Inter Overhauled the Roster but Kept the Spine That Won Everything

Inter won Serie A again, finishing ahead of Napoli, and also lifted the Coppa Italia. The club scored 89 goals in the league and closed out a campaign so solid that, in principle, it didn't call for urgent changes. And yet there's the transfer market, always poking its nose in where it didn't seem needed. Because even the most complete champion ends the summer with new faces and a few painful departures. The question hanging over San Siro is easy to ask and hard to answer: is this Inter side better than the one that was crowned a few months ago?

To understand it, you have to go back to June 2025, when Cristian Chivu took charge of the first team after Simone Inzaghi's departure, a exit marked by that brutal 5-0 loss to PSG in the Champions League final. Chivu had no experience managing a squad of that stature, but he knew the club inside and out: he'd played for Inter and had worked in the youth ranks. In his first full season, that was enough to win the Scudetto and, shortly after, the Coppa Italia.

President Giuseppe Marotta had been clear from the moment of the appointment: he wanted a younger squad without giving up competitiveness. Chivu delivered 87 points, eleven more than Napoli, and a goal difference of plus 54. Luigi De Siervo, CEO of the Lega Calcio, didn't hold back his praise for the Romanian's first season in a top job.

Lautaro Stays, and With Him the Spine of the Team

The clearest sign of how Inter approached the market is Lautaro Martinez, the title-winning top scorer with 17 goals and voted Serie A's best forward. When rumors of a possible exit started to circulate, Marotta shut them down immediately.

Lautaro is our captain, he represents Inter's current history.Giuseppe Marotta

That message carried more weight than any deal could have. At 29 and with an extremely high market value, the Argentine was, on paper, one of the most tempting assets to sell if the goal was to get younger. Inter chose the opposite: they kept him and reaffirmed him as the face of the club. Alongside him, Thuram, Dimarco, Barella, Calhanoglu, Bastoni and Akanji all stayed, the core that carried the team's best version.

The Defense, the Area That Changed Most

That's where the real movement happened. Out went goalkeeper Yann Sommer, right backs Denzel Dumfries and Matteo Darmian, and center backs Francesco Acerbi and Stefan de Vrij. That's no small detail: those five were part of a defense that kept a clean sheet in 18 of the 38 Serie A matches last season. To rebuild the back line, Inter brought in John Stones from Manchester City and Djed Spence from Tottenham, along with the return of Benjamin Pavard after his loan spell at Olympique de Marseille. The biggest question mark is between the posts: Sommer racked up 15 clean sheets in the title-winning season, and now Josep Martinez faces, for the first time, the responsibility of holding that standard across a full campaign.

The midfield, on the other hand, got deeper. It now blends the experience of Calhanoglu and Zielinski (both 32), Barella (29) and Mkhitaryan (37) with the freshness of Petar Sucic (22), Andy Diouf (23) and Luis Henrique (24). Curtis Jones arrived from Liverpool and Aleksandar Stankovic from Club Brugge, while Kristjan Asllani and Yanis Massolin returned from loan. There are far more options than before.

Up front, almost nothing changed, and that makes sense: why touch a forward line that averaged more than two goals a game? Lautaro and Thuram combined for 39 goals last season across all three competitions, and Pio Esposito and Ange-Yoan Bonny, 21 and 22 years old, chipped in 18 more between them. Proven pedigree on one side, hunger to prove themselves on the other.

Mkhitaryan, the squad's elder statesman, summed it up during preseason when discussing the number of young players now sharing the locker room.

More than half the squad are young players, and that's why I feel the responsibility to serve as an example for them.Henrikh Mkhitaryan

The league opener, a resounding 4-1 win over Monza, offered some clues but no certainties: a single match isn't enough to draw conclusions. The title-winning team had something this current group can't yet show, the automatic understanding that comes from winning again and again, with 17 different scorers spread across 36 of the 38 games played. That kind of chemistry can't be bought, it has to be built on the field.

So rather than calling this Inter better or worse, it seems fairer to call it different: less experience accumulated on defense, but a deeper, more balanced squad between present and future. In a season combining Serie A and the Champions League, that bench depth could end up being as decisive as any signing. The puzzle Marotta and Chivu put together still has to prove, match by match, whether the pieces fit as well as those of the team that wore the Scudetto badge on its chest.