Serie A's Inter Milan will restart their negotiations with La Liga's Real Madrid in January 2019 for Luka Modric, who won the Best FIFA Men's Player in 2018, according to Corriere dello Sport.

The Italian media outlet said that whether Real Madrid will agree to the deal will depend on if they can get top players as a replacement, such as Neymar or Kylian Mbappe from Ligue 1's Paris Saint-Germain (PSG).

Inter Milan made Modric their main target this summer and came close to completing a trade with Real Madrid, so it's understandable that the Italian club is willing to try again, particularly now that Real Madrid are in a significantly weaker position.

Having hired Julen Lopetegui as their new manager and sent Cristiano Ronaldo to Juventus, Real Madrid were expecting a new start as a new team in the new season. However, this new start has been poor as the team failed to score a single goal in four consecutive games, the worst opening record for the team since 1985.

The Spanish club's problems have spread among players, manager and even the leadership. For starters, no one seemed to be able to carry the team after Ronaldo's departure and both Gareth Bale and Karim Benzema, two of the team's possible leaders, have been connected with departures of one kind or another.

Secondly, manager Lopetegui has not found the squad he wanted  as it was pointed out by AS that the former boss of Spain's national team used literally all possible starting line-ups for his first 11 games coaching the club.

It's true that injuries are one of the reasons for Real's sluggish start. In the first week of the 2018-19 season, seven players got injured. Because of that, Lopetegui had could only use a starting XI that included Daniel Carvajal, Marcelo, Raphael Varane and Sergio Ramos for four games.

In offense, Isco's injury was a huge blow as the team got one win, one draw and three losses from the five games he was absent from. Benzema became the only player who was in the starting XI for all the games but hasn't found the net in the last seven.

Real Madrid has problems at the senior level, too. The Club's first vice president, Fernando Fernandez Tapias, and some of the senior members are not happy with club president Florentino Perez's decision to selling Ronaldo, according to Diario Sport. Now that the team are struggling, they have expressed their discontent once again. At the latest senior meeting, Tapias said "Pride is virtue while arrogance is sin", which has been read as a criticism of Perez.

It's no secret that Real Madrid are interested in Neymar and Mbappe. However, the two have been doing well at PSG and it already cost hundreds of millions of US dollars for the French club to get them, meaning PSG will not let them go easily. Money is no problem to Real Madrid, but neither it is to PSG. If Real can't get the new players they want, they are likely to stick with the ones they have meaning it may be hard for Inter Milan to get Modric next January, something no one saw it coming when Ronaldo moved to Turin.