Inter Milan may never get a better chance to win Champions League

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Today’s newsletter is a guest piece from Neel Shelat on Inter Milan, their chances of winning the UEFA Champions League final, and why they might never get a better chance to lift the trophy than they have this weekend.

Neel’s work has been featured at The Blizzard, Analytics FC, and Forbes, among others. Previously, he wrote here on Manchester City’s January transfer window. Neel currently appears regularly on The Transfer Flow Podcast, as well as the Get Football Tactics Podcast. You can find him on Twitter here, and Bluesky here.

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The biggest match of the European football season is upon us. Paris Saint-Germain will take on Inter in the UEFA Champions League final this Saturday in what promises to be one of the most exciting matchups of the year. Of course, the tactical battle between Luis Enrique and Simone Inzaghi will have the nerds licking their lips (it’s me, I’m the nerds), and there will be exceptional player quality on display all over the pitch.

Moreover, the two teams are very different in so many respects. Among the most obvious contrasts is the fact that PSG are still searching for their first Champions League title, while Inter are looking to claim European football’s top honour for the fourth time. The Parisians have one of the wealthiest owners in world football, whereas Inter’s previous owners (Suning Holdings Group) defaulted on mounting debts last year, leading to Oaktree Capital’s takeover.

Their seasons have gone quite differently, too. PSG simply walked to all domestic titles (almost without defeat) but failed to convince in the UCL until the knockouts. Meanwhile, Inter lost the Coppa semifinal and missed out on the league title by a point, though they did put together an incredible UCL league phase campaign with just one goal conceded before being pushed harder from the last eight onwards.

One of the most stark differences, though, is in the age profiles of the two squads. In terms of average age weighted by minutes played, PSG were the fourth-youngest team in Europe’s big five leagues this season behind only Strasbourg, Chelsea and Parma. Inter, on the other hand, can be found at the other end of that table.

For this simple reason, I believe this could be Inter’s best chance to win the Champions League for the foreseeable future. Of course, it is easy to say that when they are in the final, but it has been true throughout the tournament.

Besides their ageing squad, the stumbles of some of the pre-season favourites have contributed to this golden opportunity. As far as the next seasons are concerned, PSG are evidently well set to continue challenging at the highest level, Arsenal have been on track to grow into serious contenders, Liverpool should be expected to come back strong, Manchester City should still be backed to successfully reset, Real Madrid will surely get better under Xabi Alonso and Barcelona should also get better as Lamine Yamal and their other youngsters get more experience.

The long and the short of it is that Inter will have to do incredibly well to get to two finals in three seasons again, so they really should aim to grab this chance with both hands. If they do it, it will cap off an extremely impressive period of on-pitch success amid a good deal of off-pitch turmoil.

As previously alluded to, Inter’s financial situation in recent years has been far from ideal. We won’t be getting into it in much detail (here’s an Athletic longread if you’re interested), but the super short explanation is that the COVID-19 pandemic delivered a huge blow to both the club and their Chinese owners, leading to mounting debts and cost cuts. So, they’ve had to restrain their spending in recent years. Since 2021, they’ve only spent about €250 million on transfer fees, which is roughly equal to half a BlueCo summer.

Clearly, spending sensibly and avoiding any major losses on player transfers have been among the keys to Inter’s recent success. They were able to do both these things by not spending huge fees on any individual players and heavily dosing on the Italian special of loans with options/obligations to buy. The highest transfer fee they paid in the last four years was just over €30m, and they’ve made 12 free transfers and converted eight loans into permanent moves in the same period.

In the process, the Nerazzurri have had to adopt a different transfer strategy compared to most other top clubs. Over a third of the 33 signings they have made in the last four years have been on the wrong side of 30 years old. Only five of them have been under 23, as Inter’s limited spending capacity has rendered them incapable of competing with their rivals from around the continent for the signatures of the brightest young talents. This is also a reflection of their risk-averse approach to transfers, which should also explain why 20 of those arrivals came from within Italy, while all but two of the rest came from the other top eight European leagues. The rare occasion when Inter do take risks with their signings is when they bring in a potentially underrated gem, as was the case with Hakan Çalhanoğlu. Even so, they are careful to limit the costs as far as possible.

