Of
Paolo Condò
There were two transcendental matches, both involving the Nerazzurri. Without forgetting the Ranieri-Gasperini combo in Rome, the Fiorentina debacle and the Italian Bologna’s Coppa Italia
There were two matches, in 2025, that we could define as transcendental. This is an adjective that we are so used to using in a negative sense – “nothing transcendental” is a classic formula for dismissal – that we have almost forgotten its affirmative meaning. And instead Inter-Barcelona e Psg-Inter they were two transcendental matches because both, in opposite directions, transcended limits, reducing football to a pretext to talk about something else. The first was a compendium of all-out struggle, of refusal of defeat, of the search for extreme opportunities, of resorting to unsuspected energies. Of light beauty and heavy motivation, the goal of Acerbi who survived cancer to find himself there where no one expected him, and those wings tattooed on his back that seem to make him fly, and then the useless Taremi who assists the superfluous Frattesi – one is gone, the other is on the doorstep – for the final sentence by two damned men.
Just football? Well. Inter’s performance against Barcelona is a manifesto of Homeric will – to want is to be able – as much as the match against PSG, only 25 days later, is an abyss that immediately swallows up every emotion and spits it out in the form of resignationfaces silently asking how much is missing already at the 20th minute of the first half. A surrender that is a category of the spirit exactly like the fight against Barça. The word exists even if only a few scholars use it: no will, in the sense of escape from evil, for Schopenhauer “suppression of desire to dissolve”. This was Monaco, minus the unreal magnificence of Douè (but why Yamal, on the evening of San Siro?).
What we cannot leave behind in 2025 is also Napoli’s fourth scudettobecause it is marked by the communion between a burning city and a cooling coach. Antonio Conte won in the fourth different club (Juve, Chelsea, Inter, Napoli, and what he did in the national team was perhaps worth even more) by applying his methods on the pitch – extraordinary – and in the press room – effective and not always acceptable – but above all by improving the players as per the copyright which to this extent is his alone. The two paradigms of the discussion both come from Manchester United, Scott McTominay all year and Rasmus Hojlund from September onwards: what Conte saw in the first, what he is smoothing in the second. In an old interview the coach opened up and said «when I enter a locker room for the first time I feel those looks, those expectations». The implication was the stress load, but the magic keeps repeating itself. And then the tomato speech that McTominay gave to The Athleticwhen to explain his glorious season he spoke of the difference between the tomatoes he tasted in Naples and the flaccid red objects he guzzled in Manchester, well, it was the last push for UNESCO to give stars to our cuisine.
The feuilleton of the year is certainly Luciano Spalletti’s return from hellstumbled at sunset – he interpreted the national team as his last hurrah – in the first real failure of his career, and from there returned to the track like an avenging angel, of himself and of Juve: in perspective, the most interesting story of 2026.
We can’t leave ourselves behind either the Ranieri-Gasperini combo which did justice to the clichés about the impossibility of obtaining results in Rome, nor to the opposite destinies of two North American properties, Canadian Saputo’s Bologna wins the Italian Cup and Italian-American Commisso’s Fiorentina risks Serie Bwith that Italian Vincenzo there in the middle to remember the proverb about the old road and the new one, or about appreciating something only after you’ve lost it.
And then there are those 1,395 minutes played by Luka Modric, even more than Maignan as well as all his other teammates, who with the help of Allegri and his proven human science gave Milan back the dignity lost in the season of all against all. And of course it is curious that it is a 40-year-old who signals the dawn of a new daybut when the plant is good the tomatoes are tasty even when ripe, and their flavor fills the wait for the main course, which if your name is Milan cannot be the Champions League place forever. But this is already 2026.
December 31, 2025
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