The weight of a nation: Why Italian football entered a tailspin and how Milan can help fix it

The seemingly unthinkable occurred on Tuesday night in Bosnia, as Italy failed to qualify for a World Cup. In actuality, it was predictable, and predictable again.

The famous Azzurri shirt that used to embolden those who wore it now appears to have the impact of weighing 100 kilograms. Those four stars above the crest that once inspired instead seem to be holes that drain the confidence of the souls beneath them.

Italian football seems to be in a state of mourning once again on Wednesday 1 April, the date of writing. The front pages no longer convey shock or anger like they did in 2018 after the first play-off defeat to Sweden, or in 2022 after the catastrophic repeat at the hands of North Macedonia.

What has replaced the extreme end of the emotional spectrum, at least for many, is acceptance and apathy. Both are very problematic responses when it comes to tackling a tailspin, one which the Italian national team has been in for over a decade now.

Yet, with talk of a special government unit being formed to tackle the crisis, it still feels bigger than just a game. There are all kinds of implications from sporting to political, but above all there is a compromised social fabric in an already-volatile country.

A generation that has known nothing but lifting silverware aloft has been followed by one that hasn’t seen their team play in a World Cup. Such distortion is so remarkable that it borders on being impressive.

While fans of other nations and even supporters of Italian clubs that don’t follow the Nazionale continue to mock, the country sits under an umbrella with holes in it, waiting for the latest hurricane to pass.

It is a storm that Milan have played a part in generating, and more on that to come, but before then there is a whole tapestry filled with pockets of incompetence that have woven a picture that would impress even Leonardo Da Vinci with its complexity.

Sowing the seeds of a crisis

Italy are an incredibly proud footballing nation, as they should be with four World Cups and two European Championships to boast. The most recent triumph in the former was back in 2006, and their ‘defence’ in 2010 was so bad that it led to now infamous ‘Baggio report’.

After exiting the South Africa World Cup in the group stages, Roberto Baggio – the legendary former playmaker for Milan, Juventus and others – was appointed the President of the Technical Sector of the FIGC (Italian Football Federation).

Italy were world champions four years prior, and yet Baggio spent one year working with over 50 collaborators to identify the root causes of the decline in Italian football. The result: a 900-page dossier that he put forward to his seniors and those around him.

Without going into too much detail, Baggio urged for football in the country to shift towards youth development, prioritising individual skill over system-based coaching, an investment infrastructure like training grounds, and to learn from Spain, Germany and France who were already well advanced.

Despite all of the detail and the tangible changes that the ‘Divine Ponytail’ put forward, Baggio was given the cold shoulder and the report was largely dismissed by the FIGC. He famously presented the document in a meeting that reportedly lasted only 20 minutes before it was rejected.

The warning signs were already there that Baggio might not be taken seriously in his role, and while the Federation formally ‘approved’ certain aspects of the plan and pledged €10m for its implementation, that money never came. He resigned in January 2013.

How does that relate to the present day? Well, sadly a lot of what Roberto Baggio warned about ended up coming true. Over the next decade and a half, calcio would be left behind, like a forgotten-about antique gathering layer upon layer of dust.

With Italy again not on the world’s biggest stage and with Serie A clubs having had a dreadful time of things in Europe this season, this really feels like groundhog day again, only one that comes around every four years.

There are many different factors to touch upon as to how the decline set in, each of which perhaps deserves its own article to explain. However, it is also possible to summarise the symptoms of the sickness that is plaguing the Azzurri and its footballing ecosystem.

The big one that fans and the media talk about a lot is TV rights, something we have written about at length before. Here, the numbers do the talking perfectly: the Premier League earns approximately £2bn (€2.3bn) annually from international rights sales, while Serie A gets less than one-eighth (€223m per season, roughly).

For the five-year cycle running from 2024 to 2029, Serie A has secured a domestic media rights agreement with its incumbent partners, DAZN and Sky Italia. The deal is valued at a minimum of €4.5bn over the five seasons, which translates to an average of €900m per season.

By comparison, the Premier League secured a landmark four-year domestic rights deal for the 2025-2029 cycle valued at a total of £6.7bn. While there is still a gap on that front, the message is clear: Serie A is struggling massively to sell itself outside of Italy.

One of the factors that makes a league less marketable is the entertainment value, and here something like tactical stagnation comes into effect. It is a much more subjective thing to discuss, yet again we have a Serie A campaign where well over half of the teams are using a three/five-man defence, including five of the top six.

