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A decade has passed since Jose Mourinho wept into Marco Materazzi’s shoulder in a parking lot outside the Santiago Bernabeu for he had no more worlds left to conquer.

Internazionale had that night become the first Italian club and only the sixth team in the history of men’s European football to win their domestic league, domestic cup and the European Cup in a single season.

In the years since, only one other club, Bayern Munich, has added its name to that illustrious list of treble winners. And yet in many other ways, the landscape of elite football across the continent has changed indefinitely.

On the night of the 2010 Champions League final, Manchester City were still waiting to make their first appearance in the competition.

Paris Saint-Germain had finished 13th in Ligue 1 a few weeks earlier and by the end of the year their owners would begin the search for new and more lucrative investment.

And in Italy, Juventus’ recovery from the Calciopoli scandal had lapsed after a Champions League group stage exit and seventh-place finish in Serie A.

They would follow that with a Europa League group stage exit and another seventh-place finish the next season.

If that all seems like a different world now, that’s because it is. The story of European football during the 2010s was largely written without the team who began the decade as its most dominant.

There was always something transient about Inter’s 2010 achievements, hence Materazzi’s damp shoulder. That Mourinho had an agreement in place to join Real Madrid was an open secret and already known long before the final.

Still, it was hardly inevitable that the Nerazzurri would enter a period of sustained mediocrity and experience a nine-year long trophy drought, which could finally end on Friday night’s Europa League final.

Their decline was not immediate, or at least not in terms of silverware. The 2010-11 campaign brought the Supercoppa and the Club World Cup under Rafael Benitez then, after he was sacked at Christmas, the Coppa Italia under Leonardo.

The signs were there throughout that year, though, that a sequence of five back-to-back Scudetti would be emphatically broken.

Benitez was 13 points adrift of leaders Milan at the time of his dismissal, and though that gap would be cut to six by the end of the season, Leonardo’s standing was badly damaged when their defence of the Champions League was effectively ended by a 5-2 quarter-final defeat at home to Schalke 04.

At the end of the season Diego Milito, Serie A’s footballer of the year under Mourinho in the previous campaign, was awarded the Bidone d’oro – translation: the Golden Trashcan, as the league’s worst player.

Milito gradually returned to form but not before Inter’s wilderness years truly began. Their renowned owner Massimo Moratti, the archetypal local businessman turned football benefactor, burned through another three managers – Gian Piero Gasperini, Claudio Ranieri and Andrea Stramaccioni; before resolving to sell the club in 2013.

His father Angelo had presided over Il Grande Inter’s consecutive European Cups in the 1960s and Moratti was estimated to have paid €1.2bn out of his own pocket since taking the reins in 1995 chasing that same dream.

With an unprecedented treble achieved three years earlier, he sold the loss-making club of his life to the Indonesian businessman Erik Thohir.

But the scattergun recruitment, managerial turnover and inconsistency of results which defined Moratti’s late years persisted, while attempts to move towards a more sustainable model of financial self-sufficiency were not enough for Inter to avoid breaching Uefa’s Financial Fair Play rules in 2015.

It was only May of last year that Uefa lifted restraints on Inter’s spending and squad allocations. By then, they had hired and fired another five coaches since Moratti’s departure, had enjoyed just one Champions League appearance in seven years, and had undergone another takeover.

Yet under the ambitious Suning, a Chinese e-commerce company which became the majority owners in 2016, Inter gradually began to reassert themselves. This is no longer a club scrambling around in the dark for answers but one following and implementing the best practice of others.

Giuseppe Marotta was the sporting director responsible for the unorthodox recruitment techniques which restored Juventus to domestic supremacy. He is now in the same role at Inter, though his most important signing is without doubt in the dugout rather than on the pitch, in his old friend Antonio Conte.

Together with chairman Andrea Agnelli, Conte and Marotta rebuilt Juventus into a powerhouse that could consign Calciopoli to a distant memory. Their aim is to now do the same at the club that benefitted more than any other from that dark chapter in Italian football’s history.

And though Inter cannot yet lay claim to being one of European football’s dominant forces, the domestic landscape is shifting again.

Juventus may have won their ninth consecutive Scudetto – and more comfortably than the one-point margin suggests – but they are experiencing their greatest identity crisis since that pair of seventh-place finishes. Like super-clubs across the continent, they have sought comfort in their past, but there are no guarantees that Andrea Pirlo is the solution.

The chasing pack in Serie A is a wide field though of all the contenders hoping to eventually dethrone Juventus, Inter have the resources, the talent and the pedigree to stay the course. What’s more, beating Sevilla in Cologne on Friday night and winning the Europa League would see Conte and his players seeded in next Champions League’s group stage draw, with their place in the top bracket of the continent’s clubs restored.

Inter’s story over the past decade is a parable of how quickly even the most historic clubs at the top of the game can slide into near irrelevance, but their revival is well underway and their nine-year wait may finally be about to end. – Independent (UK)