Serie A spent most of the last decade being dismissed as a retirement league, a place where ageing stars went to collect wages while the serious football happened in England and Spain. That reputation was never entirely fair, but it wasn’t entirely wrong either. What’s changed now isn’t just the quality on the pitch - it’s the structural shift in how the top clubs are being built, and Inter Milan are the clearest example of it working.
Simone Inzaghi has done something genuinely rare: he’s taken a squad with obvious financial constraints relative to the elite European clubs and made it tactically coherent enough to punch above its weight consistently. The 3-5-2 he runs isn’t novel - Italian football has been recycling that shape for thirty years - but the pressing triggers are sharper than they’ve been under any Inter side in recent memory, and the wing-backs are doing more defensive work earlier in transitions than the system traditionally demanded.
What makes Inter worth watching right now is that they’re not just winning. They’re winning in a way that exposes something the rest of Serie A hasn’t figured out: how to defend without the ball against high defensive lines. Most Italian sides still treat possession recovery as something that happens passively. Inter treat it as a designed sequence.
The Rest of the League Is Catching Up, Slowly
Napoli post-Spalletti has been a mess - multiple managers, an identity crisis that no amount of squad spending has resolved. AC Milan have the personnel to be more threatening than they are but continue to be undone by positional discipline issues in midfield that feel baked in at this point. Juventus are rebuilding in a direction that still isn’t obvious from the outside.
None of that means the league is weak. It means the gap at the top is tighter than it looks on paper, which is precisely what makes a title race worth following.
The European Argument Nobody Is Making
The lazy reading of Serie A’s European performance in recent years is that Italian clubs can’t compete at the highest level anymore. Inter reached the Champions League final in 2023. That’s not a sign of a league in decline - it’s a sign of one club doing things correctly while the rest figure out how to follow.
If two or three more Serie A sides get to where Inter are tactically and structurally, the narrative about the league being irrelevant collapses entirely. That process looks like it’s starting. It’s just happening too gradually for people who need a storyline by October.