While that doesn’t necessarily have to result in bland football, it is emblematic of the way Calcio still seems to pin a certain pride on ‘chess matches’ and the idea of the plucky underdogs coming to San Siro or Rome and putting 10 behind the ball to try and get a result.

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It ultimately harks back to something Baggio pointed out: Italian football – the birthplace of Catenaccio – remains deeply rooted in a fundamental approach to football that prioritises collective solidity over the impact of mavericks.

Atalanta, in recent years, have been outliers, and Como are making a fist of it this time, but they are anomalies for a reason and have well-backed projects.

Even still, a glance at the Champions League results (Inter out to Bodo/Glimt, Atalanta massacred by Bayern Munich, Juventus eliminated by Galatasaray) shows that Italy’s representatives have been left behind by the modern-thinking, fast-paced European movement.

Staying on the theme of player development, there is a very worrying statistic circulating: only 5% of homegrown players in Serie A stay with their first club, the lowest among Europe’s top five leagues. There are a few possible reasons for this, though all seem to have the same common denominator: short-term thinking.

Compared to a league like the Bundesliga, Serie A clubs generally give nowhere near as much rope to rising talents from their academies that need to learn their trade and make mistakes on the job. Paradoxically, this also happens to players that clubs invest money in (David Odogu, for example).

On that note, Italian teams often prioritise affordable foreign imports over developing their own talent. One of the reasons for this goes by the rather unglamorous title of Decree-Law No. 34/2019, better known as the Growth Decree.

It was hatched in April 2019 and put into effect on May 1. It provides significant tax incentives for workers coming from abroad, which above all for football clubs was a big cut in the gross amount. It meant a player arriving from overseas who was on €5m net would cost the club €6.55m gross instead of the usual near-double (€9.25m) for tax.

The optics of the Growth Decree were always striking, because as of a couple of years ago, it cost the Italian government €674m a year in essentially forfeited taxation, and it was only benefiting around 15,000 people.

As you have also probably inferred, it gave Italian teams an incentive to recruit from abroad as it was often more cost-effective, diluting the homegrown talent pool within the league. This has manifested itself up to the present day, whereby approximately 68.5% of players registered in Serie A are foreigners.

As of 1 January 2024, the Growth Decree is no longer in effect, but only for new signings. Thus, players signed under the benefits of the decree can continue to benefit from it even in scenarios such as contract renewals, with some conditions, such as having to have a permanent tax residence.

Why do Italian clubs need to try and save money by seeking advantages and cutting corners? Firstly, the age of the ‘sugar daddy’ is over. Silvio Berlusconi, Massimo Moratti and the Agnelli family were almost mythical figureheads of the golden era in Calcio, but the time for family ownership has been and gone.

In fact, as of the 2025–26 season, the slow ‘takeover’ of foreign ownership has tipped the scales: over half of the clubs in Serie A are in the hands of non-Italians. It is a seismic shift from 2011, when every top-flight club was Italian-owned.

A by-product of this is that there is no longer that sense of belonging and pride in the Nazionale from the very top of the clubs that are at the very top of Italian football, which many see as a root cause of the collective rot.

Yet, many elite sides around Europe are not domestically owned, and their bubbles are not popping. Rather, they are inflating.

Most of these ownership groups are North American funds, which is important too, as many focus on cost-cutting rather than big investment, and on matters away from the pitch rather than on-field product. Milan are a big example of this, with Elliott Management and then RedBird Capital.

The influx of overseas ownership groups has obviously been partly because they sense a great opportunity too, especially when it comes to ‘real estate’. Most Italian stadiums are council-owned, outdated and lack modern amenities as well as commercial revenue streams.

Football #ClubOwnership. The acquisition of a minority stake – reportedly between 30% and 40% – in #CagliariCalcio by a group of US investors represents yet another North American investment at the top of Italian football. At present, half of the clubs competing in the 2025/2026… pic.twitter.com/5aiMok5djZ

— CIES Sports Intelligence (@CIESsportsintel) November 24, 2025

Since 2007, Italy has had six new or redeveloped stadiums. By comparison, Germany has had 19, England 13 and France 12. Some refurbishments are ongoing, like at Fiorentina’s Artemio Franchi, Bologna’s Renato Dall’Ara and Atalanta’s Atleti Azzurri d’Italia, though a real lack of new state-of-the-art stadia remains.

As a symbol of this, UEFA have warned that only the Allianz Stadium in Turin is currently ready to host Euro 2032. It’s not for the want of trying, though: Milan has had its own battles when it comes to trying to build their own home, which have been well documented.

