The smell of freshly cut grass, the faint aroma of truffle risotto, and the quiet hum of billionaires making handshake deals. I was standing in the VIP tunnel at San Siro on Sunday, exchanging polite nods with men whose tailored overcoats cost more than a Venezia defender’s annual salary, when I realized this sport has completely lost its way.
The so-called experts are furious. They are clutching their laptops, weeping into their heat maps, absolutely inconsolable over the fact that Inter Milan returned to the top of Serie A with a 2-0 victory in which the reigning champions relied entirely on two late own goals from the bottom-side club.
The outcry has been deafening. The tactical bloggers—men who have never felt the weight of a wet leather ball on a Tuesday night in November—are calling it "lucky." They claim that relying on a relegation-threatened team to accidentally kick the ball into their own net twice in the final ten minutes is not a sustainable offensive model.
This is why I cannot take the modern football fan seriously. If you watch a match and your only takeaway is that Inter didn't technically score any of their own goals, you are failing to see the game. You are completely blind to the intangibles.
Let me explain something about a winning culture. You do not force a professional defense into a state of such profound existential terror that they begin finishing your attacks for you by accident. That is not luck. That is championship pedigree.
I sat next to a very senior league executive during a private luncheon at Giacomo Arengario last week. We were discussing the lost art of the 1-0 win, and he told me, completely off the record, that the greatest teams are the ones who don't even need to possess the ball to break your spirit. Inter proved him right on Sunday.
Look at the first calamity. The ball is whipped into the box, an Inter forward is casually jogging somewhere in the general vicinity, and the Venezia center-back violently shins it past his own goalkeeper. The bloggers call it a miskick. I call it a statement win.
That defender didn't just miss the clearance. He felt the historical weight of the Inter crest. He looked into the stands, he remembered he was playing the champions, and his central nervous system simply surrendered to superior management. You cannot teach that kind of localized psychic dominance.
And then, moments later, the second own goal. A masterclass in tactical discipline. Inter didn't overcommit men forward. They didn't tire themselves out playing intricate tiki-taka nonsense. They simply stood there, radiating pure, unadulterated Scudetto aura, and allowed Venezia to complete the brace for them.
The bloggers complain about player fatigue, but they fail to recognize that Inter has revolutionized player preservation. Why risk a hamstring tear sprinting into the penalty area when you can simply stand near the center circle and wait for a Venezia full-back to suffer a catastrophic loss of motor function? It was the most efficient use of energy I have seen on a pitch since 1998.
Now, contrast this magnificent display of passive-aggressive dominance with the absolute circus happening across town. Milan lost 4-2 at home to Bologna. A first league defeat of the season, and frankly, an embarrassing one, precisely because they tried to actually play football.
I have said it before, and I will say it again: Milan is treating the club like a charity. They are obsessed with trying to score their own goals, and it leaves them horribly exposed at the back.
Bologna’s Samuel Mbangula came into San Siro and bagged a hat-trick. Three goals! And why? Because Milan’s defenders were constantly out of position, desperately trying to tackle him, rather than simply standing still and allowing the sheer majesty of their club history to frighten Mbangula into kicking the ball out for a throw-in.
Ruben Amorim’s side will go into Saturday's hotly anticipated Milan derby on the back of losing their unbeaten streak, and the manager only has himself to blame. Alphadjo Cisse scored a double for them, but it wasn't enough to avoid defeat.
This is the sickness rotting modern tactics from the inside out. Amorim actually praised Cisse’s two goals in a postgame presser. He is celebrating individual effort in a 4-2 loss. A true manager, a manager who understands the budget and the culture, would have benched Cisse for failing to telepathically force the Bologna backline into a tragic mix-up.
If Amorim doesn't fix this mentality before the January window, Milan is going to be in serious trouble. You cannot survive in this league by relying on your own strikers to do the heavy lifting.
The contrast could not be starker as we head into the derby. Champions Inter drew level with Lazio on 25 points at the summit, entirely comfortable in their own skin, perfectly willing to win the title without a single player registering a shot on target for the rest of the calendar year.
I spoke to a key figure in the Inter hierarchy about the criticism they’ve faced this week. His response should be framed and hung in the national football museum.
If a lesser opponent wishes to politely deposit the ball into their own net on our behalf, it would be deeply disrespectful to the traditions of Italian hospitality to stop them.
Farneti gets it. The true greats don't work for their victories; they outsource them.
When I was coming up, we respected a team that knew how to suffer, but we revered a team that knew how to make the other guys do the suffering for them. We didn't ask how the ball got into the net. We just looked at the scoreboard, nodded at the sheer grit of a 2-0 win generated entirely by the opponent's crippling stage fright, and we moved on.
Saturday’s derby won't be decided by expected goals, or passing networks, or whatever metric the laptop managers are peddling this week. It will be decided by who wants to do less.
And right now, no one in Europe is better at doing absolutely nothing than Inter Milan.