Five moments to tell his story with the Nerazzurri.
Even the farewell to Inter, after eight and a half years, he did it his way. In its own way means in the least conventional, craziest and most improvisational ways there can be. Marcelo Brozovic is leaving Inter after eight and a half seasons to switch to Al-Nassr and to convince him it took days of negotiations, millions which from 60 became a total of 100. In between there were Instagram posts dedicated to Inter, the usual hilarious social exchanges with Barella to remember how much she was theirs is fun and exciting bromancestories with writing “More to come, stay tuned” and much more. In short, it seems that Brozovic has approached this transfer with the usual lightness with which he has approached every minute of football played, on and off the pitch, during his time at the Nerazzurri.
We start from here with Brozovic, from his being an extremely unconventional person, to immediately end up circumscribing the perimeter within which he moved in his Nerazzurri past. Here, the perimeter is simply endless and not only for the countless amount of kilometers traveled in each game, which make him one of the most fatigue-resistant players of the last decade.
With his departure, Inter loses the one who – as he also writes Daniel Tirinnanzi their Twitter – he was the most representative player of this Nerazzurri era. From his move in 2014 from Dinamo Zagreb to Mazzarri’s Inter, and from Inter to the one that then returned to the Champions League, he won the Scudetto and came close to the most important trophy of all. Brozovic was the authentic expression of Inter’s growth because it was from his move to the control room – thanks to Spalletti’s intuition, always too little celebrated – that his destiny changed radically. From the lowest point of the game, as a very skilled weaver of the maneuver, Brozovic has become one of the strongest midfielders around and the whole of Inter has grown alongside him, first hesitating, then coming to win and consolidate.
Brozovic can only be the most authentic expression of the Nerazzurri’s last eight years, and there are five passages that help to better understand the path he went through at Inter.
1 – Multi-tasking
Of the 330 matches played in the Nerazzurri shirt – condition of 31 goal and 43 assist – practically only those disputed as director in the last five years are remembered. Too glittery, too priestly – as Stefano Borghi likes to define it in every commentary – so as not to be impressed in the way he conducts the entire maneuver. But Brozovic’s first years at Inter, with Mazzarri, Mancini and De Boer, were years of great experimentation even for the Croatian himself. His goal against Udinese under Mancini’s management well represents how much Epic Brozo was moved here and there in his first Italian days, looking for a position that could allow him to best express his qualities.
This splendid goal comes from a left winger position, where Mancini has deployed him several times: on the left, on the right, often even as an attacking midfielder in the canonical 4231 to which the coach from Jesi was fond. With De Boer himself he often finds himself playing mezzala assisted by Medel, Joao Mario and Banega, in that 433 that never worked. With the arrival of Pioli, Brozovic begins to specialize in a lower position: he moves to the midfield duo, alongside Gagliardini or Kondogbia, but often the Emilian coach will opt for a more robust midfielder – we are still in the two months in which Gagliardini looks the next big thing of Italian football – by re-moving Brozovic to more advanced positions on the pitch, which he covered with Croatia at that time. These are years in which Brozovic shows flashes of talent, but no one manages to find its definitive location and consecration.
2 – The whistles and the turning point in a month
The consecration comes with Spalletti, of course, but not immediately. The first six months with the coach from Certaldo fail to strike the spark, and indeed it is under the beginning of his management that the Inter-Brozovic pairing was very close to breaking. On the occasion of an Inter-Bologna match on 11 February 2018 – to be clear that match decided by an impromptu flash of Yann Karamoh – Brozovic was still deployed as a playmaker by Spalletti, but at the end of the 55′ apathetic he was replaced.
Overwhelmed by boos, Brozovic reacts provocatively by leaving the pitch. (Photo: Claudio Villa – Inter/FC Internazionale via Getty Images)
Only ten days had passed since, in the very last hours of the market, Brozovic seemed about to move to Sevilla after a less than sparkling first part of the season. It was Spalletti himself who blocked a transfer that had already been made at the last minute – Sevilla had already sent a plane to pick up the player – but those whistles that occurred a few days later still seem to be the prelude to an adventure at the end of the line. Exactly one month goes by: from 11/2/2018 to 11/3/2018 when, on the occasion of a home Inter-Napoli, Brozovic is deployed in the two midfield, in front of the defence. An epiphany that I and those who attended the match still remember, played quite well by all of Inter despite the 0-0 final.
That match – we couldn’t know immediately, maybe not even Spalletti and certainly not even Brozovic – delivers to posterity one of the strongest directors in the world. A player capable of combining quantity with a quality that is difficult to match in setting up and directing. From a discontinuous and indolent Brozovic, to a player who from game to game becomes the authentic engine of the Nerazzurri’s game plots for the following five years.