With every attempt to put down bricks and bring big investment into infrastructure within cities that are footballing hotbeds, there are endless bureaucratic hurdles, political and environmental delays and other red tape that often result in going back to square one after a few years.

Why are new stadiums so important? Well, using the ‘new San Siro’ as a prime example, both Milan and Inter expect to pocket an extra €100m each per year when their home is constructed, going from the current €80m to around €180m or even more in good seasons (long European runs or lots of other events).

Then, there is the reputation of Serie A and the way it is perceived from outside, due to the many soap operas that regularly engulf it. The league has battled everything from stadium closures and betting scandals to incidents of discrimination and fan violence for decades now.

In particular, racist abuse remains a persistent issue in stadiums, with 130 cases of it recorded at matches in a recent season. Milan fans sadly are all too aware of it as Mike Maignan was forced to walk off during the comeback win over Udinese in 2023-24.

External perception is one thing, though there is also a sadism inside Italy that many dare not to address. It feels like – as an Englishman writing this who reads and covers La Gazzetta dello Sport, Corriere dello Sport and others every day – the Italian media cannot wait for the national team to fail. And fail they did.

The path to recovery

So, not too many problems to fix then. All of the aforementioned ultimately culminate in a night like Tuesday, where the national team are ultimately a symbol that fronts a failed footballing state, and now everyone wants heads to roll.

That is as legitimate a reaction as it is emotive. After three consecutive World Cup qualification failures, the response of ‘blow it up and start again’ no longer feels extreme – if anything, it is perhaps the bare minimum to do in the eyes of many.

It is one thing to demand major changes, but it is another thing entirely to put together a list of enactable changes at all levels that can turn this cruise ship back on course. Given the lasagna-like dense layers of problems that must be tackled, reform across the board is needed.

The excellent Felice Raimondo has done a piece which is a ten-point manifesto to rebuild Italian football by using policies that can actually be deployed. It ranges from the allocation of funding to the structure of U22 teams, as well as the adaptation of coaching courses and implementing a philosophy for the national team in terms of playing style, like Spain have in place.

With a topic so contentious as football in Italy, one of the issues is that there are so many differing ideas on what must be changed and to what extent. So, it feels imperative to agree on a selective list of set principles that everyone can buy into, from the FIGC to the clubs at an amateur level, rather than individualistic and tribalistic thinking.

Speaking of which, what does feel certain among all this is that Gabriele Gravina will fall on his sword as the president of the Italian Football Federation. He has become a flag-bearer for what many don’t like: the fact that the game within the country is governed by politicians, lawyers and businessmen rather than those who know it from experience or requisite expertise.

The man at the very top of course needs to be a charismatic presence, but also someone with clear and progressive ideas on reform. They must be the ones – along with those they surround themselves with – to concoct a multi-step plan and get to work putting it in place.

For instance, it seems as though Gennaro Gattuso will resign as the head coach following the disastrous result in Bosnia, so another brief managerial reign comes to an end. The next hire simply must offers something different technically and tactically, even if Gattuso remains dear to all Milanisti.

The squad that they will have at their disposal is one that many argue is lacking in character and quality compared to previous Azzurri teams that they hold dear. Even the 2020 European Championship winning squad could call upon names that held a certain weight.

Giorgio Chiellini, Giovanni Di Lorenzo, Marco Verratti, Jorginho, Lorenzo Insigne, Francesco Acerbi, Ciro Immobile, Leonardo Bonucci and Alessandro Florenzi: they weren’t the best on paper, yet as a cohesive unit they became stronger than the sum of their parts.

Now, there is nothing but a vacuum where once players wearing the blue shirt stood that would put everything on the line just to win one game for their country, and had the shoulders to bear the weight of responsibility.

It feels like the days of Paolo Maldini, Fabio Cannavaro, Gattuso, Andrea Pirlo, Alessandro Del Piero, Francesco Totti and other icons are long gone. The next generation must somehow be forged from this damaged one though, and it feels like the right time to turn to the future.

The proof is there that there is a crop of players waiting in the wings that have not only not been contaminated by the culture of failure yet, but have won things.

• Italy U17 – European Champions (2024): Italy claimed the UEFA U17 European Championship title in 2024, their first ever in this age category under the current format.
  
• Italy U19 – European Champions (2023): The U19 squad won the UEFA European U19 Championship in July 2023, defeating Portugal 1–0 in the final held in Malta.
• Italy U20 – World Cup Runners-up (2023): Italy reached the final of the FIFA U20 World Cup in Argentina, eventually losing 1–0 to Uruguay.
• Italy U17 – World Cup Third Place (2025): The U17 team secured a third-place finish at the 2025 FIFA U17 World Cup.
• Italy U19 – Euro Semi-finalists (2024): After winning in 2023, the U19s followed up with a semi-final appearance in the 2024 edition.

