Inter Milan's Gravest Error: The Rafa Benitez Story

Rafael Benitez Maudes was born on April 18, 1960, in the suburbs of Madrid. He was a member of the Real Madrid youth system, before failing to make the grade and plying his trade as a player in the lower Spanish leagues—unspectacular.

Rafael Benitez the manager is still that man, and despite now being a global name and manager of the reigning European Champions, the very same unspectacular blood still courses through his veins.

The Benitez story is one of brief periods of reflected glory entrenched in a mire of mediocrity and unfulfilled potential.

At the start of the season, "Internazionale" were at the summit of World Football, Champions League winners, champions of Italy for five consecutive seasons under the stewardship of arguably the most talented manager in world football, the "Special One," Jose Mourinho. Nothing is forever, though.

Such an equation could not last.

Mourinho’s eye was turned, with his short attention span exhausted; the maverick was off to weave his magic in Madrid. With an abundance of money and years of unfulfilled potential, Madrid were the staple of the Special One’s managerial diet.

Inter Milan, though, were left with a conundrum, a manager to replace a manager that was nigh-on irreplaceable. Time, therefore, to draw from the highest echelons of the managerial skies, the pantheons of the world’s greatest managers. Hiddink, Ancellotti, Capello? To be honest, Rafael Benitez Maudes is not really from the same ilk.

As a manager, at some point, Benitez had a modicum of potential to be a "great" manager. You don’t win two La Liga titles with Valencia (regardless of whether they were "at their peak" at this point) without being a decent manager. His appointment at Liverpool, therefore, was symbiotic. He ruined Liverpool, they ruined him.

To think it all started out so well...

The fallacy with the role of perception in modern management is that Rafa Benitez today is essentially living of the back of that night in Istanbul. Granted, his side overturned a three-goal deficit to prevail victorious in the penalty shootout, but if that logic is applied, the fact that they were in such a position at halftime was also of Benitez’s making.

His time at Liverpool was a cacophony of errors. A seemingly regimented desire to change a winning team at every possible opportunity contravened even simple logic. A generation of boys holed up in their rooms, willing away their lives on the latest incarnation of the Football Manager simulator; would even they have changed an entire team that had won the last game for no discernible reason?

Benitez did, and a relationship that had initially promised so much gradually broke down. 

Even successor Roy Hodgson has cited a series of misjudged forays into the transfer market as an obstacle to his reign. Yes, Rafael Benitez left his mark on the face of Liverpool FC.

Two events this season in essence some up Rafa Benitez for me: Mario Balotelli, and then today. Balotelli, an extraordinarily talented 19-year-old Ghanaian-Italian national, was at Inter Milan a few short weeks following Benitez’s arrival before he was farmed off to Manchester City. Benitez had been there a month, and Balotelli, an individual with talent any team in the world would be blessed to possess, and product of the Italian’s youth system, was lost to the Italian game.

And then today: Inter lost away to Chievo to leave them sixth in the league, nine points behind rivals AC and in a Euro Cup place only on goal difference.

Oh, how the mighty have fallen. The question is how many more Liverpool's or Inter Milan's will fall to the Rafa Benitez guise in the years to come?