Tearing up the policy of austerity: The risks and potential rewards of AC Milan’s Ramos blockbuster

News of Gonçalo Ramos possibly joining AC Milan has sent Italian football into a minor frenzy. Milan have agreed a club-record fee with Paris Saint-Germain for the Portuguese striker, comfortably eclipsing the roughly €50m the club ultimately shelled out to prise and retain Rafael Leão.

The guaranteed fee for Ramos sits north of €50m; fold in the add-ons, and the overall package climbs to a staggering €70m. It is, depending on which paper you read, anywhere between a bold statement and a baffling one.

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Gerry Cardinale, pilloried for two years over a perceived unwillingness to spend, has used Ruben Amorim’s arrival as the moment to tear up the policy of austerity. Call it wisdom or call it desperation, as ever with Milan, that verdict depends on which side of the line you find yourself on.

A ransom worth paying?

Context matters here, because €70m for a striker reads very differently from €70m for anyone else. The number nine market has always operated on its own inflated logic – a moderately good striker can command a fee that would embarrass a far superior midfielder or centre-back.

Age, contract length, reputation and plain scarcity all stack the price upward in ways that rarely apply elsewhere on the pitch.

It’s worth remembering that Michael Olise, arguably a more central figure to his team’s plans and similarly aged when he made his move, cost Bayern Munich around €60m in 2024. Milan, by that yardstick, are not paying some wild outlier premium for Ramos. They’re paying striker tax.

Even so, the surface-level case against the deal isn’t hard to build. Ramos managed just six league goals for PSG last season, from a modest 1,309 minutes, barely the equivalent of 15 full matches.

Across three seasons in Paris, he has been a squad option more often than a starter, regularly an afterthought behind Kylian Mbappé and, since his departure, the current Ballon d’Or winner, Ousmane Dembélé.

On those terms, paying close to €70m for a player who has rarely started PSG’s biggest matches looks, at best, like an asinine gamble. But, the counter-case is substantial, and easy to miss if you exclude the minutes column.

Ramos graduated into Benfica’s first team as Darwin Núñez’s understudy, and when Núñez left for Liverpool in 2022. He didn’t just fill the void, he detonated it.

In his breakout 2022–23 season he scored 27 goals and added 12 assists across 47 appearances in all competitions, 19 of those goals coming in the league, with seven more arriving in 14 Champions League appearances as Benfica reached the quarter-finals.

It was a season good enough to convince PSG to pay Benfica €65m guaranteed, with up to €15m more in add-ons, a deal that could have run as high as €80m. Whatever Milan end up paying for Ramos now, it is very plausibly less than PSG paid for him back then.

Reassuring numbers

And PSG got something for their money. Ramos has scored 45 goals and provided 10 assists in 131 appearances for the club, modest-sounding totals until you break them down into granular bits.

Across all competitions and three seasons of football, he averages 0.75 goals per 90 minutes. Factor in the assists, and that climbs to 0.92 goals-and-assists per 90, a return most full-time starters would happily take, managed largely from a deputy’s role.

By October 2025 he had become PSG’s all-time leading scorer off the bench, with 17 goals as a substitute, a quietly absurd record for a club of that calibre. That same month, he came on to score the stoppage-time winner against Barcelona in the Champions League.

When PSG retained their Champions League title on penalties against Arsenal this past May, it was Ramos who stepped up first in the shootout and scored.

Three Ligue 1 titles, two Coupes de France, two Champions League winners’ medals: by the only measure that ultimately matters in football, Ramos has spent three years as one of the most successful substitutes in the world game.

None of that erases the risk. At close to over €70m, Milan are still paying a premium for a player whose route to regular starts at the very top level has so far run almost exclusively through the substitutes’ bench.

The question of alternatives was always going to surface given the money on the table. Dušan Vlahović’s situation at Juventus has rumbled on for the best part of a year, but his wage demands and an injury-hit campaign give any suitor pause.

Vangelis Pavlidis, prolific since his move to Benfica, was a name that did the rounds in Milan’s wider search for a centre-forward; Samu Aghehowa, Porto’s combustible young striker, was never seriously part of that conversation, but is exactly the kind of younger bet Milan might have explored instead.

Vlahović and Pavlidis were realistic alternatives. Milan went with neither. They chose Ramos instead, and by most accounts it was Amorim who made the call.

Best years to come

Ramos turned 25 on the 20th of June, and signed a five-year contract that hands his prime years to Milan rather than PSG. This isn’t a player being bought at the tail end of his career, but one whose best football, on the evidence of Benfica, may still be ahead of him once he’s handed the keys to an attack.

Bearing a club-record price tag, he will be judged from his very first touch at San Siro, scrutinised not only by the Milan faithful but by all of Serie A, hunting for signs that the fee was justified. How he copes with the low blocks and physical defending that define this league will be the real test.

Cardinale has answered two years of criticism over austerity with the loudest possible statement, and pinned his faith almost entirely on his new coach’s judgment.

Ramos could be exactly the centre-forward this version of Milan has been missing – a proven finisher who has simply never had the platform to show it on a weekly basis. Or this could be the latest entry in a long line of expensive disappointments, just with a bigger number attached.

The question isn’t whether Ramos can score goals, Benfica, and PSG’s bench, both answered that some time ago. It’s whether Amorim can finally give him the minutes to prove it.

Rajath Kumar is on X @rajathkumar