🇮🇹 What if national teams picked only U21s? Italy 👎, France & Spain 🤯 | OneFootball

Italy produces few talents but gets excellent results in youth national team selections: a paradox that can be explained in several ways.

The Azzurrini of various age groups are already capable of “being a team” and can go toe-to-toe with every national side in the world: individually, though, there’s no comparison. Just look at the potential U21 squads of Europe’s biggest nations.

Which U21s play for the Azzurri? The comparison...😨

But let’s start with Italy, because in the senior national team setup there are only four U21 players: Pio Esposito (20), Palestra (21), Pisilli (21) and Kayode (21 and not called up by Gattuso).

Now let’s see what the France, Spain and Germany U21 lineups would look like if they could call up all their actual U21 players.

FRANCE U21 WITH NO RESTRICTIONS

From this lineup we excluded names such as Robinio Vaz and Restes (Toulouse goalkeeper).

SPAIN U21 WITH NO RESTRICTIONS

From these 11 we excluded Fresneda, Thiago Pitarch, Gasiorowski and Joan Martin.

GERMANY U21 WITH NO RESTRICTIONS

From this team we excluded players such as Moukoko, Ouédraogo (a Leipzig starter before a knee injury) and Gruda (a Leipzig starter).

Azzurrini from the U20 World Cup: where did they end up?

The lineups we’ve looked at are made up almost entirely of starters or rotation players for top-flight clubs. On top of that, there are at least 2/3 absolute top-level stars, key players for some of the biggest clubs in the world.

A completely different story compared to Italy. Let’s take a look at the Azzurrini who reached the final of the 2023 U20 World Cup, because from that team the ones playing in Serie A are: Pio Esposito (Inter), Pisilli (Roma), Ghilardi (Roma), Prati (Torino), Baldanzi (Genoa), Lipani (Sassuolo) and Casadei (Torino).

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

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