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https://theathletic.com/4525991/2023/05/17/inter-reach-champions-league-final-milan/

Rippling down the Curva Nord, the choreography unfurled by Inter Milan’s ultras before their Champions League semi-final second leg showed a knight in shining armour, his shield pock-marked with arrows, a depiction of Inter’s quest for the holiest of grails.

If the knight were to have suddenly animated and taken off his helmet, it would not have come as a surprise to see the face of Simone Inzaghi revealed. He may as well have ridden in on a white charger when he joined Inter two years ago.

They were champions of Italy at the time. But they did not look like a club who were going to dominate Serie A in the way Inter did between 2006 and 2010, when five domestic titles in a row culminated in an unprecedented treble.

Inzaghi’s predecessor Antonio Conte had walked out a month after delivering that 2020-21 title, convinced Inter were no longer capable of matching his ambition. A week after winning the league, president Steven Zhang had shown up at the training ground to ask the players if they might waive or cut their salaries to help the club get through the financial damage caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.

The situation was desperate. Zhang had spent the previous few months looking for an emergency loan to prop the whole thing up and even when he obtained €292million (£254.5m/$316.4m at current exchange rates) from Oaktree Capital Management, it didn’t stop Inter needing to sell.

Achraf Hakimi went to Paris Saint-Germain in the July. Next out the door was Romelu Lukaku to Chelsea. Shockingly, amid it all, Christian Eriksen suffered a cardiac arrest while playing at the European Championship. The subcutaneous defibrillator he subsequently had fitted made him ineligible to play in Italy.

No one would have predicted that, two years after all that, Inter would make it to a Champions League final.

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“The first thought going through my head right now is that when I was appointed, Inter asked me to make the knockout stages for the first time in 11 years,” Inzaghi said after the final whistle last night.

By doing just that in his first season, as a 1-0 win over neighbours AC Milan completed a 3-0 aggregate victory and set up a meeting with Manchester City or Real Madrid in Istanbul on June 10, Inzaghi succeeded where Conte and his predecessor Luciano Spalletti failed. Inter were knocked out by Liverpool in the round of 16 last year but did beat them 1-0 at Anfield in the second leg, and gave Jurgen Klopp’s team as good a game as anyone until they played Real Madrid in the final.

Progress in Europe was overshadowed by relinquishing the Scudetto on the final day of last season to cousins and rivals Milan. The past week has avenged it. “We’re going to Istanbul, you shits,” proclaimed a banner in the Curva Nord at full-time last night. The word ‘Merde’ spelled out in the red and black of their old enemy.


Lautaro Martinez made sure of that by surprising the otherwise excellent Mike Maignan at his near post to make it 3-0 on aggregate, causing San Siro to tremble under the weight of all the bouncing Interisti.

“I’d been thinking about having an operation on my ankle because it’s destroyed,” Argentina forward Martinez said. “During the World Cup, I had pain-killing injections in order to stay in the squad.” Pain turned to joy on Tuesday.


Inzaghi couldn’t quite believe it.

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“After the draw, there was some disappointment. We didn’t get very lucky (landing in a group with Barcelona and Bayern Munich). We went to Plzen (for the second group match, after an opening loss at home to Bayern), knowing that if we didn’t win we might not even make it through the group.” And yet here Inter are. Back in the final for the first time in 13 years.


It’s hard to understate the scale of this achievement.

Inzaghi has done more with less. He lost Ivan Perisic last summer when he left for Tottenham Hotspur at the end of his contract. He then missed out on Paulo Dybala and Gleison Bremer to Roma and Juventus respectively. He will see Milan Skriniar walk for nothing in June as a free agent. “Giovanni Invernizzi was the only Italian to take Inter to a European Cup final,” Inzaghi observed. That was more than 50 years ago. “I’m proud.”

Proud, most of all, because of the circumstances he walked into. Inter overspent in Conte’s two years, breaking the club transfer record twice in the summer of 2019 to sign Nicolo Barella and then Lukaku. “The (last) Scudetto caused some financial problems,” Inzaghi pointed out.

Remarkably, Inter’s unexpected run to this Champions League final may go some way to solving them. It has the potential to be transformative. The club has earned more than €100million in prize money and TV rights from Italy’s market pool. “I’m not saying the Champions League is a competition that enriches clubs, but it does bring the concept of sustainability closer,” Inter’s chief executive Beppe Marotta explained this month during Milan Football Week.

James Horncastle called it in March:



Next month’s Champions League final will be Marotta’s third in eight years. The first was with Juventus in 2015, a year after Conte famously claimed being their coach was like going to a restaurant with €5 in your pocket when the menu is €100 a head. The third arrives two years after Conte once again left a club adamant the project had stopped.

The windfall Inter are now due is like manna from heaven.

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In the spring of this year, they had 13 players nearing the end of their contracts. This was a problem for two reasons. First of all, Inter couldn’t make money from selling players who were going to be available for free in July. Second, there was little value in the squad, which meant that in the event Zhang sold the club this summer, big investment in the team would have to be factored into an already high asking price.

The vast amount of Champions League revenue generated from reaching the final, and the recent surge into Serie A’s top four, will help Inter offer contract extensions to the likes of captain Samir Handanovic, big-game specialist Edin Dzeko and Stefan de Vrij, not to mention Alessandro Bastoni, Hakan Calhanoglu and Henrikh Mkhitaryan. It may even enhance Inter’s prospects of striking another loan agreement with Chelsea for Lukaku.

The exposure of going this far in Europe should enable Inter to attract a premium shirt-front sponsor too.


(Photo: Emilio Andreoli – Inter/Inter via Getty Images)
You may have noticed they played without one in their Champions League semi-final after DigitalBits did not meet some of the instalments on an agreement worth €80million to the club. Raine Group, the bank running the sale process to find a new buyer for Inter, will be hoping the team’s presence in the biggest club game on the planet finally tempts someone into making a bid acceptable to Zhang and owners Suning.

The bigger picture — if there’s one silver lining in defeat for Milan — is that a healthy Inter will help break an impasse and progress plans for a new shared stadium to replace San Siro.

Zhang will still have to pay Oaktree back the €292million it loaned to Inter’s holding company Grand Tower this time next year. But the financial storm clouds lingering over him cleared, if only temporarily, on Tuesday night.

“It’s our seventh year (as owners),” Zhang said. “I arrived here when I was 24. There were players who’d never played Champions League before. Now we have won everything possible in this country and arrive in the final. We’ve brought Inter back to the top. As long as we’re here, we’ll work to keep Inter in this position.”

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Inter vice-president Javier Zanetti, the most recent captain to lift the European Cup for the club, smoothed his never-changing side-parting and looked ahead to Istanbul. “I’d like to avoid Real Madrid,” he said. “Because this competition seems made for them. But the most important thing is we’re there.”

Half an hour after full-time, the players’ kids were having a kickabout on the pitch and wing-back Federico Dimarco was leading the ultras in song. The achievement had not yet sunk in. “We’ll only realise what we’ve done from tomorrow,” Inzaghi said.

Inter have gone from the brink to the jackpot.

(Top photo: Chris Brunskill/Fantasista/Getty Images)