Amid such a financial crunch, it would be really helpful to have a great batch of youth academy graduates coming through – just ask Barcelona. Inter, however, only have three such players in their current senior squad. Among them, Federico Dimarco is the only noteworthy contributor as 31-year-old third-choice goalkeeper Raffaele Di Gennaro has made a grand total of one appearance for the club,while young Valentín Carboni is only around because his loan to Marseille was cut short by an ACL injury.

The Nerazzurri might well improve in this respect as they have started to branch out their recruitment for the Primavera (U20) squad to other parts of Europe and the world, and their youngsters topped the UEFA Youth League standings with a perfect record earlier this season. For now, though, the lack of young academy graduates coupled with their risk-averse transfer strategy has led to their squad’s age profile looking like this:

One potential upside of signing older players is that they can help keep the wage bill in check – if their contracts are negotiated well, of course. 2024/25 was the first time in over a decade that Inter had the highest player payroll in Serie A, but they are still some way below the other European giants in this respect. They have been able to keep their annual wage bill around €150m by keeping over half of their players’ wages under €6m, with older players including Henrik Mkhitaryan, Yann Sommer, Matteo Darmian, Francesco Acerbi and Marko Arnautović falling under that category. Combined, the five of them take home under 13% of Inter’s player wages, leaving room for the peak-age stars to make the big bucks and happily stay put. Lautaro Martínez, Nicolò Barella, Hakan Çalhanoğlu and Alessandro Bastoni account for well over a third of the total squad payroll, while the addition of Federico Dimarco, Marcus Thuram and Stefan de Vrij would take that tally to over 50%.

Head coach Simone Inzaghi, for his part, also seems content with having an older squad. In his bid to compete for titles on all fronts with a pretty thin squad (Inter’s tally of 26 different players used was the lowest in Serie A this season), he surely appreciates the ability to put out a fully rotated line-up of experienced campaigners whom he can depend on to get the job done against a lower table side. The level of experience in the side also contributes to making Inter arguably the world’s best team when it comes to adapting to different game states. They’re particularly clinical at seeing out leads, as they have only lost once from a winning position all season (and that was in the Supercoppa).

Of course, the most likely issue of having an old squad is the question of whether they can meet the ever-growing physical demands over the course of a full season. Inter have been able to limit this issue by managing player loads and rotating very well. 15 members of the squad played over 900 league minutes, so just one outfielder crossed 2,500. Undoubtedly, though, the current meta of Serie A helps them a great deal in this respect.

There are a lot of direct teams in the league so it’s not boring to watch by any means, but they simply do not look to press high. As this viz from the excellent markstats shows, Vincenzo Italiano’s Bologna are the only team that seemingly did not get the memo of letting the opponents build up peacefully for the most part.

Pressing? We don’t do that here.

Inter are able to take advantage of this meta by having the highest possession and possession sequence time averages in the league. They are rarely forced to exert themselves too much with the ball since they hardly have to build out against a high press, and they can comfortably kill a game with a lead in most cases. The Nerazzurri usually can up the intensity when the game demands it, as they often have to do in the Champions League. On the whole, they have an excellent attack, largely thanks to the flexibility and versatility their tactics and personnel offer.

However, the squad’s age profile limits Inter out of possession. In particular, their first-choice midfield – which includes a 34-year-old Mkhitaryan and former attacking midfielder Çalhanoğlu in the centre – needs to be carefully used. To avoid being opened up, they rarely look to press high and instead drop into a solid and compact 5-3-2 block, where their numbers and discipline usually make them tough to break down (although they did show some weaknesses against Barcelona, most notably).

Regardless of how the Champions League final ends, it will be interesting to see what Inter do this summer as they prepare for the 2025/26 season and the longer-term future. They certainly aren’t at the financial level of the strongest and richest teams in Europe, but their situation is far more stable than it was a couple of years ago. Even amid those difficulties, they did an excellent job of finding great value in replacements for departees and declining players, so they should be expected to keep it up.

More importantly, Simone Inzaghi’s contract is set to expire next year and he already is being courted by richer suitors. Of course, Inter are keen to agree on an extension. Especially if he is staying put, I can’t think of a reason for them to veer away from a successful formula. They will have to consistently maintain a high hit rate with their transfer decisions to keep competing at the highest level, but the same can be said of any club coveting Europe’s greatest glory.

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