour, Che Adams, Miller and Bowie, Hickey left Hearts for Bologna in the summer of 2020.

Before turning down Bayern Munich and Celtic, his father had carefully studied his first-team chances and come to the conclusion that Bologna offered the best odds of an early breakthrough. So it proved after the opening day of the league season when a red card for Dutch left-back Mitchell Dijks late in a 2-0 defeat to Milan opened a window of opportunity.

Shortly after they arrived on Italian soil, Aaron phoned his dad — the voice he listened to before all others — to appraise him of the outcome of a training-ground bounce game.

“I said, ‘How did it go?’ And he said to me, ‘Good’. I asked what ‘good’ meant and he replied, ‘Good, good.’

“And I thought, ‘Oh….’ I asked how many touches he got compared to the other defenders and he said, ‘More’. But it wasn’t just more than the other defenders. It was more than anyone.

“An agent then called me up and said that Siniša Mihajlović couldn’t believe how well he played in the bounce game and planned to start him.”

With Dijks suspended, Bologna took on Parma at home and Hickey played for 80 minutes. He was picked for the next game as well, a 1-0 defeat to Benevento. Defying his youth and relative inexperience, he had made himself a difficult player to leave out. So it was in a new country, in a different spotlight, at Bologna.

While life was progressing well on the football side, the process of settling in Italy was proving more challenging off the field due to the disruption caused by Brexit and coronavirus.

The second wave of Covid-19 hit a badly impacted nation. By October 14, the number of positive cases was exceeding Italy’s peak in March. By November, the country was back in lockdown, divided into red, orange and yellow zones. A national curfew was imposed from 10pm until 5am as well as compulsory weekend closure for shopping malls and higher education institutions. Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte described the situation as “particularly critical”.

“The first season was tough because the streets were empty,” Aaron recalls now. “That was a difficult time for someone my age to go abroad and play for the first time.”

His father joined him in Italy for a few months to help with the transition. By then, they hoped, the defender would be establishing a life and routine and social circle of his own. Thanks to Covid, the process was a good deal harder than they ever anticipated.

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“I misread it at first,” admits Neil. “I would say to Aaron, ‘Are you not going out with any of the boys?’ And he would explain that not many of them spoke English.

“Most of them had their girlfriends there. Andreas Skov-Olsen, who has just joined Rangers, was there at the time and he was there with his girlfriend. And as soon as training finished everybody just went their separate ways. The wives and girlfriends from overseas were waiting on them getting home.

“Then Covid hit Italy badly. It was a complete shutdown and Aaron contracted the illness quite badly. He wanted to go home at Christmas and that didn’t transpire and it was quite a lonely time for everybody, but particularly an 18-year-old out in Italy away from home.”

Neil was running his surveying company remotely, then lockdown travel restrictions made it difficult for him to return to Glasgow. Their plans to go back to Scotland for Christmas were stifled by the government crackdown and they did not manage a return to native soil until May 2021, when Aaron came to the end of his first season in Serie A.

“I was fortunate because everyone was sitting at home conducting meetings by Zoom anyway,” Neil recalls. “The fact I was sitting holding meetings from Italy made absolutely no difference.

“I was able to look after Aaron but I wasn’t able to go to any games to actually watch him play.”

In Italy, normality became a fragile concept. Every day players would queue up in their cars before training and have a swab stuck up their nostril to check for signs of the virus. From time to time, relatives would also be asked to get checked out to prevent a dressing-room outbreak.

Brexit meant another change to the way life had been before. On January 1 2021, new restrictions and regulations were formally imposed on UK citizens at the end of the transition period. As a club, Bologna had never before signed a British player, but purchased their first during a period of legislative flux and bureaucratic upheaval.

“I phoned the club and asked if we had to do something about residency. They didn’t know. Aaron needed a residency and I was with him at the time, so the two of us were swished through the system. The club didn’t have a clue about the paperwork.”

Despite the off-field obstacles, Hickey thrived in the sphere which mattered. During his two seasons in Serie A, he made 48 appearances for Bologna, scoring five goals. By the summer of 2022 he was attracting interest from other clubs in Italy.

Napoli were first to test the water with a £10million bid and it’s tantalising, in hindsight, to contemplate Hickey in the same Serie A-winning team as McTominay and Gilmour. From the outset, however, Hickey had been upfront about his goals. The left-back had always seen Italy as a stepping stone towards the English Premier League.

