Nicolo Barella scout report: How Inter’s midfield maestro is adapting the Inzaghi style of play

Nicolo Barella (5’8 &68kg) has had a fine start to the season the Serie A for Inter Milan, leading the league in assists and has played a key role in Inter’s good start to the season post, Antonio Conte as well Italy’s European Championship success this summer.

Barella is a 24-year-old Italian midfielder who started his career at Cagliari before his move to Inter in 2019, since then he has developed into one of the best midfielders in Europe and has lived up to that tag this season. With Inter looking to generate revenue Barella has been rumoured with several moves away from the San Siro, with Liverpool being the most common link. Barella has managed five assists this season and that is currently the highest tally in Serie A in addition to this Barella has created nine goal scoring actions this season (according to Fbref) which too is the highest in Serie A.

This tactical analysis and scout report sets out to analyse look at some of the key traits and attributes of Barellas game and look at how these have impacted his impressive start to the season.

Positioning

Barella is a right-sided midfielder, within Inter’s tactics they use a 3-5-2 formation which was used by both Conte and Inzaghi Barella will occupy the right side of the midfield 3. This can be supported by looking at Barella’s heat map which is shown below. With the majority of his positioning being the wide right channel. The role Barella takes up is what the Italians referred to as a Mezzalla, in Italian this term means half, wing and is used to refer to midfielders who occupy those wide central areas. This is demonstrated brilliantly by Barella’s heat showing most of his positing is in those wide areas on the right-hand side. Playing in this role allows Barella to maximise some of the strongest attributes which we will touch on later in the analysis.

Using the wide space to make crosses

Here we have an analysis of one of Barella key attributes. playing in those wide central channels means Barella has many an opportunity to cross the ball to his attackers and with Inter playing two central strikers in the form of Martinez and Dzeko it means Barella has two aerial presences to work with. Barella loves to pick the ball up in wide space of the oppositions half and play a beautifully whipped right-footed cross which we look at now. In the following example, Inter are on the counterattack and Darmian is carrying the ball forward, Barella has made an overlapping run into the space that you would associate with a mezalla. You can also see Dzeko and Martinez making runs towards the box.

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