After months of waiting, finally yesterday Giuseppe Marotta officially joined Inter as the new CEO for sport. This is an opportunity that not every Inter supporter seems to agree with, mostly because of his recent past at Juventus, a link so strong that if we look at the last match at Torino, 10 bianconeri on the field were actually signed by Beppe between 2010 and 2008 (the 11th is Chiellini, at Juve since 2005).
The ultimate goal of this article was to find the “dark side” of the ex juventino, going through all the “negative” transfers made by him or players announced but never actually bought. I was trying to find “il pelo nell’uovo”, nitpick his career and possibly playing devil’s advocate for all those fans that disagree with this move from President Zhang.
In all honesty, it has been very hard to find something really negative, even going back in time, when Marotta was at Venezia (’95-2000), Atalanta (’00-’02) or Sampdoria (’02-’09). We can actually find him behind some of the biggest transfers of those teams; Recoba and Maniero at Venezia, Morfeo-Ventola-Dabo at Atalanta, Campagnaro-Palombo-Maggio-Pazzini-Cassano (from Real Madrid) at Samp among many others. All these are transfer made with limited resources, loans, small fees and quick turnaround. A lot of players, from Venezia to Juventus, join the team just to leave the year after with a plus in the balance, a small loss at worst.
But the biggest, juiciest part of the story comes from the last 9 years working for “the enemy”. It’s a story of success, both personally and for the team, in Italy (7 scudetti, going for 8) and in Europe, where they almost tasted victory on 2 occasions. In all these years, you would think, he must have done something negative, wrong investment for the team, huge loss betting on some immature youngster, that’s what I was looking for but, as much as I tried, I couldn’t find anything too bad compared to the huge benefits he brought to the company. I have some names sprinkled during the years, Traore’, Elia, Bendtner, Anelka, Osvaldo, Lemina, Hernanes, Krasic…all bad investment, but not so bad after all, since most of them were just last minute loans or small losses, like Elia, bought for €9M, sold the year after for €7.5M.
He is not a Re Mida, not everything he touches become gold, but a lot of time he is able to see the potential of “small” or young players, bring them into the team and make a profit from them either selling them for a higher price or through their quality on the pitch. Sometimes both, for example with Pogba.
Like every CEO in this field, he is involved in a lot of potential transfers that the media makes up, but in the same case there was actually some truth behind it. Like in 2014, when the swap Guarin-Vucinic was a done deal. Or with Berbatov (2012), Iturbe (2015), Tolisso and Schick (twice, 2017). Marotta himself also admitted to have the opportunity to sign Skriniar before Inter but he preferred focusing on Schick, so double whammy in that case!
Finally, after the Inter-Juve match of the past season, Marotta released one of his rare comments to the press, saying he was embarrassed by the behavior of some teams (yes, he was talking about us) but then expanding the concept to the whole system, suggesting to train players, coaches, managers and supporters to the “cultura della sconfitta”, something like learning how to lose, against the tradition to contest the ref.
My hope is that he will still remember how to win, and quickly too! Inter fans deserve it and now there are no more excuses to delay it!
Written By Alessandro Zorzetto
