Consider this a pre-emptive apology. Yes, we will be referring to Manchester City’s opponent in the Champions League final as Inter Milan. Yes, we know that is not what the team is called.
The issue of Inter’s nomenclature has always been a complex one. The club’s full title, F.C. Internazionale Milano, tells the story of its founding: In the early days of Italian soccer, before World War I, the city’s first team — A.C. Milan — had a policy of only fielding native players. Several of its members objected; when the issue could not be resolved, they broke away and started their own, international, outfit.
With one exception — UEFA, European soccer’s governing body, always uses the club’s proper name, in all its polysyllabic glory — nobody, anywhere, uses that title. In Italy, the club is Internazionale on formal occasions and Inter in conversation. The team’s social media accounts follow that trend: on Twitter, Instagram and TikTok, it goes by the handle @inter.
That, certainly, is how it thinks of itself: In 2014, the club filed a trademark application in the United States for the word “Inter,” a filing that would, later, prompt several years of legal wrangling with a start-up Major League Soccer team, Inter Miami, among other teams.
The problem is that, outside Italy, simply saying “Inter” does not quite seem to cut it. In the English speaking world, particularly, common usage has it that the club is referred to as Inter Milan. Quite why this convention took hold is anyone’s guess. Maybe it is a valiant attempt to transliterate the club’s full name. Maybe it is to distinguish it from Internacional, the Brazilian team.
Or maybe, as with the two teams who suffer the same fate — Sporting Clube de Portugal, known incorrectly as Sporting Lisbon, and Athletic Club, which is forced to go by Athletic Bilbao — people who speak English are just more comfortable when they know, precisely, where something is. (Within reason, anyway: Fussball-Club Bayern München is only half translated. It is enough to place it in Munich; nobody needs to know that it is also in Bavaria.)
Like Sporting and Athletic, Inter harbors at least a little resentment about the naming issue, though in recent years it seems to have acquiesced somewhat to the inevitable.
When it commissioned the German design house Bureau Borsche to redesign its badge in 2021 — a process that is now for some reason known as creating a new “visual identity” — it removed the letters “F” and “C” from the original, iconic logo, leaving just two: “I” and “M.” They stand, of course, for Internazionale Milano. Or, in English, Inter Milan.