3 – Priest
If possible, Conte puts Brozovic even more at the center of his own villageGio: not helped by another midfielder at his side, but exactly in the core of his 3-5-2, accompanied by the two midfielders. The one on the right, Barella, will become his closest companion as well as a permanent presence, so much so that they would soon start passing the ball and swap positions as they pleased. On the left, the changes were more frequent: Sensi, Gagliardini, Eriksen, Calhanoglu and Mkhitaryan. With Conte Brozovic he becomes an increasingly decisive and skilled playmaker not only at setting up the action together with Handanovic and the defensive trio, but also at shielding the opponent’s initiatives. “And then he has to work a lot on the defensive phase because his is a key role” says Conte in October 2019, two months after his arrival.
For this glittering phase of his career, which comes after having played in the final of the 2018 World Cup with his Croatia as protagonist – also in that case, already as director alongside Modric – I chose an image dating back to the derby won by Inter 4-2 in February 2020. Inter finished the first half down by two goals, only to then score three in the first 20′ of the second half: it was the Croatian midfielder with a left-footed volley from outside the area. As if to prove that he hasn’t lost what were his ballistic skills as a more offensive midfielder, despite the enormous change of role, tasks and responsibilities.
In Milan, a great player can be seen in how he plays the derbies – and these are Marcelo’s Gazzetta votes #Brozovic in derbies from 2017-18, that is, since he met Spalletti.
2017-18 7
2018-19 6,5; 7
2019-20 7; 7
2020-21 5; 7
2021-22 6; 7
2022-23 6,5; 6— Joseph Shepherd (@gippu1) June 29, 2023
Parenthesis: he has dominated practically all the derbies played in the last five years, from Spalletti onwards.
A Scudetto does not arrive in the first year with Conte, we will have to wait another year, but in the meantime Inter are playing a great Europa League, reaching the final in the pandemic summer. The least common denominator of the two seasons is Brozovic, the guiding star of the 3-5-2 – interrupted only in the first two months of the 2020-2021 season – and of all of Inter, now a top player on the international scene.
4 – A further leap in quality
It seemed impossible but, under Inzaghi’s management, Brozovic manages to take another step in what had already been a stunning transformation, in the space of three years. The 2021-2022 vintage, the one that culminates with the Scudetto won by Milan on the last day and with Inter lifting the Italian Cup and Italian Super Cup, is the best played by Marcelo Brozovic in his career.
Compared to Conte’s hyper-organized team, Inzaghi’s first Inter is much freer and more fluid. All the players said it in turn, but in fact the pitch confirmed it right away: Inzaghi’s arrival coincided with an Inter who was even more of a protagonist on the pitch, even more eager to dominate ball possession and – unlike the previous two-year period – more creative, qualitative and imaginative in maneuvering.
All this has made Brozovic even more central, mobile and protagonist on the Nerazzurri chessboard: Brozo will end the season with only 2 goals and 1 assist in Serie A, but his importance can be seen in 90% of completed passes, in being awarded as best midfielder in the league and as the authentic center of attraction for a team that finishes with the highest number of shots and goals scored. Inzaghi’s management makes Inter more and more Brozovic-dependent.
The addiction was felt even more in 2022-23, when Brozovic was away from the pitch for around four months. It is not a case that – despite Calhanoglu’s tremendous achievement in his role – Inter has in any case lost a large percentage of unpredictability and fluidity in the planning phase, as well as order also in defensive transitions, until its return to full capacity now at the end of March.
From there, from his return to the control room, Inter produced two months in which, with Brozovic on the pitch, they only lost the Champions League final against the strongest team in the world, at the end of a match in which Inter and Brozovic they proved that they fully deserved the chance to step on that stage. Five years after that Inter-Naples which by now seems very distant, yet so decisive.
5 – Epic Brozo
We could have inserted the photo in which Brozovic is in the supermarket with some frozen pizzas, the video in which he pretends to shoot bullets in the locker room, his hands spread apart in every match, the celebration in the year of the Scudetto with which he mimics the explosion of a bomb, the same one that is tattooed on his neck, or the photo of Brozovic disguised as a crocodile at his home – because among other things it is Brozovic who created the fashion of lying a player behind the barrier with the famous one crocodile move.
Instead, I return to the current situation, on his passage to Al-Nassr: the image concerns one of the social exchanges with Nicolò Barella, dating back to the hot hours of the negotiation. An image that explains what Brozovic, indeed Epic Brozo – expression born on Twitter five years ago and now in the public domain – is out of the box. Inside the field, with those armfuls that distinguish his every request to get in touch with the ball, and above all outside, in everything he does.
Inter and Serie A lose an epic player, who doesn’t steal his eyes like extremely brilliant and qualitative players do, but who isn’t even admired like someone who is hard to notice due to the amount of dirty work. Brozovic was the union of these two concepts: a player so present and so central as to be, at times, almost invisible. A player who in the last five years has established himself as one of the best midfielders in the world in his role, of which Inter has been dependent and from which they will now have to be able to free themselves.
And, after the player, comes the character: mad in the purest and most innocent sense of the term, to laugh at every video or photo that portrays him in non-compliant poses or attitudes. Brozovic has been the symbol of Inter’s last eight years, one of the most decisive players of the last five years of Serie A. He is a character who will be missed by everyone, greetings in his own way.