The powers that be must also decide how they wish to enact their new, clear and coherent overarching visions through the rulebook. In essence, will they aim to achieve it through complementary policy or through a mandatory regulatory framework?

To give an example of the former, it might be that they offer incentives to clubs in the Italian football pyramid to develop the homegrown talent of the future, such as funding or even a reverse of the Growth Decree via some form of tax relief.

The latter is what more are calling for, and this would be the more aggressive implementation of things such as an Italian player quota. This could be anything from slots within the squad (which there is already, but some argue the requirements are not enough) all the way up to minimum minutes played for Italians (which feels harder to police).

On the subject of minutes played, the story of Como is being coined by many as a ‘fairytale’, though there is also an argument that they are the perfect case study of the extremes that have resulted from the aforementioned factors.

Cesc Fabregas and the Indonesian owners over the club by the lake have invested heavily (over €100m net spend last summer) and created a strong squad, just two years after earning promotion. They are on course for a surprise Champions League berth and are playing what many consider to be a very modern, attacking, intense style.

Yet, after 29 league games this season, the Lariani had an Italian on the pitch for precisely one minute of football. Those 60 seconds were for 32-year-old defender Edoardo Goldaniga, who featured as a late substitute in the 2-1 win away to Fiorentina on 21 September 2025.

Another team that have been a flagship for Italian football when it comes to playing a high-pressing, high-intensity style are Atalanta. Their path culminated in the 2024 Europa League final win over the juggernaut Bayer Leverkusen side that won the league and cup in Germany that season.

Of the starting XI they used in Dublin, only three players (Davide Zappacosta, Mateo Ruggeri and Gianluca Scamacca) were Italian. Only one of the five substitutes used (Giorgio Scalvini) was Italian. These teams are more European in style because they are more global in substance.

For all the good intentions of an Italy-first policy, there is also the grave risk of going too far the other way, though some would contest what can be more ‘grave’ than not winning a World Cup knockout game for 20 years.

If the measures are too draconian and actually restrict/punish clubs rather than encourage them to buy into the ‘Azzurri masterplan’, then it could set the league back by quite a distance. It must create a virtuous cycle, not plunge the pyramid into being an insular wasteland.

An example from the flip side: for all its faults, the Growth Decree has been accredited with helping bring an influx of talent into the league that was not previously affordable. Teams thus improve, the product gets better, clubs go further in Europe (Inter two UCL finals, Atalanta and Roma win silverware), the league becomes more marketable and brings in more money to reinvest.

Creating a similar self-feeding ecosystem that balances quality with a made-in-Italy vision will be difficult. There is always the danger too that a new leadership does not necessarily bring new ideas, and that they repeat the same mistakes, or that they get it all massively wrong.

One thing that could help is if the European landscape were to drastically change, too, forcing all leagues and clubs to adapt. Rules such as Financial Fair Play have helped and hindered in this sense, but there are those who speak of an imminent ‘big bang’ in world football.

When and if the dust settles, Serie A might have an opportunity to pick up some pieces and make up some ground quicker than they might do otherwise.

Milan’s role and responsibilities

How does the Italian football ‘crisis’ impact Milan? After all, there were zero Rossoneri players called up to the national team in the recent break. Yet, being exempt does not equate to not being complicit in some of the issues discussed.

Gianni Rivera was once a golden boy of Italian football, to the extent that it became his nickname. Prior to the play-off against Bosnia, he was highly critical of his beloved Milan, which has moved away from its previous values.

“Well, there are also very few Italians at Milan, like Bartesaghi and Gabbia, who isn’t playing now. Even the president [owner, Cardinale] is a foreigner, and the club no longer believes in the policies that created and nurtured the Baresi and Maldinis.

“Champions aren’t born, and it’s hard to achieve great results without them. In Serie A, the few good players are practically all foreigners. Inter aside, I think. Before, the best were almost all Italian and deservedly reached the national team.

“Now, our football no longer creates champions. Whose fault? Especially the clubs, who, instead of nurturing young players and bringing them to the highest levels, have left everything in the hands of agents. I made my national team debut at 18, there were seven of us at Milan.”

Three weeks ago, legendary coach Fabio Capello weighed in on the debate, as another prominent figure who experienced winning with an Azzurri core wearing the Rossoneri shirt.

