Manchester City - Inter (10 June 23) [1-0]

vex

Capitano
Capitano
Joined
Dec 13, 2017
Messages
3,882
Likes
3,952
Favorite Player
Don't have one.
This final is just a bonus for me. I just want to get over with it cus all the waiting is stressing me out.
Same for me regarding bonus part, but I don't feel any stress whatsoever. In fact, I don't remember the last time when I was calmer before the inter game. Maybe things will change slightly before the game, but probably not by much. That semifinal against milan though, completely different story.
 

Suraj

Capitano
Capitano
Joined
Apr 17, 2013
Messages
2,900
Likes
3,228
Favorite Player
Suning GTFO
10 years of FIF
Same for me regarding bonus part, but I don't feel any stress whatsoever. In fact, I don't remember the last time when I was calmer before the inter game. Maybe things will change slightly before the game, but probably not by much. That semifinal against milan though, completely different story.

same for me, i will 100% be sad if we lose but i wont be angry or mad, incredible really we got to the final with the owner situation. semis was way more tense that's why i was so grateful we started with a bang, chances of doing the same against shitty is very slim though
 

Superminion

Primavera
Primavera
Joined
Dec 3, 2020
Messages
111
Likes
65
Roma and Fiorentina kinda make me lose whatever little hope I have for this match.
 

Zlatan4life

Primavera
Primavera
Joined
Dec 25, 2013
Messages
320
Likes
5
yi2d1jlflu4b1.jpg
 

vex

Capitano
Capitano
Joined
Dec 13, 2017
Messages
3,882
Likes
3,952
Favorite Player
Don't have one.

delaurentis

Capitano
Capitano
Joined
Dec 5, 2009
Messages
1,437
Likes
624
Favorite Player
4,19,22,25
Alot of disrespect towards Inter - it seems like a foregone conclusion Man$hitty will win the final.
Hopefully this will rile up the Inter players -

Anyhow, I agree with the many comments, and don't see Inter having much chance to win. Not really enthousiastic for the final as I'm completely set on Inter losing.
 

Puma

Allenatore
Allenatore
Joined
Mar 9, 2004
Messages
5,491
Likes
4,131
10 years of FIF

Inter Milan, Facing Painful Reckoning, Tries to Live in the Now​

Inter made the Champions League final with Italy’s oldest squad and its highest debts. Whatever happens in Istanbul cannot stop the financial squeeze to come.

June 8, 2023Updated 9:58 a.m. ET

Barely six weeks ago, Inter Milan defender Milan Skriniar was lying in a hospital bed in France, recovering from spinal surgery. A lumbar issue had been bothering him for some time and, reluctantly, he had decided that endoscopic intervention was required. He had not played a second of competitive soccer since the early days of March, nor has he played since.

Yet when Internazionale names its team for the Champions League final against Manchester City on Saturday — the club’s most significant game in 13 years — Skriniar will, in all likelihood, be among the available substitutes.

His teammate Henrikh Mkhitaryan, the veteran Armenian midfielder, has not played for three weeks after picking up an injury in Inter’s semifinal win against A.C. Milan.

His treatment began immediately: His thigh strain was being addressed even as the celebrations of that victory unspooled around him. Mkhitaryan has not yet been given medical clearance to train with his teammates. Still, there is a decent chance that he will be named in the starting lineup for the biggest game club soccer has to offer.

Manchester City, the overwhelming favorite to win this season’s Champions League, arrives in Istanbul best represented by Erling Haaland: a perfectly tuned, purpose-built machine, running smoothly, silently, an irresistible masterpiece of engineering.

Inter, on the other hand, is best represented by the likes of Skriniar and Mkhitaryan: It is a team that is creaking, straining, pushing at the outer limits of its ability, an avatar for a patched-up, jury-rigged sort of a club that is held together, these days, by little more than bandages and hope.
There have, certainly, been less likely Champions League finalists than Inter, one of the great old names of European soccer: Bayer Leverkusen in 2002, perhaps, or Monaco a couple of years later, or even Tottenham in 2019. Few, though, made it to the game’s grandest showcase against a background of such uncertainty.

It is not just that Simone Inzaghi, the club’s coach, presides over the oldest squad in Italy, a team in which the focal point of the attack — Edin Dzeko, 37 — might regard the cornerstone of the defense, the 35-year-old Francesco Acerbi, as a youthful ingénue.

