I wonder what Rafa Benitez is thinking at this moment. Could it even be: "I wish I was back at Anfield?"
You never know. The English media gave him a tough time during his last six months on Merseyside, some would say deservedly so, but the Italian media have quickly picked up where their counterparts on the other side of Europe have left off.
The headline in Gazzetta dello Sport after their flaccid 2-0 loss in the UEFA Super Cup to Atletico Madrid was not the most vicious but perhaps was the most telling, 'InterRotta' - interrupted.
It was a nice play on words which suggested that the expectations that Benitez would carry straight on from where Jose Mourinho had left off a few months before, when Inter beat Bayern 2-0 in the Santiago Bernabeu stadium to lift Europe's top prize after a 45 year wait, had been cruelly dashed.
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Last week's arrival of Germany's World Cup revelation Mesut Ozil from Werder Bremen took Real Madrid's spending this summer to 74m euros (£60.8m), a not inconsiderable amount even by the extravagant standards of fellow European high rollers Manchester City.
Clearly, Real president Florentino Perez is once again hoping that success can be bought.
In addition to Ozil, Perez has lavished his money far and wide, purchasing Argentine winger Angel di Maria from Benfica, Ozil's compatriot Sami Khedira from Stuttgart, Portuguese defender Ricardo Carvalho from Chelsea as well as, and making a rather shorter journey than his fellow newcomers, Pedro Leon from Getafe.
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German football is rarely in the doldrums but it is definitely on a high at the moment.
The national team won many admirers in finishing third at the World Cup, while Bayern Munich became the first German club to reach the Champions League final in eight years, the feats of the domestic league and cup winners helping the country leapfrog Italy into third place in the Uefa league coefficient rankings.
German officials also proudly claim that the Bundesliga is the world's number one football league on the basis of an average attendance of 41,802 fans per game last season.
Among all sports, only cricket's Indian Premier League and the American football's NFL top that figure on a weekly basis - and neither competition has as many teams or matches across the course of a season.
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Hi, I'm Phil Minshull. I've lived in Spain since 1997 and covered Spanish football since the first day I got here. My blog aims to provide some insight into what's happening in La Liga, and there is much more to it than only Real and Barcelona, as well as elsewhere around Europe.
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