As the stadium in Zenica, a small industrial city in Bosnia and Herzegovina, erupted in celebration, the Italian team looked on in despair. Italy’s failure to qualify for the 2026 tournament marks the third successive World Cup without Gli Azzurri. Unprecedented as it is, since their 2006 World Cup triumph led by a generation of iconic players, Italy has been on a rapid downward spiral.
The 2010 and 2014 World Cups both resulted in humiliating group stage exits, including failures to beat teams such as New Zealand, Slovakia and Costa Rica. So what happened? How did the four-time champions end up at this level, and is there any improvement on the horizon?
Italian football’s decline has been rapid. In the 1980s and ‘90s, Italy’s Serie A was the undisputed best league in the world. Juventus, AC Milan, Internazionale and Napoli, among many others, cemented their places at the pinnacle of the world’s game. The greatest players in the world played in Italy, including one Diego Maradona, still revered religiously in Naples for his key role in their first two Scudetti. The national team, too, had a golden era, winning the 1982 World Cup and coming oh-so-close to a fourth title in 1994 only to lose on penalties to Brazil. Roberto Baggio’s missed decisive spot kick, and the images of the aftermath as a stunned Baggio stood motionless, staring at the ground, in many ways proved a harbinger of what was to come.
A narrow loss in 1998, followed by a farcical 2002 elimination to South Korea in a game marred by accusations of dodgy refereeing, was then followed by their triumph in 2006. Led by a golden generation of players, Italy triumphed over France to lift the trophy. But by then, the rot had already long set in.
While Serie A had assumed its place at the top of the global pyramid, the reformation of English football in the early 1990s, resulting in the creation of the Premier League, opened a path for competition. The large, lucrative broadcast deals signed by the Premier League and the burgeoning league’s focus on international audiences allowed it to rapidly close the gap with Serie A, which had failed to take advantage of the global market in the same way. Despite all this, the league’s reputation remained intact until 2006, before it all fell apart.
That Italy succeeded in Germany despite the May 2006 Calciopoli scandal is remarkable in hindsight. An extensive operation that lasted two years of wiretapping, Calciopoli implicated 13 clubs in manipulating the appointment of referees that would be favorable for their teams, though only five were charged at the time, one of whom was the reigning champions, Juventus. The punishments were fast and hefty. Juventus had their title stripped and were relegated as punishment, while the others faced large point deductions. The fallout from Calciopoli has continued to haunt Italian football in the years after, and is one of the key factors in Serie A’s decline.
Calciopoli may have accelerated Serie A’s decline, but it had been building for a while. As mentioned earlier, the Italian Federation failed to realize the importance of expanding Serie A’s footprint outside of Italy. While top English and Spanish teams grew massive global fan bases, Italian sides largely did not. This was not the only place where Serie A financially struggled, with domestic revenue streams also proving problematic.
In recent years, football has seen a huge uptick in the construction of new stadiums. As teams jostle to keep up with the ever-increasing financial demands of top-level competition, they’ve found that building new, state-of-the-art venues is one of the most effective methods to consistently provide a stream of income. In the Premier League, more than half of the teams have either built new stadiums or renovated their existing grounds for this reason. Across Europe and the world, teams are hedging their bets on these developments, boosting the profile and capacity of their teams, but Italy is largely absent from this.
Why Italy has struggled in this department is a multifaceted issue. While Milan’s San Siro, Rome’s Olimpico, Naples’ Maradona or the Marassi in Genoa are all iconic venues, they are ancient and crumbling. Efforts to modernize or build new stadiums, when pushed for by clubs, almost always get stuck in bureaucratic limbo as local governments, who almost always own the grounds, do not have the will or funding to prioritize stadium development, and are reluctant to sell the stadiums to clubs that often don’t have the resources to purchase the land, much less renovate or build a new ground.
And even when clubs do have the means, this roadblock often grinds plans to a halt. Both Milan teams and Rome teams have desperately been trying to upgrade their respective stadium situations in recent years, only to hit this roadblock repeatedly. It’s no coincidence that the most successful Italian club of the past two decades, Juventus, is one of the few that owns its own ground. Stuck in crumbling stadiums built more than half a century ago that they do not own, Italian clubs simply cannot compete with other top European clubs on a day-to-day basis, and this shows in how they construct their rosters.
The top Italian clubs have become notoriously terrible at developing domestic talent, and much of this stems from the unique pressures they face. With passionate fan bases that demand success, and a dependence on prize money to help fund major acquisitions, successful Italian sides do not feel that they have the margin of error to afford the inherent risk that comes with handing playing time to young players. Instead, these players often find themselves stuck in an endless cycle of loan moves to different Serie A and Serie B teams, depriving them of the stability needed.
This doesn’t always fail; this season, attacking midfielder Antonio Vergara returned to Napoli after a year with Reggiana in Serie B, and was a standout player for them before getting injured. Still, the odd success story does not change the fact that it’s becoming rarer and rarer for these players to reach their potential, and instead, they often end up as nothing more than decent Serie A players. The major sides aren’t able to provide the necessary development environment, but smaller clubs have an even harder time.
Italy’s league structure is slightly different from England’s. Serie A and Serie B, the top two divisions, consist of 20 teams, while Serie C, a regionalized third division, is made up of 60 teams split into three groups. With more teams in the professional league system than England, and a huge bottleneck at the top of Serie C, where only four out of the 60 teams are promoted each year, it’s no surprise that financial instability runs rampant in the lower divisions.
Italy’s lower divisions see multiple teams go bankrupt almost every season. While these clubs are usually revived in a lower division shortly after, this causes chaos for academy systems, especially in the poorer regions of Italy, such as the southern regions of the country. Institutional instability at an academy level like this hugely impacts player development and restricts the talent pool that Italy can work with. These factors have led to a dearth of high-ceiling Italian prospects that can fulfill their potential.
So, is there any hope that Italy will be back soon?
In short, it depends on how, or even if, Italy decides to change its ways. Federation President Gabriele Gravina is gone after a third straight missed tournament under his tenure, and the replacement has to get the necessary reform right.
The stadium situation is unfortunate, as without action from the government, there really isn’t much the clubs can do except to keep trying their luck with their local governments. While parting with the San Siro or Maradona will be sad from a sentimental point of view, it’s crucial if Italian clubs want to continue to challenge for European competitions.
In terms of the player pool, one idea that has been floated in recent weeks is the implementation of a young Italian player quota to ensure that teams will give time to domestic prospects. While this sounds like a good idea in theory, it could also result in teams merely viewing the quota as a minor inconvenience and discarding the players as soon as they age out of the requirement rather than continuing to develop them.
More broadly, though, the league system and structure of Italian football needs institutional reform. Despite the incredible, chaotic drama of the Serie C playoffs, a marathon tournament that pits 28 teams together for a single promotion spot, the lower division structure needs contraction so that teams without the means to go professional don’t have to face the financial pressures that come with that designation.
While these are all possible, Italy is not exactly known for rapid change. It’s unlikely that Italy will miss the World Cup yet again, and Serie A is still ranked second in Europe according to the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA). Disgraceful as the post-2006 performances have been, it’s not like Italy has been completely woeful during the entire period. They came second at the 2012 Euros and even managed to lift the trophy in 2021. The current crop of Italian players is not exactly special, but they should still be beating the likes of Bosnia and North Macedonia, and both of their last two playoff losses have been somewhat fluky in nature.
Still, Italy failed to act in 2018, then failed again in 2022. If they once more continue as though business is usual, it may yet be a long time before they reach the pinnacle again.