A Storied Chapter Ends at Inter Milan LONDON - If Inter Milan is the barometer of Italy's well-being in sports, what might the club be telling us right now? Three years ago, Inter was again the European champion. The club was back under the pay of the Moratti family, back at the summit of the game. Maybe Massimo Moratti should have quit then. His emotional debt to his late father, Angelo, was repaid. The team was on top of the world. It could not get better. German clubs were rising, Real Madrid and Barcelona were spending, and billions from TV money and foreign investments were piling up in the top English clubs. And, Moratti knew, his team was aging and would need rebuilding at an enormous expense. When Inter plays at Bologna on Sunday, it will start a new chapter. F.C. Internazionale Milano will henceforth be under Indonesian patronage. Last weekend, Moratti formally declined the offer to remain as Inter's president but accepted an honorary role at his club. "I think it right that the person who carries the liability for an operation should be the president of the club," he said. Being honorary president myself and my son being vice president will allow us to remain close to the team and the club, while respecting the roles of those coming in. Spoken like the sporting gentleman that Massimo Moratti has long been. He is 68 now, he had used his inherited oil fortune to buy back the club that his father financed in the 1960s to be Europe's finest, "La Grande Inter." Now was the time for fresh energy, for investment beyond even his means. And if that means Italy going down the path of English soccer, wedded to mammoth TV deals and to billionaire owners from whatever part of the globe, then so be it. In each of those things, Italy lags behind. Juventus, still in the Agnelli family fold, is building again. A.C. Milan remains under the ownership of Silvio Berlusconi, but for how long and to what effect is anyone's guess. Napoli is owned by a film mogul. And Roma has opened the door to foreign investment and foreign ideas on how to recreate a franchise, American style, with its hedge-fund investors from Boston. But, two years into that acquisition, James Pallotta, one of the Americans at Roma, recently said in an interview to an Italian newspaper that Serie A is dying . In fact, Roma is currently where it wants to be, on top of Serie A. But Pallotta did not mince words when he described Italy's major league several times as a near-death experience, with lots of debt, old stadiums largely unfilled and supporters struggling to pay the admission price. And, he might have added, many of those fans have been disaffected by violence around the stadiums, along with a legacy of match-fixing among players. Enter Erick Thohir, the 43-year-old media entrepreneur who, with two Indonesian partners, has arrived at Inter. Thohir went to college in California. His International Sports Capital consortium already owns a piece of the Philadelphia 76ers of the N.B.A. and the M.L.S. team D.C. United. "I'm not American," Thohir said last week, "but I know well the United States because I love basketball. It's where I have understood that Americans know how to turn sports into an industry. They know how to expand and how to be strong. If Inter doesn't follow this model, we will not be competitive in the future. In week one of his presidency, Thohir got the ball rolling on talks with the mayor of Milan about building a new stadium for Inter, leaving the dated San Siro arena to Berlusconi's team. The two rivals currently share the facility. Thohir is talking about the huge markets of Asia and the United States. When he was 10 or 12, he says, Inter and the other Italian giants were big clubs that inspired his imagination in Jakarta. He has met with the players in Milan. He and his two partners paid 75 million euros, a little over $100 million, and agreed to take on €180 million of debt in exchange for a 70 percent stake in the club.