👎 Italy in play-offs, Brazil qualify after 6 losses: too much disparity? 🤔 | OneFootball

Italy will in all likelihood have to wait until March to understand whether, after two editions spent on the couch, we can finally start dreaming again. To find the last knockout match at a World Cup for the Azzurri (not a group match, but from the round of 16 onwards), you have to go all the way back to the 2006 final, a sweet memory for all of us.

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From then on, only sporting dramas. The eliminations with attached embarrassments in South Africa in 2010 and in Brazil in 2014, and then nothing, with two failures to qualify.

So now the whole movement hopes this is the right time, even if—unless Norway decides to self-destruct—we’ll have to go through the playoffs. The last two precedents don’t favor us, but it can’t always rain.

😧 Europe vs South America, isn’t that too much?

Long gone are the days when talents grew in Italy like mushrooms after an autumn downpour. Today our academy system struggles, a lot, and it’s no coincidence that Norway has trampled us.

Having acknowledged the limits of our National Team, the format devised by FIFA can’t help but raise doubts. True, the World Cup belongs to everyone and the same number of teams should arrive from every part of the globe, but perhaps something needs rethinking. If a single defeat, against five wins, forces Italy into the playoffs, the same can’t be said in South America.

Take Brazil. The verdeoro led by Ancelotti clinched their ticket despite just 8 wins and as many as 6 losses in 18 games. Bolivia, for instance, will go to the playoff with ten defeats. Numbers far from those collected by Gattuso, but there it is.

These days there’s been a lot of talk about the beautiful fairy tales of Cape Verde and Benin, the latter in truth ending with a particularly cruel elimination. It’s fantastic to see such small countries manage to qualify for a World Cup for the first time, and that’s not up for debate.

Perhaps, though, we should consider that you can’t risk staying home because you lost a single match, when in other parts of the world you qualify directly with six defeats...

This article was translated into English by Artificial Intelligence. You can read the original version in 🇮🇹 here.

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