WORDS Simon Hart

Scott McTominay certainly isn’t the first player to adopt the local customs upon a move to Italy, nor will he be the last…

Scott McTominay evidently picked up rather more than a Serie A winners’ medal and hero status in Naples during his first season in Italy. Photos of the Napoli midfielder and Ballon d’Or nominee watching the tennis at Wimbledon with his mother in July would suggest some significant additions to his wardrobe too.

“What a year in Italy does to you” was the quip from Men in Blazers on X, voicing the sentiments of the rest of us at the sight of the Scottish international wearing a navy blazer, open-necked shirt and cream slacks – not to forget the sunglasses and slicked-back hair. His prior stint at Manchester United seemed a distant memory, with his outfit screaming Liguria rather than Lancaster, his home town.

The Bel Paese can have this effect on footballers. The great Marco van Basten recalls in his autobiography how he and Ruud Gullit initially turned up for training at AC Milan with their gear in plastic bags and marvelled at their Italian team-mates’ “little leather toiletry cases” – not to mention the sight of “men drying their hair with a hairdryer”.

Former England captain David Platt’s three years in Serie A in the 1990s, meanwhile, left him gesticulating to referees in the style of a Roman taxi driver. And just search for old photographs of then Sampdoria pair Graeme Souness and Trevor Francis in Portofino, the Scotland midfielder and England forward displaying deeper tans than a Sicilian fisherman.

McTominay is not alone, therefore, in falling in love with the dolce vita. And he’s clearly in deep. As he told the BBC during his day at the tennis, “It’s different, a totally different way of life over there – the way you eat, the way you live and all that.” Fashion definitely included.