Camarda's path back to relevance runs through Belgium, says Ambrosini
Massimo Ambrosini argues Francesco Camarda must leave Milan's crowded forward line and follow Nicolo Tresoldi's example to rebuild his career.
Francesco Camarda has played nine minutes of Serie A football this season, all of it in fragments off the bench, and Massimo Ambrosini believes that number tells its own story.
The former Milan midfielder used Nicolo Tresoldi as the point of comparison during DAZN's coverage of Milan's 2-0 win over Udinese, a match in which Camarda was introduced in the 90th minute, according to Football Italia.
Tresoldi has scored three hat-tricks in the last 26 days, for Club Brugge and Germany's Under-21s, one of them against Inter in the Champions League. Ambrosini's point was not that Tresoldi is the finished article, but that regular senior football has made him look like one.
Camarda is 18 and still carries the weight of a staggering underage record: 485 goals in 89 matches through Milan's youth sides. He became Serie A's youngest ever player at 15 years and 260 days under Stefano Pioli in 2023.
Why the goal record stopped translating
A scoring rate built against age-group opponents measures finishing instinct and physical precocity, not readiness for senior-level pressing or marking. That gap is exactly what Camarda has struggled to close since his debut.
A loan at Lecce last season was supposed to supply the missing minutes. It delivered his first senior Serie A goal, but only seven starts from 21 appearances, a split that left him short of the sustained run of matches a young striker needs to develop a game.
The pecking order that has buried him
Milan's summer rebuild was meant to open a path for Camarda back at the club. Instead, the arrival of club-record signing Goncalo Ramos has hardened the centre-forward hierarchy above him, and Alphadjo Cisse now appears to rank ahead of him too.
Ambrosini was blunt about what that hierarchy means in practice: with Ramos set to play around 80 percent of Milan's games, Camarda is left fighting for scraps in a squad depth chart where the ceiling is already fixed.
That is the core of Ambrosini's argument. A loan to a club that plays in a settled, competitive system gives a young forward sustained exposure to senior-level structure, defensive organisation and the Champions League minutes that build a player's reading of the game. Staying at Milan as a fourth-choice striker does not.
Why a move to Belgium or the Netherlands makes sense
Ambrosini's case for a destination like Belgium or the Netherlands is specific rather than symbolic. He wants Camarda somewhere that, in his words, plays in a particular style, implying a league where tactical identity and physical senior football are not optional extras but the daily environment a young forward needs to absorb.
His framing was direct: "He needs a certain level of experience. For me, Tresoldi isn't a 'champion', but he could become one. He looks much better than Camarda, who should go and play somewhere more realistic, like Brugge, and have a different experience," he said, as quoted by Football Italia via Calciomercato.
Ambrosini also addressed what the Milan role risks becoming if Camarda stays. "If I were a friend of his, I would have told him to go and see if there was a team in Belgium or the Netherlands that plates in a certain way," he said, describing a forward who has barely played for two years and has made only one Europa League appearance for Milan across that span.
The underlying metric Ambrosini keeps returning to is simple: thirty high-level matches a season. That is not a figure Milan can offer a teenager stuck behind a club-record signing, but it is the kind of sample size a loan abroad, in a league built around a defined playing style, can provide.
He framed the alternative starkly too, in a separate remark: staying at Milan risks Camarda being cast permanently as Ramos's understudy, limited to cup football and the odd substitute appearance in the league rather than the structured senior development Tresoldi has found at Club Brugge.
Ambrosini's final point was about leverage rather than sentiment. If Camarda goes out, proves himself in a system that demands senior-level decision-making, and returns a different player, Milan would then have reason to build around him rather than simply rotate him in behind their record signing.