Frank de Boer, trying to turn around Inter Milan, has a Paul Pogba in Joao Mario to help

Ian Hawkey writes Frank De Boer is trying to shake Inter Milan out of the club's stultified state, and Euro 2016 star Joao Mario may well be a perfect catalyst for such a task.

Inter Milan manager Frank de Boer, who took over from Roberto Mancini in the summer, has suffered a few setbacks already this season. Daniel dal Zennaro / EPA

Some years back, when he was Netherlands captain, and played elegant passes out of a Barcelona defence that liked to think progressively, Frank de Boer told this reporter in candid terms what he thought of Italian football.

“Horrible,” he said, as we sat in one of the executive lounges of the Camp Nou stadium.

He conjured up, rather imaginatively, an image of coagulated Italian tactics. “If you put a camera above an Italian stadium you just see this line of activity across midfield,” he said.

“Incredible! It’s just about fighting in the midfield and then teams expecting to score goals from free kicks.”

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He was speaking in 2002, and he forecast that Italian methods were heading for a comeuppance.

“In Italy it’s in the culture,” he added. “They have always played just for results, and that’s truer than ever.

“But it has been proved that it’s the wrong way. Look at crowd figures for some of the Italian games. People are turning away.”

In one sense, De Boer turned out to be an accurate soothsayer. In the last decade and a half, Italy’s position at the summit of the club game, rich and successful, has fallen. And a reputation for cagey, conservative football has been hard to shake off.

De Boer as a player was always a loyalist to the expressive game many Dutchmen of his generation, graduates of the school of Johan Cruyff, were brought up on; he suited Barcelona too, as a cerebral, ball-playing centre-half.

Even then, he was clearly a coach in the making, though, back then, you would not have imagined his second senior job as a manager would be at Inter Milan, the last Italian club to win the Uefa Champions League – in 2010 – but anything but a continental heavyweight these days, as Thursday's 2-0 home defeat to Hapoel Be'er Sheva in the Europa League testified.

That humiliation, albeit with a less than full-strength XI, stacks unwanted pressure on De Boer at a bad time, with Juventus the guests at San Siro on Sunday.

The Dutchman joined Inter after coming to the end of a largely impressive five and a half year stint at Ajax – he won four Dutch titles – late this summer, after Roberto Mancini stood down.

He came into a club that had finished well short of Champions League qualification and not exactly challenged some of his old characterisations of Italian football in its style.

Fighting in midfield? Among his new charges are the likes of Gary “Pitbull” Medel, the combative Chilean midfielder, and Felipe Melo, another bruiser of an anchorman.

They can win the ball, certainly, but De Boer hopes his Inter can develop into something more refined, and above all that some of the newcomers to the squad will be allies in crafting an Inter that is more entertaining than the one that slumped from the top of Serie A midway through last season to fourth, miserly in front of goal and brittle.

For Sunday's big test, at home to Italy's champions in the so-called Derby D'Italia, De Boer expects to give a home debut to Joao Mario, whose arrival from Sporting Lisbon may end up matching Inter's previous record high for an outgoing transfer payment.

The fee for the midfielder could rise to €45 million (Dh185.6m), which is what Christian Vieri, the striker, cost Inter back in 1999, in the era when the top Italian clubs regularly outspent those from England and Spain.

De Boer’s Inter have to be more careful with their outgoings than the club used to be. Joao Mario is among the fresh recruits unable to play in the Europa League because the club have infringed Uefa’s Financial Fair Play regulations.

But De Boer is excited about what the midfielder, outstanding for Portugal in their European championship triumph in July, can give his squad in Serie A.

“I really believe Joao Mario can become a pillar of this Inter for now and long into the future,” said the Dutchman.

Early impressions have been promising. Joao Mario, full of energy, combining graft with guile, helped galvanise the team to their first league win of the season on his debut, at Pescara last weekend.

Gazzetta dello Sport, the Italian newspaper, described his “maturity beyond his years”, and hailed “the complete midfielder of the European game.”

That is something for to Juventus to consider. They have just lost Paul Pogba, of who similar tributes were often heard.

Joao Mario is Pogba's age, outshone Pogba in the final of Euro 2016, and cost well under half of the £89 million (Dh431.6m) Manchester United paid for France's Pogba.

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