Nor is it simply that, for as much as half of the team, this may be the final hurrah in an Inter jersey: Skriniar is one of 11 players whose contracts will expire, or whose loan spells will end, at the close of the current season. That reality has left the club facing the prospect of having to restock its squad almost from scratch.

Inter, though, has far graver concerns about its future. In 2016, Suning, the Chinese retail conglomerate, paid $307 million to take a 70 percent stake in Inter, a deal that was — at the time — seen as the spearhead of China’s sudden, lavish and state-approved investment in European soccer. The new ownership would, in theory, finance Inter’s return to the game’s head table. The team’s training facility would be upgraded. So, too, would the club’s offices. And, of course, the players would follow.

Suning’s ownership has not, on the field, been disastrous. In 2021, Inter won its first Italian title in more than a decade. Inzaghi has subsequently added the Coppa Italia, both this season and last, to the club’s honors. Inter has become something of a mainstay of the Champions League; it made the round of 16 last year, and has reached the final this time.

That relative return to success, though, has come at a cost. Inter is the most indebted club in Italy; according to its most recently published accounts, its total liabilities run at around $931 million. In the last two years for which information is available, it recorded losses of almost $430 million, leading to punishment from European soccer’s governing body. It fined the club 4 millions euros (about $4.3 million) for breaching fiscal controls last year, and it has threatened a bigger penalty (26 million euros, or roughly $28 million) if it does not get its finances in order.

Inter has been caught in a sort of rolling financial crisis for several years, thanks to the combined impact of the coronavirus pandemic, the dwindling support of the Chinese state for investing in European soccer and, most notably, Suning’s own troubles.

In 2021, the conglomerate had to accept a $1.36 billion bailout, financed in part by local government, in the face of its spiraling debts. The same year, it permanently closed its Chinese team, Jiangsu Suning, months after it secured the title, citing the need to focus exclusively on its core retail business. Last year, Steven Zhang, the 32-year-old son of Suning’s founder who serves as Inter’s president, was held liable for $255 million of debt and defaulted bonds in a Hong Kong court.

If Inter has been shielded from the worst of the fallout — it continues to exist; its players still get paid — then it has suffered at least some collateral damage. Suning has been engaged, for years, in efforts to cut costs: In 2021, Antonio Conte, the coach who delivered the Serie A title, stepped down when it became clear that many of the players who had delivered the trophy would have to be sold.

Inter’s two most valuable assets, the forward Romelu Lukaku, now returned to the club on loan, and the defender Achraf Hakimi, left anyway. To save its investment, Suning secured a $294 million loan from Oaktree Capital, a California-based asset management firm, to help with the club’s running costs.

Ever since, Inter’s days of plenty have receded further and further into the past. This season, it spent several months playing without a sponsor on the front of its jersey, a significant and ordinarily reliable source of income for all of Europe’s major teams, after DigitalBits, a cryptocurrency firm, failed to make scheduled payments on its $80 million agreement.

On Saturday, Inter’s jerseys will instead bear the logo of Paramount+, the streaming service that broadcasts both Serie A and the Champions League in the United States. The arrangement is the product of a last-minute deal reportedly worth $4.5 million. For the same fee, Paramount’s branding will appear on the backs of Inter’s jerseys next season.

That sum, though, does not begin to address Inter’s problems. The loan to Oaktree is due next May. With interest, the total sum to be repaid stands at around $375 million. The revenue from Inter’s unexpected run in the Champions League will certainly help with that, but so, too, would acquiescing to another fire sale of talent.

If the club cannot meet its obligations, Suning will automatically cede control of the club to its creditor. “Paying a debt at the level of interest that the club is paying Oaktree is not sustainable,” Ernesto Paolillo, the club’s former general manager, said last month. “Steven Zhang won’t be able to export capital from China and nor will he be able to cover the debt with other resources. He will have no choice but to default on the agreement and sell the club to them.”

“It’s not our plan,” Oaktree’s managing director, Alejandro Cano, said in March, when asked if the firm’s intention was to take control of the club. “We want to work as excellent partners and offer support. But who knows?”

Suning reportedly has opened talks with Oaktree to extend the loan, but it has also started exploring another possibility: an outright sale. Zhang has twice denied that Inter is on the market, insisting last October that he was not “talking with any investors” and reasserting in April that he had “not had talks with anyone.”

