Cristian Chivu found empathy in his darkest moment. It has turned 'crumbling' Inter into Serie A champions

AtalantaInter MilanJuventusMilanNapoliScores & ScheduleStandingsPodcastsAnalysisCristian Chivu found empathy in his darkest moment. It has turned ‘crumbling’ Inter into Serie A championsInter celebrate after winning the title Stefano Rellandini/Getty Images Share articleIt was a celebration in the style of Jose Mourinho. Supposedly about the players and never about him. But undeniably genuine this time. Cristian Chivu hung back. The smoke of the fireworks making him crave a cigarette. Federico Dimarco pushed him forward, so hard he almost tripped over, entangled in the blue, black, and gold streamers that had fallen from the sky. Chivu faced the Curva Nord, accepted the ultras’ applause and then turned, pointing to his team as if to say: Inter’s 21st Scudetto was down to them. He then retired to the dressing room, his face suddenly aglow from the flick of a lighter and had a smoke. Made In Romania. Midfielder Hakan Calhanoglu first introduced his team-mates to the Ionut Cercel song a couple of years ago. It was, in hindsight, serendipitous. Outside, the strummed guitar and rattling tambourine reverberated off San Siro’s red girders. Chivu made history. Until Sunday, Armando Castellazzi was the only person to win the league with Inter as both a player and a coach. And that was more than 80 years ago. “I think I was in the history books before tonight,” Chivu reminded broadcaster DAZN’s Federica Zille. He was, after all, a member of Inter’s legendary 2009-10 treble team under Mourinho. “I did win a thing or two as a player.” It was said with a sense of humour, and no trace of arrogance. Chivu claims to have lost his ego when he fractured his skull and almost died in January 2010, an incident that made the now 45-year-old think about the people around him and what really matters in football and in life: “I tried to be empathetic.” It’s a quality for which there is no metric. But, above all else, it is exactly what this group of Inter players needed after they lost the league on the final day of their 2024-25 Serie A season and then got humiliated 5-0 by Paris Saint-Germain in the Champions League final eight days later. Only someone with vast depths of emotional intelligence could have provided it. Inter were shattered. They were, in many people’s eyes, at the end of a cycle. After suffering round-of-16 elimination from the Club World Cup at the end of June, Lautaro Martinez, Inter’s captain, called out a fellow senior player, Calhanoglu, for a lack of commitment. Calhanoglu had flown home to Turkey to rehab what seemed a minor injury following the PSG game and missed that tournament in the United States. Rumours about a move to Galatasaray trended on X. From the outside, it seemed, the core of the team was beginning to crumble. Alas for their rivals, the fissures in the Inter dressing room, as discerned and fixated on by the media, never opened up. Chivu kept the squad as one. “This team never lost its togetherness,” Nicolo Barella said. As processions go, Inter’s 12-point margin on the chasing pack hides the many difficulties he needed to overcome. The Club World Cup could have been too much too soon, with Chivu having only succeeded Simone Inzaghi on June 6. Participation in it seems to have taken a toll on just about everyone involved this season. Inter were no different. Lautaro is set to be Capocannoniere again with 20 goals in all competitions despite missing eight league games this calendar year. Calhanoglu, absent for 10 of them, has been decisive in doses, doing more with less game time, scoring arguably the goal of the season in Serie A in the 5-2 win against Roma in early April. Denzel Dumfries, hero of last year’s Champions League semi-final against Barcelona, suffered an ankle injury in November that ruled him out for three months. Veterans in the defensive positions Chivu used to play — Francesco Acerbi, Stefan de Vrij and Matteo Darmian — were largely peripheral too, as age and wear and tear caught up with them. In their cases, and that of the far younger midfielder Davide Frattesi, those who played less needed careful management. Happiness should never be taken for granted at a big club, and insulating the players from the gloom that often surrounded the team this season can’t have been easy. Dimarco had a night to forget in that Champions League final. Some commentators felt he played so badly he should have been hooked at half-time. He is now expected to succeed Scott McTominay of Napoli as Serie A’s MVP. The Italy contingent in particular have suffered. Six days after losing to PSG in Munich, the Azzurri among the Nerazzurri were in Oslo to play Norway in the first match of their 2026 World Cup qualifying campaign. They were not in the right frame of mind for it, and Italy lost 3-0. It made a play-off inevitable from the get-go and Italy, ultimately and painfully, succumbed on penalties to Bosnia and Herzegovina in the final of their bracket in Zenica. Chivu, once again, had to lift his players. Francesco Pio Esposito, one of the kids he integrated as part of a transition from one generation to another at Inter, missed Italy’s first spot-kick of that shootout. Nobody required more compassion than Alessandro Bastoni. “This one means more,” he posted on Instagram on Sunday. Bastoni had rushed back from injury to be there for Italy in those play-offs. He wasn’t 100 per cent fit and played through the pain barrier. The red card he picked up when they were 1-0 up in Zenica just before half-time made him a scapegoat for the four-time champions missing a third World Cup in a row. Having already been made a pariah for duping the referee into sending off Juventus’ Pierre Kalulu in the Derby d’Italia in February, a decision he celebrated like