Harry Kane, Jude Bellingham, Scott McTominay and the top 20 Brits Abroad of the 2024-25 season - ranked

Of AC Milan's many Brits to feature on this list, Kyle Walker ranks the lowest. None of them had particularly fantastic seasons; it's more that his stint at San Siro was the shortest, only joining on loan from Manchester City in January.

Walker's start to life in Italy was competent enough for the Rossoneri to think their season was heading for a turnaround, but once his body started to fail him and the team started to falter in similar regard, there was no road left to find redemption. He could yet remain in Italy, though, following Max Allegri's return as manager.

When Fikayo Tomori was previously snubbed from the England squad, there was deserved outrage and backlash. Nowadays, he's less than an afterthought in Three Lions discussions.

Tomori was Milan's hero upon winning the 2021-22 Scudetto and subsequent run to the Champions League semi-finals. He therefore has a pedigree that the Rossoneri's other centre-backs don't have, yet he was seldom as reliable under the brightest spotlight this season and came close to leaving for Tottenham midway through the campaign. It wasn't a terrible year, rather an underwhelming one.

Poor Tammy Abraham has been absolutely decimated by injuries over the last few years. Last August, he was shipped out by Roma to Milan on a season-long loan with a heavy weight of expectation upon him given the Rossoneri's desperate need for a No.9 that was a prolific scorer.

In all competitions, Abraham at least grabbed 10 goals, including a stoppage-time winner against Inter in the Coppa Italia semi-finals that made him a fan favourite, but this was far from a vintage campaign. Out of all of Milan's Englishmen, he was the best of the bunch, yet is still being sent back to the Italian capital.

EFL fans, and particularly those of a Leeds United or Millwall persuasion, will remember Charlie Cresswell as one of the second tier's most hyped centre-back prodigies. Instead of continuing his development in his homeland though, he joined French side Toulouse last summer and hasn't looked back.

A monster in the air in both boxes, Cresswell is now one of Ligue 1's most underrated prospects and is probably only a year away from an even bigger move. This summer, he will play for a heavily-favoured England Under-21s at the European Championship as the squad's second-most capped player after Liverpool's Harvey Elliott, so he's in esteemed company.

The German press was not kind to Borussia Dortmund's recruitment team when they opted to sign Carney Chukwuemeka, undercooked having barely featured for Chelsea all season, on an initial loan at the end of the January transfer window when the squad was crying out for immediate reinforcement.

However, the deal for Chukwuemeka proved to be a shrewd bit of business given his growing importance to Niko Kovac's side down the stretch of a campaign that ended with BVB snatching a Champions League spot on the last day of the Bundesliga season. Up next for them is the Club World Cup.

The year is 2025, and Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain is one of the old heads leading Ole Gunnar Solskjaer's Besiktas. Sometimes real football feels more like a Football Manager simulation.

The midfielder came into the season off the back of a torn thigh injury and a bout of pneumonia, and thus began the campaign slowly as the Istanbul giants made an inconsistent start. After Solskjaer's appointment and a return to fitness, though, Oxlade-Chamberlain proved one of their better players in a late march to Europa League qualification, which seemed a long-shot when the Norwegian took the job.

Jonathan Rowe was only the second-most high-profile Englishman with Jamaican heritage to sign for Marseille in 2024, though he enjoyed his debut season in the south of France all the same. Though he only tallied three goals and three assists in Ligue 1, Rowe has shown enough promise to suggest he belongs at a club who will return to the Champions League next term.

The 22-year-old's versatility is a useful attribute under a mad-scientist manager like Roberto De Zerbi, and you can expect him to contribute more to OM's success in 2025-26.

The boring thing for Che Adams to have done upon the expiry of his contract at Southampton last summer would have been to join just another bottom-half Premier League team. His call to sign for Torino in Serie A was much more fun.

Another mid-table finish for Il Toro followed, and Adams was a key contributor to a season that was more positive than negative, registering 10 goals in all competitions while only missing two games across the whole campaign.

In 2020, Portsmouth defender Christian Burgess decided to swap the third tier of English football for the second tier in Belgium, penning a more secure contract with Union Saint-Gilloise, then under the guidance of Brighton mastermind Tony Bloom. It's a decision that has paid dividends.

'Air Burgey', who turns 34 later this year, was Union's rock at the back as they ended a 90-year wait to become national champions, overcoming Club Brugge during the Pro League play-offs and booking a spot in next season's Champions League to boot.

If you judge a season by what happens in May, then Jordan Henderson and Ajax were complete failures. That doesn't actually tell the whole story of a campaign that only ended in heartbreak, however.

Henderson cut his Saudi venture short in January 2024 when he agreed a move to the Amsterdam giants, who had toiled away into mid-table mediocrity and ended 2023-24 a staggering 35 points behind champions PSV. This season was a far different story, though, with Henderson the mature head as Francesco Farioli's young side went into the final weeks nine points clear with five games to play.

Then, well, it all collapsed. Ajax's bottle-job was one of the worst in European history, yet they still made remarkable year-on-year progress. This could be the end of Henderson's days abroad though, with a return to boyhood club Sunderland on the cards.

Most British football fans will recognise Jamie Gittens mostly from transfer gossip columns. To be fair, when you're a promising young starlet at Borussia Dortmund, that's a likely place for your name to be.

The 20-year-old winger does seem likely to leave Signal-Iduna Park this summer, with Chelsea among the clubs said to hold a particular interest. After scoring 12 times last term, including away at Real Madrid in the Champions League, it's easy to see why. This isn't another Jadon Sancho story waiting to happen either, with Gittens more of a hard-working dribbler who provides a decent amount of goal threat and has pace to burn.

