Completely unrelated, but I'm curious to hear your current take on Marotta. You used to argue that his Scudetto under Conte wasn't impressive due to the amount of money spent on the likes of Lukaku, Barella, Hakimi, etc. These past couple years he's had a signfiicantly smaller budget and had to make some key sales. He assembled the most dominant Italian team in a decade. Has your opinion on him changed?
My opinion on him was that he was always a strong director but people overrated him and it infuriated me because they pretended as if the gobbi weren't cheating for 10 years running after they moved to the new stadium (and couldn't clinch in their final year of cheating).
Marotta didn't win those Scudetti. Agnelli and FIGC did and the collapse of Inter and Milan helped a lot.
What Marotta did was build on that and helped create a strong team in Europe that reached the CL final twice.
At Inter what's been done is of course commendable but I still don't like his ways.
Inter has always been a "family" for players. There's a reason why Adani, a born and raised Milanista, had become and still is a token Inter fan after spending 2 years as a backup center back.
The club is beyond people and that's why this still happens a lot, but with the Chinese and Marotta we're losing this and treat them all like commodities.
I'm not against the guy, I'm just sometimes against his management style. It works to a large degree, but just like someone will complain that Darmian starts over Dumfries, I can complain that he's not extending the contracts of players that needed it (Brozovic earlier, De Vrij, Skriniar) and then pretends that it's all good.
He's part of the club and a very important piece, that's undeniable. But I'm not sure to the extent of the merit he's receiving. He's been bailed by Ausilio (who he wanted to sack), bailed by Simone Inzaghi (who he also considered sacking end of last season and bailed by Hakan and Lautaro who stepped up big time - we can give credit that they believed in them of course - but on a pragmatic level what we've seen from these two, without a proper backup, is just insane.
But sure, working with limited resources and so many people to deal with isn't easy and he's manning the ship to win another Scudetto and hopefully another deep CL run.