Italy soccer: Can Italians miss their third straight World Cup?

If soccer is a religion in Italy, its national team could be headed to the third circle of Hell.

The Tiber River is the River Styx. Dante Alighieri will be there, waiting in his inferno, in the role of Lucifer. Demons representing Sweden, North Macedonia and Northern Ireland will be waiting, too, pitchforks poking Italy’s heart and howling over the flames.

In what seems as impossible to write as “Pizza is banned in Italy,” “The Vatican is broke” and “The Colosseum converts to condos,” Italy’s national soccer team may not make its third straight World Cup.

Keep in mind Italy is a blueblood of world soccer. Its four titles are second only to Brazil’s five. Its clubs have won 12 Champions League titles. Players such as Maldini, Baggio, Meazza and Zoff are such stars in the sport’s rich history, they don’t need first names.

Thursday at 8:45 p.m. CET in Bergamo, Italy hosts Northern Ireland in the semifinals of a four-team playoff to earn one of the last bids to this summer’s World Cup in North America. If Italy wins it plays next Tuesday at the winner of the other semifinal between Wales and Bosnia-Herzegovina.

If Italy loses, it will become the first former World Cup champion to miss three straight World Cups since the competition began in 1930. Twice France, Spain and Uruguay missed two in a row. England did it once.

None has missed three straight.

Italians are easily offended. There’s ordering a cappuccino after noon. There’s wearing flip flops away from the beach. There’s writing graffiti on ancient monuments.

Then there is missing three straight World Cups.

“If it goes badly,” said Daniele De Rossi, a member of Italy’s last World Cup championship team in 2006, “there will be a revolt.”

The odds

Yes, Italy is heavily favored.

In FIFA’s world rankings, Italy is 13th, Wales 35th, Northern Ireland 69th and Bosnia-Herzegovina 71st. Oddschecker lists the odds as Italy at 1.57-1 (Bet €1 to win €1.57), Wales 3.75-1, Bosnia-Herzegovina 9-1 and Northern Ireland 25-1.

Keep in mind, however, Monte Carlo was not built by winners.

“If I had to put my money on it, I’d say they’d pull through,” said journalist Paddy Agnew who has lived in Italy for 40 years and written about soccer from here since 1990. “But you’ve got a very difficult situation.”

It’s not just that Italy’s best player is its goalkeeper or that it’s banged up or that it has an unproven manager or that it must go on the road if it wins Thursday. It’s that for the last 16 years, you could put a banner reading “World Cup” above your TV and beat Italy in the comforts of your own home.

Since winning in 2006, Italy has had all the World Cup success of Honduras. In the 2010 and 2014 World Cups, Italy never got out of their group stages. Before the 2018 World Cup, it didn’t score a goal in a home-and-home qualifying playoff against Sweden. In 2022, North Macedonia knocked out Italy in the same qualifying semifinal it faces Thursday.

Anyone under 25 likely doesn’t remember the last time Italy showed a pulse in a World Cup. This is all so odd. After all, Italy won the European Championships in 2021.

“You could argue that this is one of the most important games played in the last 50 years,” Agnew told me Sunday.

As the headline on Sebastiano Vernazza’s column in La Gazzetta dello Sport’s SportWeek screamed Saturday, “Gift the World Cup to Our Babies.”

No one will blame manager Gennaro Gattuso from banning all newspapers from the locker room. His 2006 World Cup title team, where he was a starting midfielder, was fearless. It marched into Germany and knocked out the home team in the semifinals then beat the powerful French in a shootout in the final.

I was there, covering it for The Denver Post. That Italian team had a swagger, an attitude, a bella figura on the field. It was a bunch of long-haired strikers with lightning in their legs and destruction in their hearts.

This is not the 2006 Italy team.

Fabio Licari wrote in Sunday’s La Gazzetta, “Fear, it was said, is the real opponent of the Italian team.” 

Obviously, not a single player on the roster has played in a World Cup. The current qualifying campaign has been rocky. It started June 6 in Oslo where Norway filleted Italy, 3-0, scoring all its goals in the first half.

That earned manager Luciano Spalletti “the big haircut.” Replacing him came Gattuso, still a folkhero from his role in ‘06 and for AC Milan in its glory years. He debuted with a 5-0 whitewash of visiting Estonia but Italy had to come from behind to defeat Israel on a neutral field in Hungary, 5-4.

Two more wins by a combined 6-1 led to optimism before Norway humiliated Italy in Milan’s famed San Siro stadium, 4-1. That vanquished Italy to the cutthroat, pressure-packed qualification playoffs with the likes of Europe’s third tier.

Italy’s strengths

Italy has some solid players. It should. Every member of its roster plays in the top division in Italy, England, France and Saudi Arabia. Mateo Retegui, who parlayed leading Italy’s Serie A in scoring last season (25 goals) into a €20 million annual salary with Saudi Arabia’s Al-Qadsiah, has five goals in the eight qualifying games. Moise Kean of Fiorentina has four in three.

FIFA, soccer’s world governing body, named Gianluigi Donnarumma of Manchester City as the Best Men’s Goalkeeper last season. Inter Milan’s Federico Dimarco is considered one of the best defenders in the world. 

Outside of perhaps Donnarumma, however, these are hardly names mentioned in smoky soccer pubs from Buenos Aires to Budapest. Gattuso looks around the locker room and he doesn’t see the idols he played with two decades ago. He certainly doesn’t see another clone of himself, considered one of the greatest midfielders of all time.

