Roll up, roll up! It’s the great Wolverhampton Wanderers summer sale.

At Molineux, a surge of exits awaits following relegation back to the Championship. Though why, readers might ask, would other teams be rushing to pick off players from a club experiencing one of the worst seasons in Premier League history?

Well, because despite having one of the most unbalanced, ill-equipped, underpowered squads seen in the top flight in recent years, Wolves actually have some very good players on their books.

Added to that, they have a few that sporting director Matt Jackson and head coach Rob Edwards — assuming he remains in post for next season — will be keen to be rid of as the focus turns to 2026-27. If there was any doubt about the desire for change from Edwards, his mildly ill-tempered “they’ve got to go” speech in his press conference after Saturday’s 3-0 defeat at Brighton put that to bed.

A grim-faced Rob Edwards applauds the travelling Wolves fans after Saturday’s drubbing at Brighton (Clive Rose/Getty Images)

Those two factors combined mean a summer exodus is likely, even if very few Wolves players have managed to enhance their reputations during a season in which relegation has seemed certain since well before Christmas.

There are exceptions, the most notable among them being Mateus Mane. The young forward was a virtual unknown at the start of the campaign to all but the most ardent Wolves diehards. Now, at the age of just 18, his talent is widely acknowledged across the country.

In truth, his impact on Wolves’ season was somewhat fleeting. Introduced into the starting XI by Edwards around Christmas, Mane made an immediate impact and had fans on their feet in a campaign when excitement about their team has been the rarest of commodities.

The tailing-off of his form since those early, eye-catching displays means the prospect of Wolves selling the academy graduate for huge money this summer has receded, but it does not mean interest in him will have gone away.

Wolves have never wanted to sell their best young player. That has not changed. But there has always been a realisation that offers from certain clubs at a certain level in the game might turn Mane’s head and give the Molineux hierarchy a difficult decision to make. That has not changed, either.

The Bueno boys, Santiago and Hugo, are the other Wolves players who have quite clearly enhanced their personal reputations during a horrible campaign for the club.

In a struggling team, eight-time Uruguay international Santiago Bueno has found an impressive level of consistency in the centre of the back three during the second half of the season and Wolves expect interest from Spain, where he played previously for Barceloan’s B team and Girona, and possibly from Premier League clubs who might want him to bolster their squad, especially if they play the three-at-the-back system that has mitigated some of the 27-year-old’s physical limitations.

Santiago Bueno could attract interest from Spain and in the Premier League (Matt McNulty/Getty Images)

Wolves hope he will stay but know he might be tempted by offers to stay at the highest level of club football, in England or elsewhere.

The same applies to his Spanish namesake, Hugo Bueno, who has demonstrated his durability, athleticism and crossing ability at left wing-back this season. Even though there have still been a few moments where his defensive instincts have been found wanting, the club anticipate interest from the Premier League and Europe in a 23-year-old who has proven himself to be low-maintenance and dependable.

Then there are the players who have done little to bolster their reputations, but for whom Wolves will still aim to generate a market.

The easiest to do that with might be David Moller Wolfe, who has been unable to dislodge Hugo Bueno from the team but who has generally performed satisfactorily when called up since his winter-window arrival in early February. That, combined with his previous solid form with AZ in the Netherlands and the 24-year-old’s status as a regular Norway international, should ensure interest.

That is less true of Jackson Tchatchoua, who has struggled badly on the opposite flank, but his transfer fee from Italy’s Hellas Verona last summer was a relatively modest £11million ($15m). That means his “book value” is now £8million to £9m — a figure Wolves might just manage to extract from suitors abroad to avoid an accounting loss on the 24-year-old Belgian.

Jackson Tchatchoua has underwhelmed at Wolves (Dan Istitene/Getty Images)

Elsewhere on that flank, Pedro Lima and Rodrigo Gomes are talented players who, even allowing for the naivety of youth that sometimes undermines their efforts, Wolves are likely to want to keep for next season in the Championship.

