Mamma mia, the ignominy!
For the third time in a row, Italy, a country mad for calcio — Italian for soccer, football or whatever you call it — is not competing in the World Cup. It’s the only one of soccer’s traditional powers that failed to qualify for the tournament, which takes place every four years.
For a once-mighty soccer nation that has won four World Cups, most recently in 2006, this failure represents more than a loss of athletic pride. As Italy struggles with a rapidly declining and aging population, stagnant economic growth and a brain drain of young talent, some commentators see the lapse as a metaphor for a broader national malaise. “It’s the spirit of a country, ours, which does not always live up to its own potential,” the journalist Aldo Cazzullo wrote in an opinion piece in Corriere della Sera, one of Italy’s main newspapers. “And not only in soccer.”
Even if Italians have other successful athletes to applaud, including the Grand Slam tennis champion Jannik Sinner, nothing rallies Italy’s national esteem — or bolsters its collective identity — quite like soccer.
“It’s like the only moment all Italians are Italians,” said Daniele Gioannini, 40, who was at the Lochness, a sports bar in Rome. Most of the time, “we’re a country of cities, a country of adversaries among cities,” Mr. Gioannini said, sitting near screens showing a game played by Bosnia and Herzegovina, the team that blocked Italy’s qualification. “We only feel Italian when Italy is playing in the World Cup,” he added.
To foreigners, Italy is still a bright star on the international stage. It is one of the world’s most popular tourist destinations and is the source of a beloved cuisine, recognized last year by UNESCO as an “intangible cultural heritage.”
But for Italians, who lament the strain of mass tourism and take their pasta for granted, these cultural calling cards don’t build national unity.
“Many people worldwide are in love with our country and are in love with all our food and everything,” said Pierluca Birindelli, a sociologist at the Florence campus of Gonzaga University. “But believe me, it’s hard to translate in terms of collective pride in something like ‘we Italians, we stand for spaghetti.’”
Naturally, the three-time failure to qualify for soccer’s most important global event — “The Third Apocalypse,” as La Gazzetta dello Sport, Italy’s leading sports paper, put it — has led some heads to roll. The president of the Italian soccer federation resigned in early April, along with the national team’s head coach. The new president, appointed last week, vowed to “make Italy great” again.
Dissecting the underperformance, sports analysts said the federation had long failed to invest in young talent. Italy’s minister for youth and sport, Andrea Abodi, acknowledged in an interview that Italian soccer talent has been “neglected, it’s stifled, it’s ignored.”
That sense of neglect is not limited to soccer, said Mariangela Zappia, Italy’s former ambassador to the United States and the president of the Italian Institute for International Political Studies, a research group in Milan. Many Italians don’t believe their academic or employment prospects are as strong at home, she said, and so they leave to study and work abroad.
Some Italians said they hoped the political fretting about soccer would prompt leaders to pay attention to the underlying social and economic problems in the country.
“The country won’t fail if Italy doesn’t go to the World Cup,” said Marco Achtner, 38, a singer and songwriter in Rome who composed “Out of the World Cup,” a song reminiscing about the collective passion of watching an Italian team compete in the global tournament.
“But if the country doesn’t invest in health care, young people, education, things like that, the country fails,” he said.
Some analysts have said that Italy’s national team has flailed in part because, like the Italian Parliament and its news media, it does not represent the diversity of the country’s modern population.
Close to 12 percent of Italy’s population is either foreign-born or born in the country to immigrants, yet only two non-white players were among the roughly 50 called up to Italy’s squads during the World Cup qualifying campaign. (Several others were called up for friendlies by the interim management after Italy failed to make the tournament.) France, Germany and England, by contrast, had much more ethnically mixed teams.
Italy’s national soccer team “is not reflecting national identity,” said Leila Simona Talani, a political scientist at King’s College London.
Part of the problem is that it is difficult for the children of immigrants, even if they are born in Italy, to gain Italian citizenship. That means talented soccer players from immigrant backgrounds often can’t play for the national team — unlike in countries like England, which has a policy of birthright citizenship.
But Mr. Abodi, the sports minister who represents a far-right government, said that the need to address Italy’s soccer weakness did not justify changing its immigration policies. “I’m worried that, in the rush to gain a competitive edge, we risk naturalizing players just because they’re assets, because they can contribute to that competitive edge,” he said.
Italy’s absence from the World Cup has also added to concerns about the health of the Italian economy.
According to Michele Costabile, an expert on market behavior at Luiss Guido Carli University in Rome, Italy’s failure to qualify for the World Cup may lose the country up to 650 million euros over the course of the tournament, or roughly $740 million. That is because companies pay less to advertise during televised games that don’t feature the Italian team, and consumers are less likely to spend so much on soccer merchandise or at bars and restaurants.
Having an Italian team vying for the World Cup “would have been an opportunity to have a series of nights with lots of work,” said Arianna Carletti, 46, owner of the Lochness, the sports bar in Rome. “Obviously I’m upset.”
For her patrons, the bigger loss was spiritual. Maria Adele Giommarini, 73, said that if she were to relive one day in her life, it would be the day Italy won the World Cup in 1982.
“Not so much for the soccer,” she said. “Just the joy.”
Josephine de La Bruyère contributed reporting.
