Coach Gian Piero Gasperini’s departure from Internazionale was confirmed on Wednesday - surprising nobody, after the car crash display in the previous night’s humiliating defeat of promoted Novara, playing in their first Serie A home game in 55 years. Claudio Ranieri’s swift arrival as his replacement is clear acknowledgement of the gravity of a desperate situation.

The former Genoa coach’s tactical indecision, leading to the ugly denouement that was Tuesday night’s shambles, has been thoroughly explored elsewhere (including in The Guardian by the always-excellent Paolo Bandini). Indeed, it was telegraphed from the schizophrenic display in the Italian Super Cup against city rivals Milan in Beijing, back at the start of August. An encouraging first-half display gave way to a bizarre shuffle at the interval, moving the dangerous Ricky Alvarez over to the right – where he was quickly marginalised – and Javier Zanetti deeper behind him, ceding possession and domination as Max Allegri’s men took advantage and overturned an half-time deficit. While Gasperini deserves our sympathy for lack of genuine backing from upstairs, he hardly helped himself, and didn’t learn from this early warning.

In truth, however, Gasperini was little more than a minor player in the post-Champions League win tale of woe at Inter. If José Mourinho has been proved right in his post-departure boast that his treble-winning would be “impossible” to equal, that doesn’t tell the whole story. Problems have been accumulating since a time pre-dating Mourinho’s departure. May 2010’s triumph in the Bernabéu had papered over a multitude of cracks emerging at the club, with the true worth of Inter’s domestic domination questioned continent-wide by many feeling it was solely the upshot of the post-Calciopoli weakening of their rivals. It also came at an enormous financial cost, as this typically superb Swiss Ramble analysis of their finances pointed out.

With the increasing challenge to Inter’s grip at the top of Serie A, fan discontent at the style of football practised by the team and Mourinho’s appallingly bad relations with the media, it is intriguing to wonder how the Portuguese’s two-year reign might have been judged, in Italy and beyond, had Inter not been crowned European champions for the first time in 45 years in spring last year.

The completion of the treble fulfilled a lifelong dream for president Massimo Moratti, and that it was seen as the end of a cycle quickly became abundantly clear. Little was reinvested in the team, with the purchase of the full rights to Jonathan Biabiany and McDonald Mariga being the summer’s only cash signings. The real loss of momentum, however, was in the coaching department.

Moratti made an almost-identical mistake to that of a similarly experienced leader, Porto’s Jorge Nuno Pinto da Costa, in failing to deal with the aftermath of Mourinho’s departure. As with his exit from Porto post-Champions League win in 2004, Mourinho’s move to Spain was no surprise, but his replacement with Rafa Benítez seemed an opportunistic clutch at straws, rather than a concerted plan of action. Now on his fourth successor to Mourinho, Moratti has spent over a year scrabbling to find a palatable solution.

Benítez himself seemed ill-prepared for the challenge, still suffering some sort of emotional shellshock to his divorce with Liverpool, a club that he held so dear and put his heart and soul into. He governed as if he was still in the Premier League, with many of his players complaining of his intensely physical preparation. Coming off the back of a World Cup and into this, the previous season’s star Wesley Sneijder was left looking burnt out, as was top scorer Diego Milito. Benítez’s replacement, Leonardo, was always a reluctant coach, even if Inter did pick up in a thrillingly haphazard way in the second of last season. The Brazilian’s move to a more administrative role at Paris Saint-Germain seemed a much better fit to this most charming of facilitators.

Yet as protesting Marseille fans pointed out earlier this week with reference to their own club’s problems, what goes wrong on the pitch can’t all be loaded onto the management, and that’s certainly true of Inter too. The redeployment of Samuel Eto’o into the centre under Benítez worked wonderfully for the Cameroonian on a personal level, but started to marginalise Milito, whereas Inter mark 2009/10 worked tirelessly for the Argentinian’s benefit.

The crash of Julio César has perhaps been the saddest, and most richly symbolic, aspect of Inter’s decline. When they were European champions. César had a fair claim to be the best goalkeeper in the world on his form of the previous few years. The 2010 World Cup should have been a career high point for him but ended in heartbreaking failure, with his misjudgement of club team-mate Sneijder’s cross being a key factor in the Felipe Melo own goal which levelled the match, and the subsequent 15 months have been a nightmare. 

His Brazil colleague Michel Bastos told the Ramble last year: “There was a lot of sadness and lot of crying in general. All of us felt broken. We couldn’t understand what had happened - we have players who are world champions. And we wanted to win so badly. No-one was crying more than me. I hadn’t cried like that since I was a kid. All of Brazil suffers when we lose a World Cup.”

César felt the full weight of failure very personally and suffered more than most, despite most in Brazil choosing to vilify the red-carded Melo instead. The Inter goalkeeper cried at the end of the match, and looked similarly inconsolable when the team arrived back home. He has been a shadow of his former self ever since.

What Ranieri can do to steady the ship is to bring stability, at least in the short to medium term. The perception of him in England and in continental Europe is quite diverse, largely due to his unique ways of making affable light of his shortcomings speaking English, but there is one common theme that links Ranieri’s Premier League tenure and his more recent adventures in Italy, with Parma, Juventus and Roma - that he is at his best when the chips are down, forcing the lid onto a volatile situation.

Arguably his biggest achievement at Stamford Bridge was not 2003/04’s second place and Champions League semi-final swansong, when he carried himself with such dignity while the world knew his time at the club was running out. His real legacy was the previous season’s qualification for the Champions League, when he guided the Blues into fourth place without any transfer budget to speak of, setting up Roman Abramovich’s arrival and delivering Chelsea from financial ruin. ‘Fight’ and ‘battle’ are the key words in the Ranieri lexicon, to an almost self-parodying degree, and Inter should take on some steel from here on in.

“He has great experience that can help at this moment,” said Moratti on Thursday. For that reason, Ranieri is a thoroughly sensible choice to pick Inter up and point them in a direction where Moratti can – at least – have reasonable expectation that his club will be safely delivered to the Champions League again next season. At the same time, that this is the target is a painful admission of how steeply Nerazzurri expectations have tumbled in such a short space of time.