The same is not true for Tolu Arokodare, whose £24million transfer fee when he signed from Belgium’s Genk last summer makes him pound-for-pound the worst of that window’s six new arrivals. The Nigerian’s “book value” is still around £18m and, even though he was a reliable goalscorer in the Belgian league, there is no guarantee of a market at that price.

Could Wolves recoup a loan fee to help with their accounting before selling Arokodare, 25, at a later date or might they have to keep him and hope that his obvious physical attributes are an asset in the second tier?

Tolu Arokodare apologises to the Wolves fans after missing a penalty against Crystal Palace (Paul Harding/Getty Images)

Hwang Hee-chan also seems likely to leave. After five years at Molineux and a dramatic loss of form in recent seasons, this feels like a natural time for a parting of the ways with the 30-year-old South Korea international forward. The offer of £21million that they rejected from Marseille two summers ago will not be coming again, though.

Wolves might also consider offers for central defender Yerson Mosquera. While the 25-year-old Colombian’s obvious talent and athleticism are popular at the club, his failure to curb his volatile temperament makes him a potential liability.

And even though Wolves are committed to signing Czech Republic captain Ladislav Krejci at the end of his season-long loan from Girona for a fee of £20million, there is a general expectation that he will attract interest and is likely to move on. The 27-year-old centre-back has done well enough in his first Premier League campaign to attract interest from England and elsewhere in Europe, and a solid World Cup this summer could enhance his appeal.

Sam Johnstone, 33, has not shone in his two seasons at Wolves, but the relative shortage of vacancies for goalkeepers means his departure cannot be guaranteed, while the club hope to keep Jean-Ricner Bellegarde but anticipate some interest, possibly from Ligue 1, where the 27-year-old Haiti international previously did well for Strasbourg.

Jean-Ricner Bellegarde (right) might attract some interest (Warren Little/Getty Images)

Which brings us to the players who have always been regarded as certain to depart in the event of relegation this season.

Andre, Joao Gomes and Jose Sa have not enjoyed their greatest seasons, but the Brazilian midfield pair have enough class and pedigree to guarantee offers, while goalkeeper Sa is sufficiently experienced and has a high enough ceiling to interest clubs in England, his native Portugal, Europe or even Saudi Arabia, where his agent Jorge Mendes has already found takers for multiple clients.

A departure from Molineux has seemed likely for Sa, now 33, in each of the past two summers. This one is when it will surely happen.

Andre, 24, has the talent to thrive in a better Premier League team, but seems more likely to get regular starts in another European league before perhaps returning to England with his experience enhanced. Wolves could expect to receive as much as £30million for a player who has admirers at Italian giants Juventus, which would represent a healthy profit on the £21m they paid Fluminense for him two years ago.

Andre has suitors from Italy (Shaun Botterill/Getty Images)

And then there is Gomes, one of very few Wolves players to have retained the affections of supporters during a depressing decline for the club.

Those fans will shed few tears at the departures of those squad members seen as symptomatic of Wolves’ malaise. Gomes is the obvious exception, having rarely let his levels of commitment and energy drop.

But his loss is seemingly the most nailed-on of all mentioned in this article, and the supporters would not deny the 25-year-old midfielder the chance to further his career at a Champions League club, with Atletico Madrid hopeful of completing a deal that could bring Wolves in excess of £35million.

For a club who have suffered a wretched campaign, Wolves should not be struggling for transfer income. Spending that money wisely as they aim for a swift return to the Premier League will be less straightforward.

In Dante, the Inferno is not so different from Paradiso. They compare better than they contrast. The line between them is subtler than expected. It is a spectrum of how far the soul has oriented itself toward or away from love. Milan and Roma are level on points in Serie A. The two seem dimensions apart and yet share so many things in common: exasperation with American ownership models, power struggles between coaches, sporting directors and chief executives, Champions League football tantalisingly within reach but agonisingly at risk. Tens of millions at stake.

