Fabio Cannavaro planted his lips on the top of the World Cup trophy. A single kiss to crown Italy’s 2006 victory, before hoisting it into the Berlin night sky to celebrate his nation’s fourth triumph at the tournament.
The Azzurri may only have squeezed past France – Zinedine Zidane’s headbutt and all – on penalties to win the final, but the mettle they’d shown continued a proud legacy as one of the World Cup’s most successful countries.
Only Brazil had won more and having reached at least the semi-finals on eight of the 18 competitions played to that point, Italy would surely add to their total.
So how, almost two decades on, have Italy gone from perennial challengers to facing the prospect of missing out on qualification for a third successive World Cup?
Back-to-back play-off defeats to miss out on the 2018 and 2022 tournaments brought unthinkable embarrassment. Now it would take results and a huge goal swing to go in Italy’s favour for Norway not to pip them to automatic qualification in 2026 and stumbling towards play-off uncertainty again.
Embed from Getty ImagesShould the worst happen and Italy contrive to lose another play-off, focus will be on short-term failings. Costly defeats, a shallow pool of players, managerial failings.
Yet the seed of Italy’s recent struggles may have been planted much earlier, long before any of the players or manager Gennaro Gattuso were even born. In fact, their weaknesses now can be traced back to the very success that positioned them as one of the world’s elite in the first place.
What once made Italy feared has now made them fragile.
Italian football became famous for its distinctive catenaccio style as its international and club sides stifled opposition attacks and stung them with clinical precision for decades. It was a unique tactical approach that had been cultivated within La Botte’s borders – combining traditional Italian traits of discipline and cunning with coaching genius.
Catenaccio spawned during a time when strong national football identities were cropping up everywhere. As nomadic coaches shared learnings picked up on their travels and applied them elsewhere, nationalism saw that knowledge wrangled into tropes that represented the cultures they grew in.
British teams primarily valued hard work and motivation; Brazilians rewarded flair; and the Central European nations typically viewed fast pass-and-move tactics as the way to go. Victory only served as affirmation to double down.
Italy’s own visionary was Vittorio Pozzo, the only manager to win the World Cup twice. He masterminded glory at the 1934 and 1938 tournaments – albeit to the backdrop of fascist rule at the time – and was credited with creating the Metodo formation, the earliest form of 4-3-3 we recognise today.
While Pozzo didn’t directly lead to catenaccio, his blueprint of organisation and discipline laid the foundation for the tactic to take hold in Italy, creating a culture that trusted structure over spontaneity.
That intelligence-over-imagination mindset provided fertile ground for the likes of Nereo Rocco and Helenio Herrera to establish more conservative beliefs into the national game.
By the time Arrigo Sacchi rallied against catenaccio with his all-conquering Milan side of the late-80s and early-90s, catenaccio was so ingrained in the national identity that his success was branded ‘un-Italian’ in some quarters. As a result, his impact and style of play inspired more coaches outside of his homeland than within it.
Embed from Getty ImagesItaly’s continued success seemed to justify this reluctance, until football became more globalised and those traditional national philosophies were challenged and forced to evolve. It’s this same uneasiness with new tactical approaches that have left Italy treading water as others passed them.
While the likes of Germany and Spain were among the first major nations to completely overhaul their identities to keep up with the modern game and won World Cups on the back of it, Italy’s adaptation has been slower.
Pockets of success have been achieved both internationally and domestically – most notably Italy’s Euro 2020 win – but there’s a feeling Italian football has been on the decline for some time.
It’s unfair to tar every Italian coach or club with the same brush, but generally there was an impression that modern ideas weren’t as well received.
It’s epitomised by Giorgio Chiellini’s comments about Guardiolismo in 2017 in which he lamented the impact Pep Guardiola’s vision of football has “ruined a generation of Italian defenders” by encouraging them to be good on the ball at the expense of “knowing how to mark”.
That disjointed evolution makes for a difficult breeding ground. Italy’s famed national coaching centre, Coverciano, is producing modern coaches with new ideas, but they’re struggling to get a foothold at Serie A’s biggest clubs. Instead, the same managers are hired and rehired – multiple times in some instances – as a conservative, risk-averse culture stifles opportunities for fresh faces.
Some of the brightest Italians that do emerge, such as Roberto De Zerbi and Francesco Farioli, go abroad to work. There are green shoots in the shape of Thiago Motta and Raffaele Palladino, who have done well domestically, but they are exceptions.
This leaves the national team picking from a similar pool, with a mixture of former players and elder statesmen taking the job. It’s at odds with the trends being seen by many other leading nations, with international specialists such as Luis de la Fuente and Lionel Scaloni guiding national teams in the modern era – figureheads of a uniform national game.
It’s why, even if Italy do break their play-off hoodoo, and qualify for next summer’s World Cup, the change they need feels more cultural than individual. Without it, those memories of Cannavaro lifting the World Cup trophy in 2006 will feel further and further away.
