Think of this as a love story. A real one, with the inevitable peaks and troughs, misunderstandings and suspicions and rocky ending. It begins in the spring of 2001, when Inter Milan’s scouts become smitten with a man-child at Flamengo in Brazil. At the very beginning, it’s about the numbers: 6ft 3in, 14st of angry muscle, with a sprinter’s pace. But it’s the relationship between the striker’s left foot and the ball that leaves them open-mouthed. He can smack the leather off it or he can race with it up the pitch as if there were Velcro on his big left boot.

The man-child is Adriano Leite Ribeiro and he joins Inter that summer, making his debut in a friendly at the Bernabéu in which he scores a goal people talk about for years to come. Real Madrid fans applaud him off the pitch. Inter believe they have found the new Ronaldo: with his shaved head and frightening physical skills, he looks the bigger, stronger copy of the original. “He can turn you inside out, he can run away from you, he can go around you and he can run right through you,” says Fabio Cannavaro, a man who knows a thing or two about defending.

Adriano spends a year at the San Siro, playing little, but “maturing”, as per the club’s plans. They then loan him out to Fiorentina, in Serie A, always monitoring his progress. He has his flaws — he remains almost entirely one-footed, he doesn’t take too well to complicated tactics, he occasionally gets depressed — but the raw talent is still there.

Then, in the summer of 2002, the love begins to wane. Partly, it’s the coach, Héctor Cúper, who needs to win here and now and doesn’t want to invest time and energy into the club’s relationship with Adriano. Partly, it is a cluttered front line that includes Hernán Crespo, Christian Vieri, Álvaro Recoba and Obafemi Martins. Partly, it is Adriano himself, who wants more from the relationship: he’s tired of going on loan, he believes that the club don’t fully have faith in him.

So Inter enter into a co-ownership agreement with Parma in exchange for £4 million. Under the terms, he moves to the Serie A rivals, who pay his wages. Should there be a dispute over where he plays, it would be settled by sealed bids. It’s a bit like a trial separation, but one in which, if you’re willing to pay enough money, you can get your spouse back (cynics might say it’s a bit like real life).

Adriano flourishes at Parma, scoring 23 goals in 34 Serie A starts over the next 18 months. He becomes the hottest commodity in European football. Inter realise that they have made a terrible mistake and come crawling back. But he doesn’t come cheap. Because of the co-ownership agreement, they have to shell out £13.5 million to buy Parma’s half. But surely it’s worth it. He’s not even 22 yet.

And, for a while, everything works out magically. Upon his return, he scores 40 goals in his first 60 appearances. He’s rewarded with a £120,000-a-week contract, as befits the best centre forward in the world.

But the wedded bliss doesn’t last. This time, demons off the pitch begin to haunt him. His father passes away, the mother of his child leaves him, he begins to drink far more than he should. One thing leads to another, his fitness deteriorates, he starts to miss training sessions. Inter bend over backwards for him. They send him on long holidays in Brazil, they get him a personal trainer, they eventually loan him to São Paulo, in the spring of last season, thinking that some time at home will do the trick.

Nothing seems to work. When he returns to Inter in August, there’s a new sheriff in town, José Mourinho. The “Special One” has a reputation as a disciplinarian, but he knows that Adriano is too big a talent to let slide, so he dons his marriage-counsellor hat. But even Mourinho cannot connect with him. His tally for the first six months of the season is disappointing — three goals in 11 appearances — and when he returns to Brazil for the winter break, there is talk that he might not come back. “Adriano should maybe spend some time elsewhere,” Mourinho said last month. “He needs a tutor, I can’t be his tutor.”

Inter field offers for him, but ask him to return for training last Friday. When the scheduled flight from Brazil arrives, he’s not on it. The club initially claim that he simply took another, earlier flight and that he’s “undergoing a medical”. But that white lie is soon rumbled, when Adriano is spotted at the airport hours later, dozy after a transatlantic journey.

And so the club have no choice but to fine him £150,000, the maximum allowed, while adopting a “this hurts me more than it hurts you” attitude, like you might when spanking a small boy.

Because that’s what this love story has become. It was once a marriage of equals, it’s now a parent-child thing. And this particular child seems to have so many demons that it would take a raft of shrinks to sort him out.

Adriano turns 27 next month. Unless Mourinho decides he wants to embark on one of the greatest reclamation projects in footballing history (and manages to pull it off), the love affair will be over, the only evidence that it ever existed being his enormous contract, which runs through June 2010. When that expires, there will be nothing left.