Conor Gallagher and Diego Simeone's Atletico Madrid felt almost destined to cross paths at some point. The midfielder's tireless running and the team's dogged style married up perfectly.

There was much fanfare when Gallagher swapped Chelsea for Atletico ahead of the 2024-25 season, though we haven't yet seen the best of him in the red-and-white. He's had some fine moments, including a first-minute strike against rivals Real Madrid during their Champions League last-16 tie, but this would have been par for the course by his own standards.

Once one of Serie A's best up-and-coming midfielders, Lewis Ferguson has had to endure a season of personal transition with Bologna after tearing his ACL last year. He was fit enough to start regularly again during the final weeks of the campaign though, and etched his name into club history by captaining the Rossoblu to the Coppa Italia, their first major trophy since 1974.

Despite exiting the Champions League at the league phase hurdle, Bologna only lost one of the three games in which Ferguson started in Europe, while they will return to continental action as one of the favourites to win the Europa League next season.

Did anyone expect Eric Dier's career path to develop this way? By the time he left Tottenham, where he served for nearly 10 years and was well respected in all corners of the club, he had seemingly become obsolete to front-foot football. There was little jeopardy or risk in Bayern Munich taking him on loan with a free transfer agreed for the following summer, but he's surpassed those expectations.

Dier will now leave Bayern as something of a cult hero having contributed a fair bit to their rise back to the top of German football, shaking off the shackles of his 'Harry Kane's mate' label. After sampling Lisbon, London and Munich, Dier will now take his talents to Monaco in Ligue 1. It's alright for some.

The city of Naples has fallen in love with their hero Scottish midfielders, and the Robin to a certain someone's Batman is Billy Gilmour. A diminutive playmaker who naturally plays the game at a slower pace, it seemed obvious he would be more suited to Serie A than the Premier League.

Though he was in and out of Antonio Conte's starting line up throughout the season, Gilmour still contributed a significant amount to Napoli's fourth Serie A title. With the Partenopei back in the Champions League next season, expect his game time to go through the roof.

A few eyebrows were raised when Ivan Toney, fresh off some superb cameo performances at Euro 2024 with runners-up England, decided his next move at club level would be to Saudi side Al-Ahli. To this day, there are still question marks over that call, but he would argue he's enjoying his football in the Middle East and on a much more lucrative wage than any of his other suitors could have offered too.

The ex-Brentford striker netted 30 goals in 44 matches during his first year abroad and was only outscored in the Saudi Pro League by Golden Boot winner Cristiano Ronaldo, while he won his first piece of silverware with glory in the AFC Champions League. To cap off a fine season, Toney has even been recalled back into Thomas Tuchel's Three Lions squad.

After departing Manchester United for good last summer, Mason Greenwood made himself at home with Marseille, playing a crucial role in their march back to the Champions League.

The 23-year-old finished as Ligue 1's joint-top goal scorer alongside Ballon d'Or frontrunner Ousmane Dembele and was arguably OM's most important player in a season they finished second to the all-conquering Paris Saint-Germain. Combustible manager Roberto De Zerbi did at points take issue with Greenwood's attitude and the Stade Velodrome ultras were not particularly fond of his discipline, though it's a €31.6m deal the club's top brass would probably do again and again.

After a debut season at Santiago Bernabeu in which pretty much everything went his way - multiple titles, many last-minute winners and a signature celebration taking off - it was always going to be difficult for Jude Bellingham to overcome a sophomore slump. It didn't help that Real Madrid fell short in La Liga, the Champions League and Copa del Rey, all the while battling an injury crisis which decimated the defensive structure they needed to balance out their maverick set of attackers.

Nevertheless, Bellingham still registered 14 goals and assists apiece in 51 appearances, despite clearly needing surgery on his shoulder for most of the year. Even now, going under the knife will have to wait until after Madrid's Club World Cup campaign, with club president Florentino Perez said to be desperate for his side to create history and become the first winners of the new format.

Even the most ardent of Scott McTominay defenders would have failed to predict the 2024-25 season he's just had. Sure, he was one of Manchester United's most useful players by the time of his PSR-enforced departure from Old Trafford last summer, but if he was to help swing the Serie A title race, you would have thought that came in a far less prominent role.

Instead, the Scotland midfielder scored 12 goals en route to Scudetto glory and won the league's MVP award, joining an illustrious list of winners since it was introduced - Cristiano Ronaldo, Paulo Dybala, Romelu Lukaku, Rafael Leao, Khvicha Kvaratskhelia and Lautaro Martinez. On a local level, he is a legend only surpassed by Diego Maradona, and that's why he ranks ahead of even Bellingham.

McTominay has fulfilled his potential and then some in Naples, while he will receive some frightening support next season with Kevin De Bruyne in line to join from Manchester City.

Well, he's done it. Harry Kane has finally won a trophy. The jokes are over, the low-hanging fruit of banter destroyed for good. Bayern Munich are once again the champions of Germany, and it's largely thanks to the efforts of their star striker.

It's not as if Kane was riding the coattails on his way to a first piece of silverware, far from that. Across 46 games in all competitions, the England captain scored a whopping 38 goals while also providing 13 assists for a new-look Bayern attack.

There's still scope for Kane to enjoy further success this summer too, with Vincent Kompany's men heading to the United States for the revamped Club World Cup. Glory on the other side of the Atlantic would surely boost his Ballon d'Or chances.