Fading on world stage, Italy seeks fixes for its football | OneFootball

Absent from the last two World Cups, Italy has done little to stand out on the current international football stage as it prepares to face Northern Ireland on Thursday in the semifinals of the European playoff for the 2026 World Cup.

The decline of the national team, four-time world champion (1934, 1938, 1982 and 2006) and two-time European champion (1968 and 2021), can be explained by several reasons, according to its officials:

Without direction since 2006

On July 9, Italy will celebrate the 20th anniversary of its fourth World Cup title, won after defeating Zinedine Zidane’s France in an epic final (1-1 after 120 minutes and 5-3 on penalties) in Berlin, Germany.

It is a milestone that could take on dramatic proportions for the entire country if the national team is reduced to the role of mere spectator at the 2026 World Cup, to be held in the United States, Mexico and Canada.

After finishing second in its qualifying group behind Norway, Italy still sees the world’s biggest tournament on the horizon, but must first survive the playoff, a stage that proved fatal in both 2018 and 2022.

If it beats Northern Ireland at home on Thursday, the Italian team will travel five days later to face Wales or Bosnia.

Less than five years ago, Italy was at the top of European football after winning the European Championship in London, England.

However, time seems to suggest that title was only a mirage for a team that, aside from reaching the final of Euro 2012 and winning in 2021, has relentlessly disappointed its fans: group-stage exits at the 2010 and 2014 World Cups, a round-of-16 exit at the last Euros, and a fall to 21st place in the FIFA rankings in August 2018 (it is currently 13th).

“Today’s results are a reflection of 20 years ago, of that era when we depended on our stars: Buffon, Cannavaro and Totti... thinking they would last forever,” Gianluigi Buffon, former goalkeeper and current head of delegation for the national team, recently noted.

“Even back then, we should have rethought our technical and tactical models. Instead, we acted like the grasshopper (from the fable with the ant),” lamented the former goalkeeper.

“Football has changed over the last 20 or 30 years,” insisted Gabriele Gravina, president of the Italian Football Federation, in an interview with Corriere dello Sport.

“It is no longer that technical style of football in which we used to reign supreme. It is still technical, certainly, but speed and, above all, physicality have taken over,” he added.

Problems in player development

Led in different eras by names such as Giuseppe Meazza, Gianni Rivera, Paolo Rossi and Roberto Baggio, Italian football has not recently produced talents who define a generation, like Kylian Mbappé and Lamine Yamal.

“It is not true that there is no more talent in Italy,” argued former Italy coach Cesare Prandelli (2010–14) recently in an interview with Corriere della Sera. “The issue is simply that we train them in the worst possible way.”

According to Prandelli, the problem Italian football faces lies in player development.

“If, ten years ago, we had been lucky enough to have a talent like Lamine Yamal, we would have let him slip away,” said the man who, in 2025, became the first technical director of Italian football.

“Our coaches would have robbed him of the joy of playing and having fun, boring the player with tactical schemes or instructions on positioning,” he added.

In Buffon’s opinion, “we need to start again at the grassroots level, between the ages of seven and 13. That is where there can be a real impact.”

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Shortage of Italian players in Serie A

“The foreign owners of Italian clubs see the ‘Nazionale’ as a nuisance,” Gabriele Gravina recently lamented.

For the Italian football executive, as well as for former Milan coach Fabio Capello, the Italian national team is paying the price for Serie A’s preference for foreign players over Italians.

“Until the 2010s, the best players in the world came to our league and served as role models for our own players, who could then develop that way,” Capello explained to La Gazzetta dello Sport last week.

“Nowadays, there are fewer Italians playing in Serie A, and the foreign players taking their places are of a modest level,” said the coach, who also managed Real Madrid.

Statistics confirm the point: only 33% of players competing in Serie A this season are potentially eligible to be called up by Italy.

Among Europe’s five major leagues, only the English Premier League uses fewer local players (29.2%), while Ligue 1 and the Bundesliga take a more protectionist approach, with 37.5% French players and 41.5% German players, respectively.

“There is no point complaining about something for which nothing can be done,” concluded Italy coach Gennaro Gattuso, however.

*With AFP content

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