“When I was a coach, we had the best in the world in Italy. Today, we have Modric, Rabiot and a few others. And we sell the good ones, whereas once upon a time, at least until 2010, they all came here because we were a benchmark. Without that example, our players can’t improve. But that’s not the only problem.

“The absolute shortage of Italian players in Serie A. Foreigners occupy those spots, even if they’re modest. Do we really think they’re all superior to ours? Of course, if we were to fail at the third World Cup, I’d have no doubts: it means all our youth football policies have been flawed.”

Ever since the fund-led era began, there has definitely been an emphasis placed – deliberate or circumstantial – on signing players from outside Serie A. To put things in perspective, Milan have signed nine Italian players this decade: Sandro Tonali, Alessandro Florenzi, Pietro Pellegri, Antonio Mirante, Marco Sportiello, Filippo Terracciano, Riccardo Sottil, Samuele Ricci and Pietro Terracciano.

Of that list, only one went on to form a core part of the team before being sold on at the first opportunity for big money (Tonali). Florenzi offered useful leadership and we’ll see what Ricci can become, but the rest are flops and back-up goalkeepers.

One of the reasons for this is that it is generally regarded as being very hard to do business with domestic rivals. Stubborn owners do not want to strengthen their competitors and would actually rather see their gems go abroad. Out of sight, out of mind – it feels like a bit of a theme of this piece.

Milan have been linked with Riccardo Calafiori, Diego Coppola, Giovanni Leoni and Mateo Retegui in the past 18 months. All of their clubs chose to sell them abroad, to the Premier League or to Saudi Arabia. This is because the money on offer was greater, so you cannot really blame them, yet it shows why the talent drain is happening.

The result is the paradox whereby Milan can have three or four players in the France squad – one of the best national teams in the world – and not a single Italian call-up. Matteo Gabbia, Samuele Ricci and Davide Bartesaghi offer immediate hope however, the ‘new era’ takes shape, but it must go beyond that.

Gabbia may not even be a regular starter when he returns, Ricci signed in the summer and is the fifth-choice midfielder, while Bartesaghi has never been called up to the senior national team and has a lot of competition.

If anything goes wrong, the feeling is that Bartesaghi will be next, then what about the future? Francesco Camarda is still far from that level, but he has plenty of time, having just turned 18. Christian Comotto is doing very well in Serie B and could be part of Milan’s squad for next season.

Further down the line, the likes of Lorenzo Torriani, Diego Sia, Emanuele Sala and Alphadjo Cissé are ones to watch more in hope rather than expectation. Even in Milan’s youth sector though, the influx of prospects from abroad is hard to ignore.

Then there is the U23 team project Milan Futuro, which was meant to be a mechanism through which to accelerate the development of talent. They were relegated in their first season, and though style and individual growth seems to now be the priority in Serie D, the Futuro so far has given off an impression of being under-prepared.

The panic signing of ‘veteran’ players for Massimo Oddo’s side to help the younger players compete against adult side is a perfect representation of everything written about so far for many reasons. One solution suggests is to ensure B-Teams (Milan Future, Juve Next Gen, Inter U23 and Atalanta U23) only use Italian players. As restrictive as it sounds, it would strip things back to one of the core purposes.

Having Massimiliano Allegri as a coach is as good a guarantee as any that the team will be built around the core principle of having players with experience of the rigours of Serie A, or at least players suited to it.

In the summer window, we could therefore see a transfer strategy based around boosting the Italian influence. Targets like Federico Gatti, Andrea Cambiaso and Marco Palestra have been mentioned for the defence, as well as Moise Kean and Retegui for the attack. Will any arrive? We’ll have to wait and see.

There could even be some Milan influence at the top, too. There have been suggestions that Adriano Galliani may take up a leading role of sorts (though concerns about him falling into the same line of antiquated thinking are valid) as well as even Paolo Maldini. Maybe the Minister for Sport, Andrea Abodi, should ring Baggio to see if he has any extra copies of his dossier.

For now, the near-nuclear fallout surrounding the state of football will rage on. Heads will roll and the strongest of changes will be promised, as is always the way with under-performing teams and federations. That isn’t the important part: what is absolutely vital is that the right steps follow.

Otherwise, Calcio will remain stuck in its nostalgia-fuelled tailspin towards becoming a former footballing powerhouse, meaning the league and the teams within it will suffer further.

Galileo Galilei, a great scientific and philosophical mind of the Renaissance, brought a quote that still stands 400 years on: “Dietro ogni problema c’è un’opportunità. (Behind any problem, there is an opportunity).” Italian football is duty-bound to see it that way.