This is Legacy, GOAL's feature and podcast series following the road to the 2026 World Cup. Every week, we dive into the stories and the legacies that shaped football’s greatest nations. This time it's a look at Italy’s long and painful fall from grace. From Berlin 2006 to the heartbreaks that followed, this is the story of a four-time world champion lost in footballing exile.
It has been more than 11 years since Diego Godín’s header in Brazil which knocked the Italian national team, coached by Cesare Prandelli, out of the World Cup at the group stages. In that moment, few – perhaps no one – could have imagined that over a decade later it would remain the last image of four-time champions Italy on football’s grandest stage.
In those 11 years, the Azzurri touched what many believed would be the lowest point in their history, failing in 2017 — for the first time in 59 years — to qualify for the World Cup finals after losing a two-legged playoff against Sweden. Remarkably, they managed to sink even lower five years later, when the modest North Macedonia blocked their path to Qatar.
The possibility of missing the 2026 World Cup has once again evoked dark ghosts, with the prospect of a third consecutive absence still very much in play. The paradox is that, between these two darkest moments in Italian football, the team led by Roberto Mancini in 2021 managed to win a European title that had been missing since 1968, snatching it in an epic final decided by penalties against hosts England.
What should have been a new beginning – the start of a reborn, modern Azzurri – was soon downgraded to the most classic of exceptions: The rule-confirming anomaly. Because even after the sudden end of Mancini’s cycle, which came like a bolt from the blue in August 2023, not even one of Italy’s best coaches of the past 20 years, Luciano Spalletti, could lift the national team from its decline.
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Long-standing problems
First came a premature elimination from Euro 2024, knocked out in the round of 16 by Switzerland, leaving a dreadful image of the team’s play. Then, an exit in the quarter-finals of the Nations League, setting the stage for a disastrous start to the next World Cup qualifying campaign – a heavy 3-0 loss in Norway and a narrow win over Moldova – that led to Spalletti’s dismissal and left his successor, Rino Gattuso, with an almost impossible task of qualifying without the need for the play-offs.
Can all of this be explained simply by listing a sequence of bad results? Is that really enough to understand how a nation that has always been a point of reference in world football risks once again missing out on the World Cup stage, postponing its return until 2030 while extending its absence to sixteen years?
No. The reasons for this long crisis, perhaps the deepest Italy has ever faced, even worse than the dark years of 1954, 1962 and 1966, or the non-qualification of 1958, are multiple and profound. They are rooted in structural weaknesses, in the inability to adapt to the changes that have transformed football both tactically and physically.
But even more gravely, Italy has abandoned its own capacity to identify and nurture talent, embracing management models that have clearly failed to deliver results.
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World Cup glory – and warning signs
The extraordinary victory of 2006 in Germany marked the culmination of a generation of extraordinary players – Gigi Buffon, Alessandro Nesta, Fabio Cannavaro, Andrea Pirlo, Francesco Totti, Alessandro Del Piero, to name the most iconic – who had come close to triumph in previous years.
At the same time, that penalty shootout win in Berlin over France also marked the twilight of a great era. After it, not only did the national team’s results decline, but Italian clubs also stopped achieving major international success. Italy, which the following year celebrated glory in both the Champions League and Club World Cup via AC Milan, has not won either trophy since 2010, the year of Inter’s glory.
That same period also brought the first major warning sign: The disastrous 2010 World Cup in South Africa, where the reigning champions, under Marcello Lippi, crashed out early. Since then, Serie A clubs have reached four Champions League finals (two for Juventus, two for Inter), two Europa League finals (one lost by Roma under José Mourinho in 2023 on penalties to Sevilla, and one won spectacularly by Atalanta in 2024), and three consecutive Conference League finals, with Roma’s victory in the first edition in 2022 followed by Fiorentina’s defeats in 2023 and 2024.
Beyond those, there have been very few prestigious results, and there is a sense that the gap to Europe’s elite has not just widened since the golden era of the 1990s and early 2000s, but that the balance of power has actually been reversed.
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Serie A's struggles
A comparison with the Premier League is now almost impossible. England’s top-flight has created an unbridgeable gulf, being the first to grasp the Copernican revolution brought by the influx of billions from television networks and global investors. Clubs were forced to reinvent themselves, no longer as sporting associations, but as real entertainment businesses, capable of attracting capital from every corner of the world. They invested first in modern stadiums, designed to generate new revenue streams (merchandising, restaurants, shops, events), and then in acquiring the best players and managers available.
In Italy, however, the flood of money from television rights – first in lira, then in euros – instead fuelled a vicious cycle, as clubs focused on short-term spending to maintain appearances, rather than building a sustainable future. They ignored the ageing infrastructure, failing to modernise stadiums that were becoming increasingly outdated and unattractive, even for foreign fans who now represent a growing market. And they stopped investing in youth development, the very foundation of Italy’s footballing future – and by extension, the national team’s.
The sudden arrival of vast sums of money in the early 1990s coincided with another historic shift: The Bosman ruling of 1996. It triggered an uncontrolled pursuit of foreign stars – or presumed ones – in the hope of increasing competitiveness. But it deeply changed the fabric of Italian football. Entire academy teams, once known for producing homegrown talent, became filled with young players from every corner of the world, often chosen for economic convenience rather than merit. Youth coaches, under pressure to win and climb the career ladder, abandoned the mission of developing good players (and people) through sport.
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Are the current crop good enough?
This is one of the main reasons for the crisis of the past two decades, and especially of the last 11 years, the time between Italy’s last two World Cup appearances. How is it possible that a country which, in every post-war era, has produced players of the highest calibre now struggles to assemble a truly competitive national team – and, compared to many other nations, has so few internationally sought-after talents?
Only in recent years have Italian leagues showcased players like Marco Verratti, Gianluigi Donnarumma, Riccardo Calafiori, Guglielmo Vicario, Sandro Tonali, Destiny Udogie, and more recently Federico Chiesa, Giacomo Raspadori, Matteo Ruggeri and Giovanni Leoni, who have sought success abroad. Previously, high domestic wages and a certain reluctance among Italian players to challenge themselves overseas kept most at home, apart from a few exceptions, such as Gianluca Vialli, Paolo Di Canio, Gianfranco Zola in England, or Christian Vieri in Spain.
It is no coincidence that Italy’s last major triumph, at Euro 2020, was built around a handful of players who had grown and matured abroad, such as Donnarumma, Jorginho and Verratti, whose experiences outside Serie A allowed them to raise their game.
Today, as Italy aims to return to the World Cup after years of absence, it again places its hopes in players of higher international standing: Donnarumma, now at Manchester City after his European successes with Paris Saint-Germain; Calafiori of Arsenal; Tonali, the midfield anchor at Newcastle; and Moise Kean, who after difficult stints with PSG and Everton, has found a home at Fiorentina.
All good or even very good players, but apart from Donnarumma, few could truly be called champions. Those once abundant in Serie A, and therefore in the Azzurri, are now an endangered species.
