Italy reels in shame as it’s three strikes and it’s out of the World Cup again
I was in Tuscany Tuesday night when the apocalypse happened.
Sitting upstairs in a dark pub in the pretty town of Arezzo, I joined Italian men grasping for one last shred of soccer dignity that the country has slowly lost over the last 20 years.
The pub, called simply Inside, is in a building built before World War II. It’s doubtful in the decades since the last brick was placed that it ever housed more sadness. As Esmir Bajraktarevic’s last penalty kick in the shootout rocketed under goalkeeper Gianluigi Donnarumma’s arm, the pub’s collective groan could be heard in the surrounding vineyards.
We all silently filed out. But the silence in Italy didn’t last long.
From Sicily to the Alps, Italians are furious, curious and perplexed how their national sports identity has sunk to the level of banana republics. Italy’s shootout loss at Bosnia and Herzegovina in Tuesday’s final of a four-team playoff marked the third straight World Cup Italy will miss.
This is like Duke not making three straight NCAA Basketball Tournaments, Beyonce getting stood up three times in a row, Andrea Bocelli getting booed out of two hotel lounges and a subway tunnel.
Italy reaches historic low
Since the World Cup began in 1930, the only country besides Italy to make two straight World Cups then miss the next three is Honduras. The difference is Italy has won the World Cup four times, second most to Brazil’s five.
Let these facts sink in: Haiti is in the World Cup; Italy is not. Uzbekistan is in the World Cup; Italy is not. Sixteen teams from Europe are in the World Cup; Italy is not.
During the game, drinking my Tuscan beer, I was indifferent. I’ve lived in Italy for 12 years and adore the Italian people. But 40 years as a sportswriter killed my subjectivity. I hinted last week that Italy could gag again. I fell back to my kneejerk emotion as a spectator. I slightly – albeit silently – rooted for little Bosnia. Then again, this summer’s World Cup would be a lot more interesting with Italy in it.
Finally.
The reaction
I drove home to Rome wondering the same thing as the Italians: What has gone wrong and what needs to be done? But first, a wave of angst swept across the nation. Thursday’s La Gazzetta dello Sport had 16 pages of coverage.
“Italy is now the laughingstock of international football,” Alessandro Del Piero, a striker on Italy’s 2006 World Cup title team, wrote on Facebook. “Missing three World Cups in a row is genuinely unforgivable. How can a nation like this miss out on a whole generation of World Cups? Four-time winners haven’t scored a World Cup goal in 20 years.
“We used to have world-class players, but today the players are very average.”
Wrote Fabio Licari in La Gazzetta: “The new manager must work on other aspects, beginning with the attitude.”
“Italy was always famous for good coaches and good players, but it seems the high tempo needed in football has been lost,” said Oliver Bierhoff, a former Milan striker and German national player. “It stopped in the 1990s. The game has changed, the preparation has, too. The intensity is higher.”
Italy will never live down its 2017 flop against Sweden in the World Cup playoff or its choke job at home against North Macedonia four years ago. But after losing to 71st-ranked Bosnia and Herzegovina in a tiny 13,800-seat stadium, the team didn’t even bother asking for sympathy or patience.
“It’s a nightmare,” defender Leonardo Spinazzola said. “I’ve been on the national team nine years and still haven’t played at a World Cup. It’s awful. For Italy. For us.”
Said a visibly shaken manager Gennaro Gattuso after the game: “We needed this, for ourselves, for Italy, for our sport. A blow like this is hard to take. I’ve been in football for a few years now. Sometimes I’ve celebrated. Sometimes I’ve taken blows like today’s.”
After choking away three straight World Cups, the entire Italian soccer system needs a Heimlich maneuver. Gattuso will step away when his contract expires in June after only one year. So will Gianluigi Buffon, the goalkeeper on that 2006 team who has been head of Italy’s soccer delegation since August 2023.
Gabriele Gravina, president of FIGC, the Italian soccer federation, said he wanted Gattuso and Buffon to stay. Then Gravina resigned Thursday.
What must be done?
This isn’t a knee-jerk reaction to a bad 90 minutes in a small town in Bosnia. Italy’s troubles go all the way back to 2010 and 2014 when it failed to get out of the World Cup group stages, going a collective 1-2-3 and losing to the likes of Costa Rica and Slovakia.
Take out the outlying 2021 European Championship and reaching the quarterfinals in 2016, and on the world stage Italy soccer has dropped below Italy baseball.
What must be done? The two names connected to replace Gattuso are Napoli manager Victor Conte, who led Italy to that Euro Championship, and Milan manager Massimiliano Allegri, who won five Serie A titles with Juventus.
Most critics point to a disconnect between player development and the national team. Start with Italy’s Serie A. Only 31-34 percent of the national league’s players are Italian. In my AS Roma’s last match, Italians made up only four of 11 starters.
In Spain’s La Liga, 55-60 percent of the players are Spanish. In Germany’s Bundesliga, 51 percent of the players are German. France’s Ligue 1 sports a French percentage of 41 percent.
Out of 487 goals scored in the Champions League this season, Italians totalled eight. Only Atalanta made the quarterfinals and Bayern Munich buried it by an accumulative 10-2. Only Bologna has made the quarterfinals of the Europa League.
Some signs of progress
It’s not like nothing has been tried. After Italy’s 2010 World Cup collapse in South Africa, Italian soccer legend Roberto Baggio presented a 900-page report detailing all that needed to be done. He mandated youth coaches at all levels emphasize technique and creativity rather than Italy’s traditional emphasis on tactics and defense.
Arrigo Sacchi, considered one of the greatest managers in Italian history, started coaching coaches of developmental teams after the 2014 disaster in Brazil. CONI, Italy’s Olympic committee, proposed to allow Serie A clubs to put their B teams in Serie C.
Something worked. Italy made the Under-17 European Championship finals in 2013, 2018 and 2019 then won it in 2024. In U-19, it made the finals in 2016 and 2018 and won it in 2023.
Gravina, to his credit, sought tax breaks for anyone investing in the infrastructure and women’s movement. He wanted the government to relax the sporting constraints to prevent young players from exporting their talent. He requested 1 percent of royalties on sports betting to be used for youth development.
Help is needed, particularly at striker. Italy has two reliable forwards, both 26: Mateo Retegui, who was their leading scorer in World Cup Qualifying, and Moise Kean, who scored Italy’s lone goal at Bosnia. But Retegui was substituted for a defender in the first half when Italy went a man down and Kean reacted to a breakaway one-on-one against Bosnia’s goalie, leading 1-0, by overshooting the goal halfway to Serbia.
Meanwhile, Italy’s shame has turned to resignation and gallows humor. On our way home, we stopped to do a TraveLazio post on Civita Castellana, a small town 50 kilometers north of Rome. As we walked down a side street, we heard a group of youths laughing about the game the night before.
Said one, “Italy’s players think the ball is square.”