FootItalia spoke exclusively to serial trophy winner Marcel Desailly about the Serie A teams’ dismal results in the Champions League knockout round and current the state of Italian football ahead of national team’s crucial World Cup playoff tie with Northern Ireland.
FootItalia: Inter were knocked out of the Champions League by Bodø of Norway, just nine months after reaching the final. What did you make of that result?
Marcel Desailly: It happens. They lost the away match but had the belief they could come back but it wasn’t to be.
That’s the beauty of football – smaller teams can beat bigger teams. I’m disappointed because Inter are an experienced team and were expected to go through, even in this new Champions League format.
It means there are some internal problems – the dynamic, the focus, the discipline. For a team that’s supposed to be defensively solid Italians, they’ve conceded too many goals.
How does that happen? Once you lose defensive discipline, you pay the price. UEFA have structured this competition to give smaller teams a chance to express themselves, and Bodø took full advantage.
We’re glad to see new faces in the knockout stages. And I’m a AC Milan man, so I’m not that disappointed, to tell you the truth.
FootItalia: You played in one of the great Italian teams – AC Milan in the early nineties – a side that barely conceded goals. Atalanta are the only Serie A team remaining in the Champions League after Juventus were knocked out by Galatasaray, condeding seven goals across two legs. Is there a lack of quality across the board in Italian football in 2026?
Marcel Desailly: You can see it at national team level too – they’re struggling to find leaders, players and managers who can read modern football and adapt to it.
You cannot just defend anymore and wait for your moment. You have to go forward, you need positional play, you need consistency.
They don’t have squads where every player is a first choice at their club. They’ve started exporting players, and sometimes those players face challenges abroad, so the focus is no longer what it was.
The national team is no longer the priority it once was, and Serie A is no longer the top league in Europe. The Bundesliga is more structured, the stadiums are better organised, the financial planning is on a higher scale.
So it’s an overall issue – it’s not just one team losing. The Italian league is performing below where it was, though it still has potential.
Inter showed in the previous Champions League that they could reach the final under Inzaghi. But yes, big disappointment – and when you look at the whole picture, including the national team, the disappointment is even greater.
FootItalia: On the Scudetto – what chance do you give AC Milan of catching Inter with 12 games to go having lost at home to Parma at the weekend?
Marcel Desailly: The consistency isn’t there from Milan. Thankfully we have these two new players who have brought real energy to the squad – Adrien Rabiot from Marseille and Luka Modrić from Real Madrid.
They’ve brought that winning mentality the club needs. Back in my era, and in the time of players like Kaká, Shevchenko and Inzaghi, it was an amazing AC Milan team. But that’s more than thirty years ago now.
That winning mentality has to come back into the system. The new stadium might help a little, but for now the performances are on and off.
I don’t feel that AC Milan can naturally win the Champions League right now – you’ve seen how Inter struggled. As for the league, when Pioli came in they managed to win it, but it was a little fortunate.
It wasn’t a team that started the season saying ‘we are going to win this.’ This year it feels more like: let’s play, and if the opportunity comes we’ll take it. That winning mentality is gone from the system – they need to get it back.
Find out why one ex-Juventus star will be happy if his former side fail to qualify for next season’s Champions League.
