From today and for the next ten days, Inter, Fiorentina and Roma will play in the finals of the three European football cups, which in order of importance are the Champions League, Europa League and Conference League. The first to play will be Roma, tonight in the Europa League against Sevilla. Then it will be Fiorentina’s turn in the Conference against West Ham and finally Inter, who will try to become European champions against Manchester City on 10 June.
It has already happened four other times that three Italians get to play in the European finals in the same season. In 1989 Milan won the European Cup final, Sampdoria lost the Cup Winners’ Cup and Napoli won the UEFA Cup. The following year there were four: Milan won the Champions Cup again, Sampdoria made up for it in the Cup Winners’ Cup while Juventus and Fiorentina met in the UEFA Cup. In 1993 Juventus, Parma and Milan reached the final; the following year it was Milan’s turn again, and then Inter and Parma.
Those were the so-called golden years of Italian football and Serie A was the best league in the world, as evidenced by the many victories achieved in that period. More than twenty years later, however, a lot has changed: no Italian is favorite in these three finals, especially Inter. To give the measure of the predictions, those who bet on Inter’s victory in the Champions League can win about seven times as much; those who bet on City’s victory don’t get to win even double what he played.
Yet for days it has not been uncommon to hear talk of the “rebirth of Italian football”, as if these three finals served to rehabilitate and relaunch a movement that has long had to deal with difficulties not yet understood, witnessed by the two consecutive World Cup misses by the men’s national team . In general, however, the opinions on this period of Italian football are many and conflicting, precisely because there doesn’t seem to be a real common thread.
Luck and merit
Before the three finalists there had been five Italians in the semi-finals: Inter and Milan in the Champions League, Juventus and Roma in the Europa League, Fiorentina in the Conference League. It had never happened before, and with such a widespread presence it is difficult to speak only of chance or favorable coincidences. However, the paths of the teams were only favorable in the knockout phase of the Champions League. In the Europa League, Roma have never been favourites, nor will they be in the final, which will play against the team — Sevilla — who eliminated Juventus. In the Conference League, Fiorentina was one of the most competitive teams right from the start, but they always had to work hard to get through the various rounds, right from the preliminaries.
André Onana, Inter goalkeeper (Marco Luzzani/Getty Images)
Even in the case of the paths considered easier, those of Inter and Milan in the Champions League, the teams still had to face level opponents. Porto, Benfica and Tottenham turned out to be within reach, but often in past years the eliminations had come precisely against teams considered such. In fact, it should be remembered that before the Conference League won by Roma last year, the last European cup for an Italian team was the Champions League won by Inter in 2010. After that, Italy returned to the final in the cups European only three times, without ever winning.
Foreign properties
Framing this moment in Italian football is complicated because there doesn’t seem to be much in common between teams and competitions. However, Inter, Roma and Fiorentina are united in a certain sense by their properties, all foreign, which have invested in Italy in search of visibility, objectives and possibly economic returns. These are three properties that have made long-term investments, even in the case of Inter, which is for sale and which in recent years has been held back by the economic difficulties experienced by its Chinese owner group.
In recent years all three teams (to which Milan could also be added) have been reorganized, built to be competitive in their fields and are also carrying out infrastructure projects. With the Suning group, Inter returned to being highly competitive as it wasn’t under the Moratti management, and it is no coincidence that it won a Scudetto again after 11 years; with the Friedkin group, Roma has returned to winning something after 15 years and investing in world-class professionals, such as José Mourinho and Paulo Dybala; with Rocco Commisso, Fiorentina has overcome the major difficulties it had recently experienced, is completing a new sports center worth over 400 million euros and is trying to redo its stadium (albeit with the same difficulties as Inter and Milan).
Trends and styles of play
Seasonal European competitions can mark trends in international football, both sportingly and economically. Victories and performances of a certain depth can help propose new styles of play or affirm other, more traditional ones. If then these successes are shared by several teams from a single country, even more widespread trends can be identified: it happened, for example, with Spanish football in the period of Messi and Guardiola’s Barcelona, which demonstrated the superiority of its tactical school by winning a lot even with National; or between 2018 and 2019 with English football, which monopolized the continental finals in the first real European display of its economic dominance.
Even from these points of view, however, the current season of Italian football cannot be summed up with equal ease. On a sporting level, the three Italian finalists are very different: Roma are a purely defensive and pugnacious team, Inter alternates defensive solidity with moments of ball possession and others of verticality and offensive pressure; Fiorentina, on the other hand, is rather unstable as a team, because they are generally more devoted to attacking and always proactive in the game. Looking also at Milan and Juventus, the first tries to express an offensive and quality football, while the second is ultimately comparable to Roma, albeit less compact and with more quality.
(Paolo Bruno/Getty Images)
On the economic front, however, the situation of Italian football is anything but favourable. Smaller clubs continue to have very tight budgets, so much so that there is still talk of reducing the number of participants in Serie A. Mid-table teams remain mid-table teams, while those realistically contending for trophies are not particularly in health, except in some cases. Inter stopped investing for at least two years; Milan has chosen gradual growth with prudent investments in young players; Juventus has difficulties of another kind; Roma and Fiorentina invest as they can, but are held back by still low revenues to be able to bear higher costs.
In this sense, the last winter session of the transfer market was particularly significant. The twenty Serie A teams spent around 31 million euros in total, an average of 2 million for each transaction completed: even less than the Dutch championship. On the other hand, 829 million euros were spent in the English Premier League; in the German Bundesliga and in the French Ligue 1 around 130 million.
These expenses also say something else. For many big European teams it was a season of reconstruction and difficulty, and this deprived the cups of usually very competitive participants. This is the case of Chelsea, Manchester United, Liverpool, Barcelona, Bayern Munich and Paris Saint-Germain. If you look at the Champions League scoreboard, the most competitive teams were the only two healthy ones, Manchester City and Real Madrid, who however met in the semifinals.
The Italians, for their part, have now learned to work with limited means and, with the exception of Juventus, have long since found their stability. The finalists (and their coaches: Inzaghi at Inter, Mourinho at Roma, Italiano at Fiorentina) then proved to be skilled in preparing and playing direct matches, with different but equally effective strategies.
The World Cup in between
That this season could be less obvious than the others has been said since its inception, due to the presence of the World Cup in Qatar in the middle of the year, between November and December. And the World Cup itself, which has modified and lengthened the calendars, seems to be the other common factor that has somehow represented an advantage for the Italian teams. Inter, Roma, Fiorentina, Milan, Juventus, but also Napoli, were the exceptions for some European competitions that have always been won by the same small circle of participants for some time.
Serie A was the fourth most represented championship in Qatar with 68 players called up: the Premier League had more than double that, 136, the Spanish Liga 83, the Bundesliga 75. If you look at the individual teams, Inter Milan and in Qatar 7 players, Napoli 5, Juventus 11, Fiorentina and Roma only 4. In these numbers, rather low compared to past editions of the World Cup, the absence of Italy weighed in particular, which saved about twenty players only in Serie A and many owners distributed in all these teams.
The other big European teams sent many more: Real Madrid 12, Barcelona 17, Atletico Madrid 11, Chelsea 12, Manchester City 16, United 14, Liverpool 7, Paris Saint-Germain 11 and Bayern Munich 17. For many of these players, the season never really stopped and this may have affected their performances. And it is no coincidence that the players who will be most remembered for this season, such as Erling Haaland of Manchester City (52 goals in 51 games), Osimhen and Kvaratskhelia of the Italian champion Naples, weren’t at the World Cup.
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