“I was fortunate to have a bit of family there,” the defender reflects now. “But there were points when I thought to myself, ‘I’m feeling pretty homesick here.’ I just wanted to get back to the UK and get to what I knew.

“After a really tough period, things got better and I settled. I played games and I had a good season and that helped me to get the move to the Premier League.”

A serious hamstring injury stymied Hickey’s career at Brentford

In the late 1980s and early 90s, Italian clubs had the edge on their English rivals. And a more technical and tactical type of play was why Hickey chose Serie A in the first place. However, there was one department in which the EPL excelled: finance.

English football became a licence to print money. So much so that it became cheaper to buy a season ticket at the San Siro and fly from England for every match than it was to purchase a season ticket at Arsenal or Chelsea. The Calciopoli scandal of 2006 saw Juventus and Milan charged with bribery or attempted bribery of referees. When Juventus were relegated, Serie A’s fall from grace was complete.

“It’s a sign of the times when a team like Brentford could outbid Napoli,” ponders Neil now. “But in hindsight Aaron was too young to go to Italy in the first place. He wanted to come back to the UK.”

Life at Brentford has never been easy. After playing 37 games, Hickey was sidelined by problematic hamstring surgery and spent two years on the sidelines. He sat out Scotland’s Euro 2025 campaign, forcing Steve Clarke to start Anthony Ralston, Celtic’s second or third-choice right-back, because Nathan Patterson of Everton was injured as well.

“This year has been better than last year and I am just taking it week by week to be honest,” explains Hickey. “I am trying to get back to where I was.”

Hickey’s next challenge is a selection joust with Bees’ Jamaican left-back Rico Henry. The knowledge that the World Cup finals is around the corner is both thrilling and a source of frustration every time he starts a game on the substitutes’ bench.

“I am so excited,” he admits. “I feel it now. There is probably not a day when I don’t think about it now. It can’t come fast enough and I really am buzzing to get out there with the boys and enjoy the experience.”

Fitness permitting, his inclusion in Clarke’s 26-man squad for the games against Haiti, Morocco and Brazil is assured. A sizeable percentage of the squad — McTominay, Gilmour, Adams, Ferguson, Miller and possibly Bowie — are likely to be plying their trade in Italy and Hickey’s status as an ambassador, a trailblazer, for Scottish players makes him an honorary member of the Serie A club.

“Before Lewis made the move I spoke to him. We were away with Scotland and he came up to me on the bus and said Bologna had just contacted him. He was asking me about it, but at that point I knew I was going. I offered some advice and recommended the move. I knew he would enjoy it; he has done so well.

“What I would say to any Scottish player thinking of going there is that it is going to be difficult sometimes. Liam and Lewis have taken up the language. I tried to and could understand what people said to me but I was never fluent. That makes everything easier.”

Hickey starred in Scotland’s unforgettable qualifier against Denmark at Hampden. There is not a day goes by when he doesn’t look ahead to this summer’s World Cup

The Hickeys derive personal pride from their role in the Scottish invasion of Serie A, but prefer to focus on the bigger picture. Last year, Ferguson’s agent Bill McMurdo told of a dogged two-year quest to convince clubs in Italy that a midfielder from Aberdeen was worth the punt. The reticence seems to have gone now, Bowie the latest to make the jump when he left Hibernian for Hellas Verona for £6m in January.

“It’s just great to see that there are good options for our young players now,” says Hickey senior. “You see so many going down south too early, before they are ready.

“There are potentially six members of the World Cup squad playing in Serie A and if we had any part in that then it’s not a personal thing, more a delight for the country at large. It’s a happy accident because we didn’t mean to be trailblazers, but if we did and everybody benefits out of that then it’s great, isn’t it?”

While Hickey is under contract at Brentford until the summer of 2028, sporadic, fleeting appearances in the first team seem unlikely to keep him there. A move to Italy at the age of 18 was inspired by a desire to play first-team football and he is open to a return to the country where his career took flight.

“I think, now, he would quite like to go back to Italy to play for AC Milan or a club like that,” says his father. “When I say to him, ‘You wanted to leave Italy’ he says to me, ‘I was just too young to really understand it.

“Ask him why he would go back out of the English Premier League and he’ll tell you it’s the football. It’s the opera, it’s the colours on the strips, the way they play the game.

“In Bologna, you will see the mayor stuck in traffic while the police escort the football team through the town. You don’t really get that in the UK, do you?”