Theoretically, we have a strong squad but our main issue, since the treble, is quite a lot of our players being unable to perform even close to their technical capacity.
Just some examples:
- Perisic: some amazing matches on past seasons, one of the best players of the 2018 world cup;
- Nainggolan: one of the best players at Roma last season;
- Gagliardini: had a great first half season with us.
Another examples of previous seasons of players who had a drop in performance when playing for us: Dalbert, Candreva, Jovetic, Kondogbia, Vidic, Dodo, Montoya, Llajic, M'Vila, Alvarez, Shaqiri and of course Coutinho. Sure we can look into individual players and argue that "he is coming to a big team with more pressure" or "he is getting older" or "played out of position" or even "defenders in Italy are more tactical". Many of these are clearly true, but the trend is alarming.
Usually you'd expect players to develop when blending with the team, getting used to the tactics and so on but that's not the case for Inter. We can buy whoever we want with little progress if we keep this lazy ass loser mentality as we won't be getting 11 players as focused as Skriniar relying on luck.
In my opinion, D'Ambrosio was one of the best recent transfers. He is reasonable but he is consistent every match so you know what to expect from him (also, costed 5m).
How can you expect to plan any tactics with Perisic, who can single handedly win a match but will fail make a significant impact in 80-90% of the matches of the season? This is why we usually play good matches against the teams high up on the table (Juve, Napoli, ect) but end up away from the first positions because we drop points to Parma, Sassuolo and our favorite Udinese.