a goal, he has cut an embattled figure these past couple of months. Through it all, the supporters at San Siro never left Bastoni’s side. He has a tattoo of the stadium on his calf and it is hard to contemplate him playing elsewhere, even amid interest from Barcelona. The smile he wore on Sunday was shared by everyone in the stands and in Milan’s Piazza del Duomo, where the ticketless Interisti congregated, lighting up the gothic facade of the city’s most famous landmark with hissing flares and fireworks. “This Scudetto is down to Chivu and the players,” president Beppe Marotta insisted. It was also Marotta’s 10th, an achievement ordinarily commemorated with a star. He instead settled for a new tie. “We were brave in our choice of Chivu, but it was calculated bravery.” Sporting director Piero Ausilio added: “I was at an advantage” from having watched Chivu coach in Inter’s academy, where he led the under-19s to a league title. “I already knew the ability he’d go on to show. Many thought he wasn’t cut out to handle a team with big-name players like Inter.” At the time of his appointment, Chivu’s experience in the top flight amounted to just a couple of months at Parma, who he creditably kept up on the final day of last season. “He showed intelligence and great sensibility,” Ausilio concluded. For a guy in his early-to-mid forties, Chivu is possessed of a wisdom beyond his years in management. Some young coaches think they know better. They’re eager to try new things out on experienced players, displaying hubris rather than humility. Chivu didn’t make that mistake. He stuck with the 3-5-2, a system introduced by Antonio Conte and elaborated on by successor Inzaghi. He chose continuity. Gradually, Inter perhaps became a little less sophisticated and a little more direct. A 5-0 win against Torino on the opening weekend broadly set the tone for the rest of the season. Only Bayern and Barcelona have scored more goals across Europe’s top five leagues. Attacking Serie A seemed, in the afterglow of Inter’s title win, even more counter-cultural than usual. This past weekend was another round of multiple 0-0s in Italy’s top flight. There were three of them, including in the eagerly anticipated game between Como and Napoli. Milan failed to score for the fourth time in five games. This has been the principal shortcoming of Inter’s rivals this season. Napoli, Milan and even Roma all briefly looked like challenging. Each of them had far more experienced coaches on the bench, some of them — in the cases of Conte and Max Allegri — being serial winners. And yet Inter have scored 30 more goals than reigning champions Napoli — THIRTY! — and 34 more than Milan. Under this rookie Romanian, they became only the third team this century to win the league without the best defence and without a formidable record in the so-called big games. These are things traditionally held up as the mark of champions in Italy. It turns out that if you score one more goal than your opponents in those fixtures, or three, or four, and beat the other 14 teams in the league home and away, then that’s also a winning combination. To do that despite your goalkeeper Yann Sommer experiencing a sudden decline, and two-thirds of the defence changing upon Manuel Akanji’s late-summer arrival and Yann Bisseck’s development, was quite something — as was the need to reinvent Piotr Zielinski as a deep-lying playmaker during Calhanoglu’s injury lay-offs. Having more prolific backup strikers in the forms of Esposito and Ange-Yoan Bonny, as opposed to Mehdi Taremi and Marko Arnautovic, no doubt helped, even if some of that was by accident rather than by design. Esposito, into double figures this season with 12 for club and country combined, probably would have been loaned out last summer if Atalanta had not played hardball over Ademola Lookman. The only fly in the ointment this season appeared in the Champions League, where Inter were eliminated in the play-off round by Bodo/Glimt. Leaving aside the woodwork Inter hit, Lautaro’s unavailability for the second leg at home and Inter’s superiority in xG terms in each game, the 3-1 and 2-1 defeats against the Norwegians left a sour taste. Inter should not have been in those play-offs, having missed a top-eight finish by a point. They lost in stoppage time away to Atletico Madrid, 2-1, on a corner kick. A soft 88th-minute penalty given against Bastoni was the difference against Liverpool, who won 1-0 at San Siro. Only Arsenal genuinely outclassed them. Unlike in Italy, the big games do matter in Europe, and Chivu will have to show progress there next season. That said, winning the league was the priority for the players this season. For the club’s owners, however, the Champions League is the major revenue differential. Inter raked in €546million (£471m; $639m) last season — a record for a Serie A side. They turned a profit for the first time in 15 years. Much of that was down to Champions League TV revenue and prize money following a second run to the final in three years. It is also the competition the wider world judges Inter’s competitiveness on. Not Serie A, nor the Coppa Italia. As his players were taken by bus to the nearby Sheraton hotel for a night of partying, Chivu insisted he wouldn’t allow himself to get carried away. “I don’t want to come across as a hypocrite, but I am already thinking about the Coppa Italia final (next Wednesday, against Lazio).” As for Marotta and Ausilio, they are already thinking about the 2026-27 campaign, with the stated aim of investing in and developing Italian talent. Take Atalanta’s 21-year-old Marco Palestra, for instance, who has been a revelation this season on loan at Cagliari. “Unfortunately, he’s not ours. But he has a great future,” Marotta said. Spot the pattern. Connect the terms Find the hidden link between sports terms