Barca could do that because academy is great, if not the best. We Inter fans hyped our Primavera a lot but any of them have a decent career anywhere, let alone Inter?
If we are aiming for titles and starting with Fiorentina (Biraghi), Sassuolo (Duncan), Verona (Faraoni) or Serie B players, we are doing seriously wrong (am I missing someone?!?). Looking from hindsight, the probability that Dimarco or Agoume going downhill are higher than becoming core players for big teams. See Pinamonti, Vanheusden, Puscas, Bonazzoli trend. It isnt worth the cost of “developing”, in terms of points lost, if you can pay some millions and get already better players.
The problem you have here is that you have a problematic, finished product and assume that this would have been the projection. In some cases, you'd be right, some of these guys just aren't good enough.
But kids tend to improve a lot when given games and responsibilities earlier in their career, but not a la carte. This needs to be done paired with world class players. 10+ years ago we failed here. When Santon was playing initially as an 18 year old in the 'wrong' position, versus top competition (Cristiano Ronaldo etc), he was solid and promising. But he won't suddenly become Lahm.
If we still had and played Bonucci in 2013, he'd be playing for Frosinone now. But to his credit, he worked to reach a very good level, in a role he was very comfortable in. He's usually exposed when he's in uncomfortable territory, it's not like he suddenly became the carbon copy of Gaetano Scirea! But in a team that's strong enough to hide his weaknesses, he thrived.
There's a reason why players like Mohamed Kallon, Giovanni Pasquale, Obafemi Martins, Mario Balotelli were able to be part of the main team and sometimes have an influence. And even kids with cameos like Marco Andreolli, Alen Stevanovic or Rene Khrin were able to be part of the squad and not affect our overall quality and even contributed indirectly at points. Even players like Miangue, Gnoukouri, Duncan, Obi etc in a shitstorm weren't really that bad and perhaps one of them under better circumstances could have filled a role in a contending team.
Real Madrid and Barcelona are on a different level because Spanish players in the last 2 generations tend to be vastly superior to Italian ones. Italian talent is also more spread out (there's Atalanta, Roma, Fiorentina, Torino, Milan, Juventus, Sassuolo produce good players and several other teams that produce 1-2 decent players a season) whereas in Spain there's Real Madrid, Barcelona, followed by Valencia and Athletic Bilbao really who aren't having the best of times actually. The rest produce decent talent of course, but nowhere near the levels of Real Madrid and Barcelona.
But it's easy to play with scrubs like Francisco Pavon, Raul Bravo and Ruben De La Red, when you pair them with great local players like Fernando Hierro, Iker Cassillas, Ivan Helguera, Raul and add to them top players like Zinedine Zidane, Luis Figo, Roberto Carlos etc.
You see Manchester City playing with guys like Delph, Zinchenko, Mangala and still managing to win the league because the rest of their team is too good.
We live in an era where football transfers are more common than anything else, you cannot build your team around Primavera kids. Not even Real Madrid can do that when in fact they're possibly the only team in Europe who could bring up a competitive team with exclusively club grown talent. You can sign as many European players as you want now and teams are very militant there, top/wealthy teams buy everything that breathes. You fall behind if you try to play with kids. Look at Milan for example who tried to play with a bunch of their recent Primavera classes. Not good enough. Now they signed a couple of decent players on top of that and are having a honeymoon season, it probably won't last, not with Zlatan leaving eventually before they resurrect themselves.
If the question is if we could use a few Primavera players to cover our issues, the answer is of course yes. As long as we keep signing players like Eriksen, Barella, Bastoni, De Vrij and Skriniar, we can use Primavera players to fill roles here and there. One-two of them will end up becoming really good and grab a lineup spot. I'm not even commenting on the Biraghi and Dimarco cases where they left and came back and then left again. From our current Primavera team, there's definitely 4-5 players that deserve a shot, but they will not get it. Because the pressure is too high and the coach will consider everything to be hard.
This team could not have used Zaniolo, Esposito, Dimarco, Gravillon, Vanheusden Salcedo and Agoume as part of the roster. Zaniolo, being healthy and Dimarco in particular would have featured a lot, and Esposito played a bit last year, even in a tough CL game, so I'm guessing Conte would have used him more than Pinamonti. Who also should have been an option to use but he refrained for it for no clear reasons.
Seven serviceable Primavera products in one generation is actually pretty great outcome given the times we live in. But since we never gave a chance to players like Salcedo, Gravillon and Agoume, they won't really have that high hopes of becoming relevant players in the future, at least not as high as being involved in a team that aims to win the championship, with however small part.
We just flat out refuse to acknowledge that we produce the talent and as management, we succumb to coaching cravings of new, "ready" players. This was our biggest mistake in the Thohir era. The talent wasn't as great as now, but some players could have been turned out useful.
