Inter CEO Beppe Marotta feels that at the moment, the financial aspect of football has taken away some of the more intangible aspects of the game.

Speaking at the book launch of Italian journalist Marco Bellinazzo’s new book “The New Wars of Football,” as reported by FCInterNews, Marotta gave his views on the state of modern football.

Marotta has been in the football business for around four decades.

Over the course of his career, the executive has shown himself to be one of the most effective people at running a football in Italian football.

Over the past decade and change, the executive has experienced his greatest period of prominence, as he was one of they key figures to mastermind Juventus’s run of nine successive Serie A titles before taking over at the Nerazzurri and bringing them back to the top of Italian football.

The Nerazzurri CEO has been increasingly conscious of the importance of financial sustainability, all the more so given the financial situation of European and Italian football, and particularly at Inter.

Speaking about Bellinazzo’s book, Marotta noted that “In your preface you evoke the idea of a romantic football model from the 60s, 70s, and 80s, which is disappearing today.”

“As you underline, I’ve gone through many changes myself, the first question I have to ask myself is: what is a football team?”

“It’s a sporting phenomenon and also a social one, is something which contains many different values.”

“Today it is certainly business,” Marotta said of football clubs, “but also a game in which one experiences contrasting emotions of victory and defeat.”

“In these forty years I’ve been along for these radical changes,” he said, “we’ve gone from football in the 40s, in which a collection of poems by Umberto Saba was needed to describe a goal, to the present day where the explosion of joy is suffocated by the intervention of VAR, though that is an indispensable tool for eliminating errors even if it cannot be perfection.”

Marotta also noted that “Today, you have to think about the financial balance before the sporting aspect.”