There are 4 Suning periods.
1st is the attempt to elevate the club's sporting level about Thohir's tenure trashed it for the sake of cutting costs. This was a disastrous decision that set us back years and Suning tried to fix it from day 1.
Didn't succeed of course, they even fucked up and we ended up registering less players in Europe (which cost our progression) but you cannot dismiss the effort. They learned early on not to let agents run the show.
2016-17 was its own show. They started with Roberto Mancini and then they went full idiotic by not backing him properly and he just left us. They had a multitude of options but went for someone like Frank de Boer who had like 3 weeks to get to learn the Serie A way, learn the language and introduce whatever hectic style of football he wanted. That went well...
The season went awkward with Pioli almost sending us to CL with a crazy run and one bad result that could have sent us to the Europa League for some reason made us prefer not to play in Europe.
2nd phase is Spalletti.
Suning initially wanted to spend big but the CCP ordered that Chinese money would no longer go to football. We had deals lined up for Alexis Sanchez and 1-2 other world class players at the time that'd put us in Serie A contention, but instead we ended up with just Nainggolan by playing around with players exchanges (Santon 9.5m ffs and Zaniolo as a prospect for 4m + future fee %), we got Skriniar for Caprari + 12m, we landed Bastoni for a crazy valuation and loaned him back to Atalanta. The whole idea was to spend big, and also smart, we had to be creative and Ausilio went to work by generating over 50m from Primavera sales. That's iirc whne the term "plusvalenza" became our only strategy. That's why we lost Banega before the season and that's why we kept failed transfers around.
This was a 2 year period because we had to reach the CL group stage. We did that twice. Baby Zhang was promoted to what was still Thohir's chairman spot during our first CL appearance in years. I think it was in November 2018, just before the Tottenham away game.
Then we have the Conte period, which is broken into two phases. The pre-covid phase and the post-covid phase.
Pre-covid, Suning was liberated by the settlement agreement with UEFA and we ended up with big important transfers, but still with the plusvalenza considerations. We got Lukaku for a big chunk of money that we've never seen being spent before, we locked Barella and Sensi from the local market, we then got Eriksen for 20-25m on an expiring deal just because we wanted to prove a point. We locked the Hakimi transfer just before the Chinese started meddling again. Let's not forget that we tried to sell all Bastoni, Skriniar, Lautaro, Perisic, De Vrij and Brozovic in the same window. Not that we'd clear the house, but we were shoppin these guys around like there was no tomorrow. Perisic of course was on the verge to leave as he was out on loan the year prior and Brozovic was sketchy about staying at that point. Then the famous Conte interview in August/September, the Inter restaurant version, we ended up getting Kolarov and Vidal instead of Kumbulla and Tonali. It looks better now of course, but at the time we all felt like it was a backwards move.
And this is pretty much the 3rd phase. Which includes Simone Inzaghi's first two seasons. Or 1.5 to be exact.
Then we somehow managed to break through to the CL quarters, beat Milan in every way possible, in any competition possible, reached CL final and basically restored our brand name in football to a large degree and then took that momentum and took Serie A by storm, while still being quite competitive in Europe despite the decimated rotation we used there for the most part. If Suning leaves now, I can say that they're leaving on a high.
They're leaving the club in good hands, morale is at its highest possible after securing the Scudetto against Milan, we even celebrated the championship three times already and the season is still going. If the next owner takes us to a team that barely can manage to reach the CL spots and cannot compete in Europe, they'd fail. If they can keep this up at the sporting level, it's good enough. Ideally, we have an owner that can elevate the club commercially and give us a stronger sporting competitiveness by improving our depth by finally stop sacrificing what works and experimenting each year. If we can keep the core and reinforce it, we're in great hands. If it's one of the same, then it's honestly no worse than what Suning would have done, but the main difference would be that Suning didn't do it. The next guy did. So let's hope we end up at the hands of someone who can take over and improve the club. Then we can thank Suning for their contribution at the club. No one would look back and call it a failure.
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10 years of FIF
