Inter have achieved extraordinary things over the past five years, so why are they still underrated?

Henrikh Mkhitaryan tried to see the funny side.

He joked that next time he’d tell the kitman to give him a smaller shoe size. Perhaps the chiropodist could trim his toenails even closer, too. Millimetres were all that separated Mkhitaryan’s goal from standing at Montjuic last week. Had semi-automated offside not detected his boots were a European 43 (that’s a 9 in the UK and a 9.5 in the U.S.), Inter would have won 4-3 in Barcelona.

Life’s a game of inches. While Mkhitaryan wrestled with the contradiction of how justice delivered by technology could still feel like injustice, others sank back into their seats on that pine-scented hill overlooking Barcelona and muttered to themselves: “Damn!”

Lamine Yamal had just given a performance guaranteed to remain impressed on the minds of everyone who witnessed it. His sleight of foot hid the ball from Inter’s defenders and eclipsed everything else about the night.

That included Inter going 2-0 up in Barcelona, scoring three goals and thinking they had found a fourth. Outdated but resistant, it is still, in this case, worth underlining how — in contrast with the stereotypes about Italian football — a team from Serie A went to Catalonia and had the ball in the back of the net four times.

Inter fans won’t appreciate the comparison, but there is one to be brooked here with rivals Juventus between 2015 and 2018 when they, at their peak and before succumbing to Cristiano Ronaldo-shaped hubris, went to the Bernabeu and also scored three in an epic remontada ruined, in Gigi Buffon’s recollection, by Michael Oliver, a last-minute penalty, and the referee’s “dustbin for a heart”.

But back to Inter.

On the one hand, the scoreline in last week’s classic in Barcelona did not tell the full story. Inter were clinical. Their goals came from their only shots. Marcus Thuram won’t pull off a back-heeled goal like that every week, in the same way Yamal won’t play to the same level he showed against Inter all the time and Raphinha won’t benefit from the luck of his equaliser hitting the bar and bouncing off Yann Sommer’s back into the goal.

Set pieces aside, ‘Barce-Lamine’ dominated and caused Inter more problems than anyone since Milan in Paulo Fonseca’s one and only derby in September.

Tuesday night will undeniably be tough. Inter doubled and triple-marked Yamal and it wasn’t enough. They will likely be without captain Lautaro Martinez. But the tie is alive, they’re playing at San Siro where their 15-game unbeaten streak in Europe is the longest in club history since the period between 1980 and 1987 and, again — not to labour the point — they scored three goals in Barcelona without playing as well as they know they can with the ball.

Yamal was irrepressible at Montjuic (David Ramos/Getty Images)

Dwelling on that point is worthwhile because Inter have done some extraordinary things in Europe over the past five years.

They have played Europa League and Champions League finals. They have won at Anfield. Lautaro scored a screamer there. The Argentine has found the net away at Barcelona in 2019, Real Madrid in 2020 (check out Nicolo Barella’s backheeled assist), Milan in 2023, and Bayern Munich this season.

And yet, much like their captain, recognition of Inter as one of the world’s top teams remains relatively minimal — at least outside Italy.

Making it all the way to Istanbul two years ago should have achieved meaningful cut-through, particularly given how Inter made Manchester City sweat for their treble, came agonisingly close on a couple of occasions to taking the game to extra-time, and returned home with the aura of a team who knew they could have won.

That display left a mark, but it should have been deeper.

Inter and Simone Inzaghi departed Istanbul wondering what might have been (Franck Fife/AFP via Getty Images)

Perhaps it only went so far because history remembers winners more than runners-up. Perhaps the uncertainty over the ability of the then-owner to keep the team together played a role. Perhaps last season, when Inter played the best football of the Simone Inzaghi era and didn’t make the most of it in Europe, was also a factor.

Inter dominated Atletico Madrid in the first leg of the quarter-final to the extent that they should have taken a 3-0 lead to Spain. Instead, it was only 1-0 and, although they took the lead at the Metropolitano, Benjamin Pavard’s mistake for Antoine Griezmann’s instant equaliser, a half-fit Thuram, and the way the home crowd and Diego Simeone’s substitutes helped Atletico turn the tie brought an earlier elimination than Inter’s football deserved.

They could have gone back to the final when you consider a beatable Borussia Dortmund team awaited in the semis.

To outsiders, it’s worth stressing that Inter’s 2024 league title carried particular weight. Having already proven themselves in Europe by reaching the 2023 Champions League final, winning the Scudetto took on added significance. It was Inzaghi’s first league triumph — an important milestone that helped dispel his reputation as a coach who only delivered in cup competitions.