“He doesn’t have a Roberto Baggio up front,” Agnew said. “He doesn’t have a Giancarlo Antognoni at midfield. He hasn’t got Franco Baresi in defense. He and Paolo Maldini were the heart of the AC Milan defense.

“Above all, there were players with not only experience, but because they were winning European Cups and Champions Leagues, etc. They were just players who commanded a huge amount of respect amongst their teammates and opponents alike.”

Also, Italy is coming in hurt. Striker Federico Chiesa, a former starter who Spalletti called “Our sinner” in reference to Italian tennis champion Jannik Sinner, was sent home from training camp Sunday with an undisclosed muscle injury. Starting defenders Alessandro Bastoni (ankle) and Gianluca Mancini (calf) are hurt but probable.

More banged up are forwards Gianluca Scamacca (abductor) and Mattia Zaccagni (thigh), midfielder Sandro Tonali (hip) and defender Riccardo Calafiori (undisclosed muscle).

“The others (teams) have injuries, too,” Gattuso said in a press conference Monday. “We’ll have to get on the pitch and give it our all. My staff and I have everything we could. We’re focused on Thursday’s match and nothing else, not on the fact that we’ve won four World Cups, nor on the fact that we haven’t played a World Cup since 2014. For us, Thursday’s match is the most important.”

Gattuso, 48, is in his first national post and has three days to piece this all together. Starting in 2013 with Sion in Switzerland, he has changed jobs 10 times. He’s called fiery which is accurate. He’s been fired four times. He left three jobs by mutual agreement.

“I wouldn’t worry about that,” Agnew said. “He’s taken all sorts of jobs. “He’s taken on jobs that weren’t easy. AC Milan was not easy. He didn’t do badly with some of them. He didn’t win anything so he moved on. I don’t think Gattuso’s a bad coach at all.”

Strange parallels

The match with Northern Ireland has two eerie similarities to the pratfall against North Macedonia. Northern Ireland is ranked 69th; North Macedonia was ranked 67th.

North Macedonia also beat Italy in Palermo’s Stadio Renzo Barbera which seats only 36,000. I wrote before the game that the relatively small crowd won’t intimidate North Macedonia, a veteran team that won at Germany in qualifying. It wasn’t. 

It won 1-0.

Thursday’s game is in Bergamo’s New Balance Arena which seats only 23,439. Why not play arguably their biggest qualifying match in 50 years in 70,000-seat San Siro? Well, maybe if they walked into San Siro they’d see the ghosts of Norway that crushed them in November or the Swedes who eliminated Italy there in 2017.

But while Bergamo’s old yard built in 1928 and renovated four times can get rowdy for its beloved Atalanta, like North Macedonia in Palermo, I doubt Northern Ireland will spend 90 minutes looking up at the lights.

“If you look at the majority of players on my squad, outside of the four lads who play in the Premier League, they play the majority of their games in stadiums anywhere between 10,000 to 25 or 30,000,” Northern Ireland manager Michael O’Neill told BBC Radio 5Live. “They won’t be exposed to the San Siro or Stadio Olimpico, so I think we’ll feel very at home in Bergamo and we won’t be intimidated by the atmosphere at all.”

O’Neill is a bit of a folkhero in Northern Ireland. In 2016, he led it to its first European Championship. He left for Stroke City in November 2019, got fired in August 2022 and that December returned to his old post.

He’ll be knighted if he qualifies the Green and White Army for its first World Cup in 40 years. It has a good young core in its four Premiership players: defenders Conor Bradley (Liverpool), Daniel Ballard (Sunderland), Trai Hume (Sunderland) and midfielder Shea Charles (Southampton).

It relies on counter attacks and a tough, physical defense typical of British soccer. It gave up only six goals in its six qualifying games and four were in the two games against Germany.

Northern Ireland also returns ghosts of Italy past choke jobs. In November 2021 in Belfast, Northern Italy tied Italy, 0-0, forcing Italy into the playoff where they lost to North Macedonia.

Four Northern Ireland players return from that team. 

“I think if you go off that, then there’s no reason why we can’t do something similar again,” midfielder Ali McCann, one of those four players, told BBC.com. “We frustrated them a lot that night and could have come away with more in the end. It was class.”

However, Bradley (knee) and Ballard (hamstring) are out and Northern Ireland is weak on the offensive end. Not one player scored more than one goal in qualifying. Nine players on the roster play in the Championship, England’s second division, and eight are in League One, the third division.

Wales and Bosnia-Herzegovina

If Italy survives Thursday, it might face a Wales team that returns 12 players from its 2022 World Cup squad. However, one of them is not Wales legend Gareth Bale who retired. In his place returns Harry Wilson who has nine goals this season for Fulham which has jumped to a surprising ninth place in the Premiership.

Bosnia-Herzegovina’s strength remains Edin Dzeko, once a star for Roma and now still scoring goals for his country and his German club, Schalke 04. But he’s 40 and the team has little depth although Sead Kolasinac is a top defender for Atalanta.

It looks like an easy set up. Maybe that’s why Gattuso speaks with more than a hint of optimism.

“Right now, our football history says we’re struggling, but we have the chance to reach the World Cup,” he said. “I’m very proud and proud to be Italian.”

Stumble in one of these next two games and his seat will be a devilish level of hot.