Inter’s Dario Baccin Outlines Recruitment Plan After Piero Ausilio Exit

Inter have changed the man running their sporting department for the first time in almost three decades. They’ve just done it in about the least dramatic way possible.

Dario Baccin has replaced Piero Ausilio as Inter’s Chief Sport Officer after Ausilio’s departure brought an end to an association with the club stretching back around 28 years. Baccin, naturally enough, isn’t exactly a stranger being handed the keys. He spent the previous decade working alongside Ausilio and has already been involved in much of the recruitment work he’s now taking charge of.

His first interviews in the job have given a decent indication of what he wants to keep. Speaking ahead of Inter’s 5-3 win over Udinese, Baccin said the club will continue looking both in Italy and abroad for new players, but made a point of the Italian core that has run through the side in recent years.

“Over the last 10 years, the core group have defined us and given us a clear identity. And the idea is to carry on that way.”

It’s fairly easy to see why. Nicolò Barella, Alessandro Bastoni and Federico Dimarco have become three of the faces of this Inter side, while Francesco Acerbi and Matteo Darmian gave the club years of extremely useful service before leaving this summer. Davide Frattesi has since moved to Lazio on loan too.

Inter have become particularly good at building squads like this. Barella and Bastoni arrived young enough to grow into pillars of the team, Dimarco eventually came back through the door after loans and a permanent spell at Verona, while Acerbi and Darmian arrived with considerably less fuss and somehow ended up playing Champions League finals.

Not every club gets that much mileage out of signings that initially have a bit of “he’ll do a job” about them.

Baccin’s talk of an Italian core doesn’t mean Inter are suddenly going to fence off the scouting department at the Italian border either. Ivan Provedel arrived from Lazio this summer, but John Stones, Djed Spence and Curtis Jones were among those coming in from England.

It says more about what Inter want to keep than where every new signing has to come from. Barella, Bastoni and Dimarco give the side a recognisable Italian spine, while the club can still shop abroad for a particular profile, experience or value when it suits them. There’s no great need to make recruitment unnecessarily complicated when you can keep the identity in one part of the squad and stay flexible everywhere else.

That younger profile was already becoming more important before Ausilio left. Giuseppe Marotta explained in July 2025 that Inter were moving towards players who could develop on the pitch and increase in value, a noticeable adjustment for a side that had become very good at squeezing another two or three useful seasons out of experienced footballers just as everybody else had started looking for their replacement.

Ausilio and Baccin were both involved in putting that approach together, which makes the succession quite different from the usual sporting-director change. Baccin isn’t arriving at Appiano Gentile with a new recruitment philosophy and a contacts book nobody else has seen. He’s taking control of an operation he already knows inside out.

His work with Inter’s Under-23 side could become another important part of it. Baccin played a major role in creating the team to give young players a proper bridge between Primavera football and the senior side, rather than sending another group of academy players around Italy on loan and hoping somebody eventually makes their way back.

Francesco Pio Esposito is already a pretty useful advert for what Inter would like that pathway to produce. He joined the academy in 2014, has worked his way into the senior picture and signed a new contract until 2032 earlier this month.

For a club that wants to stay recognisably Italian while getting younger, producing more of its own would certainly make life easier. Established Italian internationals aren’t exactly sitting in the bargain aisle, and Inter already have one very good example in Dimarco of what can happen when an academy player is given the time to go away, develop and eventually come back ready for the first team.

That’s what makes Baccin’s promotion more interesting than a straightforward changing of the guard. He’s replacing one of Europe’s longest-serving sporting executives, but he hasn’t inherited a recruitment department that needs to be ripped apart. He knows the people, the academy and the direction Inter were already heading in long before the job became his.

After 28 years of Ausilio, some things will naturally change. Baccin’s first few transfer windows should give us a much better idea of what those changes actually look like.

For now, the new man sounds pretty keen on keeping plenty of the old Inter with him.