there isnt a big difference between inter and torino or sassuolo, its not the 90s or early 2000s
playing good for torino or sassuolo will open door for italian NT, same as inter
and inter isnt real/barca/bayern level, the difference is 6 games in CL pfff.
top teams are 6 from epl, 3 from laliga and 1 from italy and france.
No clue how old you are, but the 90s are a completely different animal and they're not a uniform era like the 2000s. They are split into pre-Bosman era and post-Bosman era. In the pre-Bosman era, you'd see great players at average and below average clubs because there wasn't much roster space (foreigners limits) for them. Gheorghe Hagi played for Brescia and stayed there after they got relegated! The guy was a Real Madrid and Barcelona player in between and arguably a top 10 player of the late 80s and definitely a top 25 player of the 90s. You think he couldn't have played for Inter, Milan, Juventus or another top team of the time?
The Champions League back in the 90s wasn't something special either. European Cup Winners Cup and even the Uefa Cup was as important. Since the early 2000s, it's Champions League or bust.
Top 6 from England are not "top" teams. You can argue that Liverpool and Manchester City are top teams, the rest are pretenders and really aren't that really better than Inter, Napoli, Sevilla, Valencia, Dortmund etc. But just like anywhere, a team of specific quality may get a result from other similar teams quite often.
I'd say that Chelsea is dysfunctional as fuck, Manchester United is even more dysfunctionalm, Tottenham carries a featherweight jersey (like Manchester City, but with 1/10th of the budget over the last decade) and Arsenal is shit. But yeah, these teams can outspend the best of them and can manage to get some great players that will follow the money rather than the optimal career choice, because the money is just so much more there now.
The same applies with Italy. Being a scrub at Inter pays more than being the star of Torino, Atalanta, Udinese Sampdoria or Sassuolo.
Just to see this, the following players, with their current salary at Inter, would be the highest paid player of those teams:
Ashley Young
Matias Vecino
Aleksandar Kolarov
Danilo D'Ambrosio
Matteo Darmian
Stefano Sensi
Andrea Pinamonti
Andrea Ranocchia would also be the highest paid player for Udinese, Sampdoria or Sassuolo (Atalanta and Torino have Papu Gomez, Andrea Belotti and Salvatore Sirigu earning more than Ranocchia).
Alessandro Bastoni and Roberto Gagliardini are our two lowest paid outfield players. They would still be the highest earners for Sampdoria, Parma, Spezia, Udinese, Verona, Crotone and would be top 3 earners at Bologna.
This is modern football for you.