In September 2022, though, the boutique investment bank Raine — the firm that handled the sale of Chelsea to Todd Boehly and Clearlake and which is currently overseeing the Glazer family’s efforts to divest itself of Manchester United — won the mandate to seek new ownership for Inter.

Several parties have expressed an interest in buying the club, according to executives with knowledge of the talks who insisted on anonymity to discuss the sensitive discussions. A handful, largely drawn from the United States and including both private families and equity investors, have been given a tour of Inter’s facilities and a broad rundown of its accounts.

So far, though, there has been one major sticking point: the cost. Suning values the club at around $1.2 billion, not coincidentally the exact amount that RedBird Capital Partners paid to buy A.C. Milan last year. Given the realities of Inter’s financial position, nobody has yet been willing to bite.

That has left Inter in purgatory. In negotiations, the club remains defiant: Those who have worked on transfers with Inter in recent months have noted that at no point have its executives pleaded poverty. The club retains an undeniable, undimming appeal, too. Lautaro Martínez, its World Cup-winning striker, was presented with a chance to leave last summer but chose to reject it, so settled did he feel in the city and at Inter itself.

Pride, though, does not pay the bills. There have been times when cash has been in such short supply that the club has not been up-to-date on its share of the payments for the architects and designers working on the stadium it is intending to build, together with A.C. Milan, not far from San Siro.

Inter, perhaps, cannot afford to think about the future now. It arrives in the Champions League final battered and bruised, taped and strapped, aging and fading. There is a chance — slim, but a chance nonetheless — of glory in the immediate present. What it means, where it goes from here, can wait for another day.

 
Last edited:

SiamoNoi

Capitano
Capitano
Joined
Jul 21, 2012
Messages
4,634
Likes
5,583
Favorite Player
Cambiasso
10 years of FIF
And that narrative that City trashed them cause they were trash is ridiculous.
How we suddenly got to a point where so many people are underrating City is beyond me.
Yeah, that’s the biggest difference IMO. We have Gosens, Lukaku, and Mkhi who can make a difference from the bench, but they have 7+ game changers.
Luckily they can't sub more than 5. And it's doubtful that Guardiola will even use all 5.
Joking aside, imagine if he seriously injured himself walking out of the bus, and he somehow missed cl final.

Fuckin hell I would be suicidal, imagine telling that story to your children and grandchildren...
Stjepan Lamza,if you are familiar with that story...

After the 1967 Inter-Cities Fairs Cup semifinal against Eintracht Frankfurt, when Dinamo managed to overturn their first leg defeat in Germany (3–0) with a home victory (4–0) after extra time, he and his teammates went on to celebrate the victory to a luxury restaurant, that lasted late into the night. The next morning Lamza woke up early in the morning in one of the rooms upstairs and found a bar in the lobby below that was empty and started drinking. When other teammates and guest started to wake up they found Lamza drunk in the lobby and one of Dinamo's officials ordered the waitress to take him back to his room so others would not see him in the state he was in. She has done just that and took Lamza to his bed and then locked the door of the room. Later, when Lamza woke up, he was still intoxicated and found the doors locked and went into the balcony where he fell down, hitting the chair with his shoulder and a concrete floor with the right side of his head. He was immediately rushed to a hospital where he stayed for 40 days and was diagnosed with a severe head fracture and most importantly the damage to his nerve center that hurt his center of balance, which subsequently affected his career as Lamza never demonstrated the level of football he did prior to the accident. He followed the final of the 1967 Inter-Cities Fairs Cup (won by Dinamo) by a radio broadcast from a hospital room in Bled.
 

Irequis

Capitano
Capitano
Joined
Nov 28, 2011
Messages
2,309
Likes
1,335
Favorite Player
Javier Zanetti
10 years of FIF
We really step up our PR game. Nice tactical insight (and nice presenter too).

 

Dave54

Allenatore
Allenatore
Joined
May 27, 2022
Messages
5,806
Likes
3,185
Favorite Player
Pele
Best Forum Newcomer
I'm calm. whatever happens. The win would be great of course. Sitting back against them won't work, press hard and counter.
 

Glass box

La Grande Inter
La Grande Inter
Joined
Feb 3, 2014
Messages
10,422
Likes
7,227
In my opinion, if we can score a goal & they fail to score one, we can win. But, if they do score, I hypothesize that we have to score one more than them to win the match. I am not sure about this theory though.
Classic Alan Ford like quote :lol:. Some Balkan posters & Italians will know what I'm talking about.
 
Top