Is there something in the water in Serie A? Footballers go to Italy for all sorts of reasons. Trophies, regular minutes, a new challenge, better weather. But there’s also the increasingly very real phenomenon of the Serie A glow-up.

Maybe it’s the food. Maybe it’s the sunshine. Maybe it’s hanging out with Italians who actually know how to dress. Give it six months, and we fully expect Curtis Jones to be gracing the cover of GQ as naturally as Callum Turner.

Here are six of our favourite examples of the Serie A glow-up.

The poster boy for this phenomenon.

McTominay’s secret? “Oh my goodness, the tomatoes,” the former Manchester United midfielder told .

“I never ate them at home, they’re just red water.

“Here, they actually taste like tomatoes. Now I eat them as a snack. I eat all the vegetables, all of the fruits. It is all so fresh. It’s incredible.”

Solved. Any Gen Alpha kids tempted to subscribe to Clavicular and go down some bizarre cortisol rabbit hole, don’t bother. Just listen to McTominay and eat your veggies. It’s that simple.

Look at little Billy Gilmour there, looking as though he could be the leading man in a Paolo Sorrentino movie.

Lovely stuff.

It’s not just the Brits who benefit from a bit of Mediterranean air.

Hojlund’s time at Manchester United always felt a bit awkward. A little sad, even. He had the air of a slightly ungainly teenager desperately trying to find his place among the cool kids.

Now look at him. Certified prom king.

What is it with Napoli?

It’s almost as if their Head of Recruitment found a secret ‘lads who would burn to a crisp after five minutes on a sun lounger’ filter on WyScout and took it from there. It’s working out alright for them.

In fairness, we’ve done Ginger Kev dirty with a picture from his early flush-faced years at Manchester City here. By the time he’d left, he’d grown his hair out and was well on his way to becoming a surprisingly suave, handsome b*stard.

But he needed the move to Naples – and away from a city described as “ugly as the back of a fridge” in the immortal words of David de Gea’s wife – in order to complete the transformation.

The trend-setter.

Nowadays we’ve got countless Scots in Serie A, but Henderson joining Fabio Grosso’s Bari in Serie B back in 2018 was something of a novelty.

Eight years later he’s still there, having flitted between the top two tiers of Italian football, representing six different clubs and cracking over a hundred appearances for Empoli. Nowadays he’s battling relegation with fallen giants Sampdoria.

It would be a stretch to describe Henderson’s glow-up as transformative. He is still very much a pasty fella from Livingston, and we’re not expecting to see him turn up at Milan Fashion Week any time soon.

But it would also be fair to say that Italy’s been kind to him. We’d expect he’d look considerably more grey and weather-beaten, looking 10 years older with a hairline a couple of inches higher, if he’d stayed back home in Scotland all this time.

Going back a bit here.

Richards’ loan at Fiorentina didn’t have much of an impact on reviving his football career, and there wasn’t any kind of physical transformation, but he’s often spoken about how much he loved it. From giving Mohamed Salah lifts to embracing the Italian lifestyle.

The Manchester City cult hero has always been bold when it comes to fashion – that much is clear from the hilariously late noughties get-up he wore to a PFA Centenary Launch event way back in 2007 (left, obviously). He continues to raise a few eyebrows with his outfit choices on Match of the Day.

It might be a stretch to give La Viola all the credit, but his year in Florence certainly seems to have been part of his sartorial evolution.

“Florence,” Richards answered when asked if he could be anywhere in a 2024 interview with The Guardian.

“Since playing for Fiorentina, I kid myself I’m Italian. The people, weather, food, culture – I love everything about it.”

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