Having said all that, one move separates them in sentiment.

Both clubs appointed experienced Italian coaches in the summer in the hope that Massimiliano Allegri and Gian Piero Gasperini would restore Milan and Roma to the top four. Both tried to solve the equation, as laid out by one of Italy’s great recruiters, Pantaleo Corvino, behind all competitive teams. You cannot, or so the Corvino theory holds, sign the wrong player in the goalkeeper and striker positions if you are to build a good side. It’s as simple as that. Milan and Roma nailed the first part. They extended Mike Maignan and Mile Svilar’s contracts, retaining a couple of the world’s best No 1s. Neither renewal should be taken for granted.

But the second part of the equation continued to flummox both. Santi Gimenez and Christopher Nkunku on the one hand, Artem Dovbyk and Evan Ferguson on the other, have underwhelmed. When a Gimenez-Dovbyk swap was mooted last summer, you would have been forgiven for thinking the goal was maybe not to score goals. Milan have spent more than €100m trying to replace Olivier Giroud. Roma have not had a regular goalscorer since Tammy Abraham’s knee injury in 2023 and even then, the Englishman was afflicted by second-season syndrome. A year later, Dovbyk replaced Abraham, who left on loan, as fate would have it, to Milan, where, truth be told, he fared no better before being returned to sender and ultimately sold to Besiktas.

At the start of this season, Allegri and Gasperini found workarounds. Rafa Leao and Christian Pulisic were unsustainably clinical in the first half of the season, before regressing to the mean in a side bereft of chance creation in the second half of the campaign. Roma, meanwhile, felt like the opposite of a free-scoring Gasperini team. Accustomed to his Atalanta sides racking up more than 100 goals a season, Roma were an anaemic alter ego. In their early and unexpected title challenge, they were keeping clean sheets and edging games by the narrowest of margins before a paucity of goals at the other end caught up with them.

January was a chance for both to have another go at cracking the Corvino code. Milan signed Niclas Fullkrug on loan from West Ham United. The deal was set up so early that he has largely been forgotten about. The Germany striker, who started a Champions League final less than two years ago, has been a spectator, watching Allegri play wingers as centre-forwards and persist with them through a goal drought. An agreement was also reached for Jean-Philippe Mateta in the final days of the winter, only for Milan to responsibly pull out after a series of scans left them with reservations about his knee. If a solution continued to elude Milan, Roma belatedly found one.

They rectified the issue by breaking Leon Bailey’s loan and taking on his Aston Villa team-mate, Donyell Malen, instead.

The Dutchman has arguably been the best January signing since Fiorentina borrowed Mohamed Salah from Chelsea a little over a decade ago. He is a late contender for Serie A MVP and has a slim chance of ending as Capocannoniere (Serie A’s top scorer) despite being in the league for less than four months. For context, no one has been as prolific as Malen in the history of midwinter transfers: not even Mario Balotelli when he left Manchester City for Milan in 2013. Memes have depicted him as R9, Ronaldo O Fenomeno. Fans encountering him outside the Stadio Olimpico have approached Malen on bended knee.

He is the difference between Inferno and Paradiso at the moment. Malen has scored 13 times in Serie A and his brace at the weekend in a remarkable late 3-2 comeback win away to Parma has made flesh of Roma’s faint chances of Champions League qualification. “I was beginning to think about the Conference League,” Gasperini admitted.

Donyell Malen has scored 14 goals in 18 games in all competitions for Roma (Alessandro Sabattini/Getty Images)

Milan are reluctantly having to contemplate it instead. Malen’s winner in the 101st minute came just as they were preparing to play Atalanta at San Siro in an already hostile environment. A petition and choreography were organised, demanding Milan chief executive Giorgio Furlani leave. Those who signed it have, in some cases, short memories. Furlani handled Milan for former owners Elliott, the hedge fund that saved the club from being wound up and forced to start over at the bottom of the football pyramid.

