Wolves are facing up to huge loss as Patrick Cutrone transfer plan confirmed

Patrick Cutrone arrived to such fanfare in 2019 that it’s hard to fathom how quickly his Wolverhampton Wanderers career unravelled.

When Wolves agreed to pay AC Milan £16million for Cutrone, almost everyone was in agreement that Fosun had struck gold. Admittedly, Cutrone’s final season in Milan - where he scored nine goals in 43 games across 2018/19 - wasn’t as impressive as the one which preceded it.

But the deal, on paper at least, looked exceptional. Wolves would be signing a 21-year-old Italy international with top-level European experience for a relatively small transfer fee. “In Italy he is compared to Filippo Inzaghi,” Sempre Milan reporter Vito Angele told BirminghamLive at the time. “He has a strong sense of where the goal is, a gift that allows him to be decisive even when coming off the bench.”

Since Cutrone signed for Wolves almost three years ago, the heir to the legendary Inzaghi’s throne has scored a total of 11 goals. Three of those came in Wolves colours before Nuno Espirito Santo shipped the homesick forward to Italian side Fiorentina on an 18-month loan deal.

Cutrone quickly fell out of favour in Florence so Wolves agreed to take him back last January, only for Nuno to pack him off to Valencia once he’d signed Willian Jose - who was ultimately even more ineffective than Cutrone in a Wolves shirt. A stint in Spain didn’t work out and Cutrone was back at Wolves in the summer, where he worked under Bruno Lage.

Lage gave Cutrone a chance to win him over in pre-season, telling the striker: “I said to Cutrone, ‘You are here two years, every time on loan, but the fans are singing your song, so you need to prove something on the pitch. 'If you want to change something it's not the change I give to you