Gokhan Inler aims to build an Udinese team to challenge Serie A’s best: ‘We don’t hide. We will always fight’

As Tottenham and Paris Saint-Germain delivered a thrilling curtain raiser to the European club season last month, the eyes of the soccer world were on Udinese’s Stadio Friuli, currently known as Bluenergy Stadium. That is something that Gokhan Inler, a star of the great sides of the late 2000s and now the club’s technical director, would like to see happen much more often.

“It was a great game, a great show,” Inler said. “Intense and heavy.” It was the sort of game he used to play in when Udinese were vying with Serie A’s big beasts for Champions League qualification. It was also the sort of game that befits that rarest of commodities in Italian football, a stadium owned by its occupants and renovated to the standards needed to host showpiece UEFA events.

It was not, however, the sort of match that Udinese have played in in some time. You have to go back to 2013-14 for the last time continental football was played in Friulli, five years earlier for their best season of European football, when Inler and company were beaten by eventual finalists Werder Bremen in the UEFA Cup quarterfinals. In the years since Udinese have retained their Serie A status, but, even as big name talents such as Alexis Sanchez and Bruno Fernandes have come through their doors, they have struggled to punch above their weight as they once did.

“When I played here, we were all young, no names, not so famous,” says Inler. “We had only [Antonio] Di Natale as a proper legend and a couple of other players. What gave us the strength was the group and how we respected each other. Then we could achieve a lot more than people thought.

“For me in the position I’m in now, I count on that point. You build inside the core and make that very strong. Of course, budget wise, we are not the same as the bigger clubs but we have the heart, right?”

It is, of course, very early in the new season to be sure whether Udinese have the qualities to compete with Serie A’s big beasts over 38 games, but they have at least proven they can overcome the best of the best in 90 minutes, title contenders Inter downed in the San Siro in an exceptional display by Kosta Runjaic’s side. The hosts might have had all the possession but Udinese fought back impressively to turn a 1-0 deficit into a 2-1 lead before the first half was out. From there on out, the visitors defended with heart and commitment, holding Inter to just two shots on target and 0.75 expected goals.

Though it was the sort of win Inler the player would have celebrated for many days to come, the executive’s focus is on the bigger picture, starting with Sunday’s trip to Udinese. The 41-year-old doesn’t want to stop with one win. He wants to give the region of Friulli a team they can be proud of. 

“Udinese is a worker’s city,” says Inler, who has opened up training to supporters so that they can feel closer to their young team. “They like that every worker and every player gives 100%. You can lose, you can win but you need to sweat the shirt. 

“When I played here with the great group, we shook this area. This is my aim, to bring this even better, to build a deeper connection with the fans. People respect you here… if you respect them. The players who work here, the players who give everything, the region is behind them.”

There are more tangible changes that Inler has implemented within his role. Udinese have long looked to buy young and sell on at a great profit, this summer they took in over $20 million from Leeds for star defender Jaka Bijol while also sanctioning eight figure departures in Lazar Samardzic, Nehuen Perez and Lorenzo Lucca. Naturally these players in their mid-20s have been swapped out largely for those in their early 20s and teens. What Inler has done differently is to ensure those players already have senior experience. “When a player comes in now, he already knows what we expect. We don’t want to sign someone and then they start playing football.”

Redolent of this approach is Lennon Miller, linked with the likes of Ipswich Town and Union Saint-Gilloise before he made his move to Udine in a deal worth over $6 million. This was the winner of both prizes for young player of the year in Scotland with 76 games to his name before his 18th birthday. Miller’s Udinese debut may still be in the pipeline but the contingent of Scottish players have helped him settle in Serie A. So too, as Inler puts it, does the “football minded” nature of the likes of Scott McTominay and Evan Ferguson.

“We see already he has huge quality,” says the man who brought him to Italy. “We need to give him time to settle. It’s not only the football on the pitch, also on the outside with his family. You need to settle them perfectly such that he has no doubts. If a player has doubts, believe me, he loses many percentage points on the field.”

Should those doubts come, Inler is more capable than most of empathizing. After all, he knows how even moments of great collective triumph can come at an individual cost. In 2015 the then-Napoli midfielder arrived at Leicester City to considerable fanfare, universally hailed as an outstanding piece of business, the man who could plug the hole left by outgoing player of the season Esteban Cambiasso. The problem for Inler and absolutely nobody else associated with Leicester was that a fortnight earlier his new club had picked up another altogether less heralded midfielder, a 24-year-old by the name of N’Golo Kante.

Inler might have got his Premier League winners’ medal nine months later but his memories of that remarkable season in the East Midlands are, to put it mildly, conflicted. Playing just five league games cost him a call up to the Swiss side for Euro 2016 and though he would revive his career somewhat in Turkey, he would never add to his 89 senior caps. And yet, when he describes life at Leicester you hear many of the hallmarks that Inler wants in the Udinese dressing room a decade later.

“When I came there, I saw a really strong group,” he says. “We did everything together outside the pitch. We were really a great family.

“For me personally, though, it was the most difficult year in my whole career. I came there to help the team but I came there in the last days of the transfer window. They’d already trained together and played games together. After eight years I was changing country from Italy, it was the reverse of what it was like for Miller. It was a change on the pitch too, the automatisms, the moves, you cannot learn them in one week. You need time to settle fast.

“The coach tried me in some games and I’m honest, I wasn’t fantastic. I couldn’t give my skills. It was a little bit different, the style of football to Italy. Leicester played compact and then hit the fast players. The coach [Claudio Ranieri] tried, tried, tried and he found [Danny] Drinkwater and Kante and he was always winning. A veteran like Ranieri, he’ll never change a winning team.”

And why would he when before his eyes Kante is emerging as the outstanding midfielder of his generation? “Why did Kante become one of the best in the world?” asks Inler. “Because we, the players who didn’t play, pushed. The group respected that. I pushed Kante and Drinkwater, Andy King too. I had the chance to leave after six months but I said ‘why change? I’m a fighter.’ The coach said ‘Gokhan, no problem, fight and then we’ll see’. We never lost. What can I do?

“Sometimes I was in the stands, not even the bench. After six months, I lost the national team place and the captaincy. I played the minimum number of games to get the medal. For me it was really hard: working every day, I don’t play, go to the away games, don’t play, go home, extra training, don’t play, blah, blah, blah. But in the end, what happened? I won the most important trophy in the world.”

Having played his part in such an unforgettable triumph, why shouldn’t Inler aspire to repeat the trick at Udinese? After all, the sides led by Di Natale and Oliver Bierhoff before them proved that this is a club that doesn’t need the financial heft of the Sette Sorelle to occupy the upper echelons of the table. 

“Of course the league in Serie A is really difficult. You have monsters in front of you. But we don’t hide. We will always fight.”