For the club, it marked the 20th league title in its history, earning Inter the coveted second star on their badge (each star representing 10 Scudetti). In Italy, this is a symbolic achievement of huge importance. That they sealed it by beating Milan in the derby only deepened its historical resonance — an iconic moment that will be recounted for generations.

Lautaro and Inzaghi lift the Serie A trophy last May (Marco Luzzani/Getty Images)

In that context, their Champions League exit against Atletico was largely forgiven at home, but maybe not abroad, where a team’s worth is judged in the snapshots it provides on that stage.

Nevertheless, it was still surprising to hear pundits from outside Italy at the start of the season go through their favourites for the competition without — or with barely — a mention of Inter; overlooking, for instance, Opta’s supercomputer consistently placing them in the highest echelon of its power rankings.

It raises the question: why? Is it specific to this year? Does it speak to the domestic frustration with the team for not playing to the same impeccable standard as last season? Has it something to do with Inter’s maturity? This is the oldest team in the competition, much older than Paris Saint-Germain and Barcelona. It is harder to get excited about a team with less of a future.

The reason Barca have captured the imagination again isn’t exclusively down to the football implemented by Hansi Flick. It’s because the most compelling touchstones of their story over the past 20 years have been reactivated: La Masia has produced again and Barcelona not only have players such as Pau Cubarsi, Gavi, Marc Casado and Alejandro Balde — they have the closest thing to the new Lionel Messi. They’ve tapped back into their lore.

Inter, by contrast, don’t have the same buttons to press.

At a time when dribbling and high-wire wing play has come back to the fore, Inter don’t have a dribbler like Khvicha Kvaratskhelia, Yamal, Vinicius Junior or even a Rafael Leao. And yet, if Barcelona had scored the kind of goal Inter did in Munich — a masterpiece of 12 touches, positional interchanges, a back-heeled assist from Thuram and outside-of-the-foot finish from Lautaro — it would perhaps have been celebrated more and for longer on account of the outstanding skill and team play it exhibited.

That goal is Inzaghi’s Inter. More than, for instance, what the stat packs tell you about a team that conceded only once in the league phase, keeping clean sheets away at Manchester City and in 1-0 wins against Arsenal — results which have maybe allowed pundits to lean into this idea that Inter are an old-school Italian team.

Inzaghi, like Max Allegri before him, could sell himself better. He has the football to do it, if not the command of English regularly demonstrated by the German coaches of his generation and Luis Enrique.

As for the make-up of the team, those who don’t follow Lautaro every week still remember the World Cup in Qatar and how Julian Alvarez usurped him. That he scores more than 20 goals every season, was top scorer at Copa America last summer and shows up, more often than not, in big games gets oddly lost. Meanwhile, the Italian core is associated more with not qualifying for that competition in 2018 and 2022 than for winning the Euros in between.

Lautaro receives instructions from Inzaghi (Gabriel Bouys/AFP via Getty Images)

The external view of Italian football still tends towards the negative. Whether that’s the long tail of Serie A’s post-Calciopoli image crisis, the expectation gap between the 1990s and today, or the diminished spending power of its big clubs, take your pick.

When Atalanta, Milan and Juventus followed Bologna out of the Champions League in February, their exits were quickly seized upon as evidence of a new nadir. Leaving aside the individual circumstances behind each elimination and who kicked them out of the competition, the impact was great because of the number of teams Italy had in the Champions League: five.

That was a reward for topping the coefficient.

Even this season — a down year by recent standards — Italy has semi-finalists in two of UEFA’s three tournaments and might yet win one. Don’t get me wrong, Inter are talked about more than they were a couple of years ago. The question is: are they talked about enough?

Inter’s players celebrate Denzel Dumfries’ second goal in Barcelona last week (Carl Recine/Getty Images)

For that to happen, Inter either need to win the Champions League or establish themselves even more as regulars at this stage of the competition — much like Simeone’s Atletico have over the past decade.

Inzaghi is, for now, expected to stay and it’ll be interesting to see how Inter, under new ownership, continue to build. When Juventus reached finals in 2015 and 2017, chairman Andrea Agnelli allowed himself to be talked into signing Cristiano Ronaldo in an attempt to get over the line. That decision, an Icarus moment, sent Juventus into a spiral from which they are still recovering.

If Inter face the same conundrum of coming close again without winning, it’ll be fascinating to see how they react.

But for now, maybe handing Mkhitaryan a pair of smaller boots will be enough.

(Top photo: Alexander Hassenstein/Getty Images)

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