Working with his predecessor as chief executive, Ivan Gazidis, they won the league together. That and a run to the Champions League semi-finals in RedBird’s first year has been all too quickly forgotten (in part because Inter got to the final at their expense). As for Roma, it is worth pointing out that they have still not replaced Furlani’s equivalent, Lina Souloukou, following her resignation in 2024 amid death threats and other unsavoury scenes in the aftermath of sacking fan favourite Daniele De Rossi.

For all the criticism of Milan’s structure, Roma have largely lacked an obvious CEO figure (and therefore someone to petition) ever since. For all the uncertainty around Igli Tare’s future as Milan’s sporting director, Roma also moved on Florent Ghisolfi after a single season. His replacement, Frederic Massara, who worked for Milan under Elliott, is expected to leave after Gasperini publicly criticised Roma’s recruitment. This prompted Claudio Ranieri to clash with Gasperini and depart as senior advisor to Roma’s owners, The Friedkin Group, less than a year after moving from the dugout to the boardroom. It was not quite on the same level as Paolo Maldini’s dismissal as technical director of Milan a couple of years ago, and Roma have been through this before with James Pallotta and Francesco Totti, but Ranieri is Roman and Romanista through and through.

As such, Milan’s often scrutinised org chart looks relatively stable compared to Roma’s. The restlessness reflects the owners’ ambition to win. Contrary to local reporting, qualifying for the Champions League is not enough for RedBird and The Friedkin Group. It’s the minimum.

Milan fans spell “G. F. OUT” as they protest against CEO Giorgio Furlani (Marco Luzzani/Getty Images)

Protests in Rome have been milder than at Milan, surprisingly so after Ranieri’s exit and especially so for those who remember how much flak the old owner, Pallotta, caught for assembling more competitive teams that regularly finished runners-up to Juventus.

Both experiences serve as a parable that tells us something about Italian football. Roma and Milan’s owners have been portrayed as not culturally assimilating with calcio. If anything, though, they have perhaps been too conformist.

Hiring Jose Mourinho, Gasperini and Allegri was a gesture of understanding, a way of saying: here is a coach you understand, successful in your context, more acceptable than a German or a Spaniard who might bring some novelty; here is a coach used to being the most important person at a club, a totaliser, unused to and disinclined from acting on data and analytics.

The expectation in the media is that you let them run the thing. You acquiesce to everything, irrespective of the changed economic landscape of European football and the need to comply with UEFA’s financial regulations. You sign Paulo Dybala, loan Romelu Lukaku (as Roma did in the past) and supply Luka Modric with a new home.

In overcorrecting towards tradition, it is surely then up to the coach to deliver. Gasperini has been more capable of doing that than Allegri in recent years. Milan have spiralled just as Juventus did in his final season, despite playing only one game a week. Roma have come to life just as Gasperini has found a way to make Roma score like his Atalanta teams.

The momentum is with them, even if Milan’s destiny is in their hands. The principal tie-breaker separating the former in fourth place and Roma in fifth, their head-to-head record, is in Allegri’s favour. But Milan go to Genoa next, a team coached by De Rossi, a Roma icon.

While Allegri and Tare agreed the fans had a right to protest on Sunday, the timing felt like an act of self-harm as it hardly created an environment for underperforming players to perform in. At 3-0 down in a 3-2 defeat to Atalanta, supporters headed for the exits, leaving in droves. The players might not be worthy of it, but if Milan are to get over the line, they need support in the next fortnight. As for Roma, they have the derby coming up and must hope Lazio tire themselves out in Wednesday’s Coppa Italia final. If Lazio were to win it and somehow end a chaotic season with a piece of silverware, it would be as uncomfortable for Roma as Inter winning the league has been for Milan.

For owners still in limbo over what really works in Italy, answering the Corvino conundrum is simultaneously simple and perplexingly hard. The difference between being plunged into the Inferno and an ascent to Paradiso could be Malen over Milan or vice versa.