WHEN Indonesian billionaire Erick Thohir bought a controlling share of Inter just over a year ago, he was warned that "chaos was the natural state of affairs" in the black and blue half of Milan.

That may have seemed an exaggeration for a club that had won the Treble as recently as 2010 under one Jose Mourinho. But that's been the way of the nerazzurri since the Special One decamped for Real Madrid, just hours after winning the Champions' League. Thohir's predecessor, Massimo Moratti, had spent in excess of a billion pounds to pursue the dream of a European Cup: having reached that goal, and equalled his father back in the 1960s, the club began to drift.

The result? Seven managers since 2010 and the sudden realization that

Financial Fair Play had arrived leaving the club entirely unprepared.

Wage bills had to be cut, transfer spend flattened. The upshot?

Three straight seasons outside the top four.

This campaign started poorly and Walter Mazzarri was sacked with the team lying in ninth last November. In came Roberto Mancini, the man

who had delivered the last league titles before the Mourinho era.

Unsurprisingly, upon arriving, Mancini asked for assurances in terms of signings. Enter Inter's "try-before-you-buy" policy. Xherdan Shaqiri (from Bayern Munich), Davide Santon (Newcastle), Marcelo Brozovic (Dinamo Zagreb) and Lukas Podolski (Arsenal) all came in on

loan with Inter retaining the option to buy at the end of the season.

The plan is pretty transparent. If they do well - and, crucially, if Inter qualify for the Champions' League - they'll stick around. If not, Inter won't be on the hook for their transfer fees and they'll be

sent back. It's a bit like buying a formal gown for a fancy evening

at the opera and then returning it the day later because you haven't hit the jackpot at the casino.

Under Mancini, there's been progress in terms of performance, but

results have been status quo: they were tenth going into the weekend.

The problem is even where there is promise, things aren't quite right. Midfielder Mateo Kovacic, just 20, ought to be one of the most

exciting young playmakers in Europe. At times he looks the part, but

too often he seems stifled by the players around him, starting with the gifted but absurdly inconsistent Hernanes and Fredy Guarin. As a result, Gary Medel, the "pitbull" cult hero formerly at Cardiff, is a

mainstay, primarily because he's as reliable as he is unimaginative.

The back four has been decimated by injuries and suspensions but even

at full-strength usually looks capable of leaking multiple goals.

Nemanja Vidic, the big free agent signing, has been a bust, his defensive partner Andrea Ranocchia is a 6' 5" conundrum: elegant and decisive one minute, awkward and Bambi-like the next. It's not surprising then that goalkeeper Samir Handanovic gives up industrial quantities of goals, despite the fact that he's probably one of the better keepers in Europe.

Podolski and Brozovic are cup-tied and won't feature against Celtic so the final third will be the domain of some combination of Shaqiri, Rodrigo Palacio and Mauro Icardi. Shaqiri is a genuine talent who couldn't find space at Bayern. At Inter, he has plenty, the question

is whether he can perform with the array of moving parts around him.

Palacio has one of the most recognizable haircuts in the game - the shaven-headed/rat-tail hasn't been emulated by many, but it still stands out - and one of the most frustrating scoring records. After notching 22 and 19 respectively in the past two years, he has scored just twice in twenty-two appearances in all competitions this season.

But all this pales compared to Icardi. He turns 22 on Thursday and, with 18 goals this season, he's been prolific and effective. He's also something of a headcase who arrived in Barcelona at 15 and was released two years later after a string of disciplinary issues. For the past two years he's been at the center of a running feud which has captivated attention in Italy and back in his native Argentina. He began an affair with Wanda Nara, a TV personality and wife of Argentine international Maxi Lopez. Once it was exposed, both he and Wanda began chronicling their life together in an incessant stream of

tweets and Instagram posts, much to the annoyance of Lopez. There

was Icardi assembling a flat-pack cot for one of Lopez's three children. There he was carrying another child on his shoulders. And there he was, with Nara, taking shirtless selfies in what used to be Lopez's bed. Icardi and Nara married last May, a few months after her divorce was finalized. But when it comes to wind-ups, the hits keep

coming: most recently he posted photographs of the names of Lopez's kids, whom he had tattooed on his leg. In case you're wondering, the nuttiness extends on to the pitch. In the past three weeks he has nearly got into a fistfight with teammate Dani Osvaldo (the Brad Pitt lookalike who is himself a strait-jacket candidate) and scored a brace without celebrating because he was annoyed at the club's contract offer.

This, in a nutshell, is the three-ring circus that Mancini has to deal with. It may remind him a bit of his time at Manchester City with Mario Balotelli and Carlos Tevez, but the main difference is that the rest of his squad was talented to the point that he could freeze out the potential troublemakers. That's an option he does not have in his current job.

Indeed, you wonder sometimes if he regrets taking it. And if he's only now realizing the enormity of the task ahead of him. Failure to get Inter into the Champions' League - a hugely remote possibility right now - will likely mean more cuts from Thohir as the club scramble to meet FFP parameters. That would mean being forced to work with kids, more cut-price signings and, ultimately, putting his future into the hands of Kovacic and, especially, Icardi. And that's the kind of thought that can cause a manager to wake up in a cold sweat in the middle of the night.