‘An unacceptable disgrace’: anger and sadness as Italy miss out on World Cup again
Italian fans and politicians reacted with a mixture of fury and dismay after Italy’s playoff defeat to Bosnia-Herzegovina on Tuesday
“Let’s just leave it be,” said Valentino del Duca. The restaurant worker from Rome was in no mood to talk about football after the Italian national team delivered another agonising blow, missing out on qualification for the World Cup finals for the third time in a row.
Corriere della Sera called the elimination, which came after Italy suffered a 4-1 penalty shootout defeat to Bosnia in a playoff, the “World Cup curse” while Gazzetta dello Sport marked it the “Third apocalypse”.
“I’ll give you another headline,” said Del Duca after eventually relenting to questions. “We are a population of failures,” he added. “End of story.”
Such despair reverberated across the Italian capital on Wednesday. “It’s tragic,” said Gabriele Alfano, who watched the match with friends. “Our hopes were high after they beat Northern Ireland last week, but something is clearly wrong.”
Alfano believes the problem is less about “a curse” and more about Italian football’s failure to produce young talent. “I’ve also noticed fewer children playing football on the streets – when I was growing up, there were always children kicking a ball around,” he said. “Are we now more into tennis?” he pondered, referring to the world No 2 Jannik Sinner, who notched up another triumph at the Miami Masters on Sunday.
The defeat sparked a furious response from Italian politicians too as pressure mounts on the Italian football federation president, Gabriele Gravina, to resign.
“It is an unacceptable disgrace. Italian football needs a complete overhaul, starting with the resignation of Gabriele Gravina,” the League party, a member of Giorgia Meloni’s ruling coalition, said on social media.
Matteo Renzi, the former prime minister, said: “Unfortunately the third consecutive elimination from the World Cup is not an April fool’s joke. It’s a sign that Italian football has failed. Football isn’t just entertainment in our country; it’s part of our culture and national identity.”
Gustavo Sosa is originally from Argentina, another football-mad nation, but has lived in Rome for 20 years.
“After they went down to 10 players in the match against Bosnia they seemed to lose their rigour,” he said. “It was as if the fear set in – they knew the stakes were high.”
The feeling of a despondency is a far cry from the celebrations that swept across Italy in July 2021 when the national side beat England in the Euro 2020 final. The victory was seen as a sign of a reversal in fortunes after the team missed out on the 2018 World Cup only for hopes to again be crushed nine months later when it failed to qualify for the 2022 tournament.
“They seemed to go downhill after winning the Euros,” said Sosa. “But a similar thing is happening in Argentina – football players don’t have the same grit and passion as they did in the past. They seem to have lost the hunger it.”
Italy’s sports minister, Andrea Abodi, said football in the country must now be “rebuilt”, adding that it made him sad to think there’s “an entire generation of children and young people who haven’t yet experienced the thrill of watching the national team play in a World Cup”.
But perhaps it’s time to pay more attention to other sports disciplines, said Lucia Severi, who works for a food company in Rome. “We have great tennis players, and great athletes,” she said. “Maybe we should finally shed some light on other sports and not give so much focus to football.”