Italy will not be at the 2026 World Cup, and that fact alone already places the blow on an exceptional scale. The defeat to Bosnia and Herzegovina in the playoff, settled by a penalty shootout, leaves the ‘Azzurra’ out of the World Cup for a third straight edition, an anomaly that is hard to reconcile with a national team that has won four world titles and built one of the most influential legacies in European football.

The elimination has brought to the surface a crisis that had been building for much longer. What is now being debated in Italy is not only who should take immediate responsibility, but whether Italian football can truly stop and undertake deep reform, or whether it will once again fall back on short-term fixes, with the next European Championship less than two years away. Alessio Lisci, now head coach of Osasuna after developing and growing as a coach in Spain, summed it up like this: “If a national team and a country like Italy, historically one of the best national teams in the world — not necessarily the best, but certainly one of the greatest in terms of history — misses three straight World Cups, then the problem is big, very big. You need to stop and change a lot of things.” The question is whether Italy will know how to do that and, above all, whether it will have the patience to carry out such a necessary change.

Resignations, political pressure and a crisis that can no longer be disguised

The first impact of the failure has been institutional. Gabriele Gravina resigned as president of the Italian Football Federation -FIGC-, Gianluigi Buffon stepped down from his role as head of delegation, and Gennaro Gattuso also resigned as national team coach. That chain of departures has placed the federation before an immediate change in leadership, with elections scheduled for June 22, and has confirmed that this time the shock has not been treated as just another sporting disappointment. For now, Italy has reacted in the way it probably had to.

The diagnosis, in any case, goes beyond the resignations. Andrea Abodi, the Sports Minister, called for reconstruction from the top of the FIGC, while Aleksander Ceferin increased the pressure by warning that Italy could even lose Euro 2032 if it does not solve its infrastructure problems in time. In that context, Lisci’s words about the timescale of real reconstruction carry even more weight: “To change things again, you need time and patience. What is the problem? That when the European Championship comes, Italy will want to go there and win it with a team that has spent years failing to qualify for the World Cup. (…) when the situation is this serious…” That is where one of the central contradictions of Italian football appears: it needs deep reform, but it still lives under the constant demand to start winning again immediately.

A powerful league, but an increasingly less Italian one

A major part of the debate points to the very structure of Serie A. Italy still has one of Europe’s major leagues, with historically important clubs, competitive strength and strong international appeal, but that strength does not necessarily translate into a broad base of Italian players who can make the difference for the national team. Lisci makes the point directly: “It is obvious when you look at the number of foreign players in Italy. The Italian league has a high level, but it is the league with the most foreigners among the top five leagues.”

That trend is not the result of a particularly strict overall limit, but rather the opposite. In Serie A, there is no official cap on the total number of foreign players in a squad. The rule requires that, within the main list of 25 players, at least four must be “club-trained” and four must be “trained in Italy,” while under-23 players can compete outside that list. The more specific limit affects players from outside the EU/EEA arriving from abroad: in general, clubs can register up to two per season, with certain exceptions, and up to three if they had none under contract by June 30. But neither “club-trained” nor “trained in Italy” necessarily means Italian, and that distinction helps explain why several of the country’s biggest clubs remain so internationalised. In the public squad picture for 2025/26, Milan has 18 foreign players out of 23, Inter 16 out of 24, Juventus 18 out of 25, Napoli 17 out of 26, Lazio 18 out of 29 and Roma 19 out of 27. But it is not only the clubs that usually compete at the top of the table that carry so many foreign players. The same is true of this season’s surprise package, Cesc Fàbregas’ Como, with 21 foreigners in the current squad, Udinese with 25 out of 30, Genoa with 18 out of 26, Torino with 24 out of 30, and even some relative “exceptions,” if they can be called that, such as Atalanta with 14 out of 24 and Bologna with 17 out of 27.

The Italian academy system, between protecting local talent and a model that is hard to simplify

Lisci extends that view to youth development: “Then the academies are full of foreign players, especially at the top clubs, and that is another problem. There are no B teams, which is another problem.” In youth football, however, the situation is less straightforward to summarise than it is for the first team. There is no single, clean rule of the kind “maximum X foreign players.” Instead, there is a more fragmented framework linked to the registration of “giovani stranieri,” federation rules and FIFA regulations on the protection of minors. The control mechanism, then, is not built around a universal cap so much as around registration, eligibility and the exceptions that apply to underage players.

In Primavera 1, there have been list-composition rules aimed at strengthening the weight of local talent, although without a public text as clear as the one in Serie A that would allow it to be summarised with the same legal precision. Even so, the picture of youth squads does show a difference compared with first teams. In the current public data, Inter Primavera has 10 foreign players out of 28, Milan Primavera 4 out of 33, Roma Primavera 4 out of 28, Lazio U20 6 out of 28, Napoli Primavera around 5 out of 39 in one of the public sources consulted, and Juventus Primavera a much higher proportion, around 13 out of 29. The overall reading is that internationalisation exists in youth football too, but the jump becomes much sharper once players reach the professional first-team level. It is clear that if those Italian players do not then find room in the senior side, the academy system is not serving the purpose it needs to.

Italy no longer produces the same kind of star

Italy’s crisis can also be seen in the type of player now reaching the senior national team. For years, Italy sustained its competitive weight through generations full of talent, authority and personality across almost every line, with names such as Francesco Totti, Andrea Pirlo, Paolo Maldini and Alessandro Del Piero. Today, the only name that comes close to that international standing, in status and performance, is Gianluigi Donnarumma. Italy still has an elite goalkeeper, probably one of the best in the world, but it no longer finds, elsewhere on the pitch, a truly decisive figure, a player capable of changing stuck games through individual quality.

Lisci links that absence to tactical and developmental issues: “There are no B teams, which is another problem. Another is the playing system, because in Italy so many clubs play with a 3-5-2, and that has led to there being no wingers in Italy, no player capable of beating his man one against one.” He then grounds that idea with a very specific comparison: “I’ll give you the example of Spain’s last final. They were behind, the game was a bit stuck, Lamine Yamal moves inside and scores a top-corner goal. In Italy, there is no player capable of doing that when a match gets stuck, and all of these things keep adding up.” That is where much of the Italian problem comes into focus: it is not only about results. It is also about missing profiles, missing tools and a development ecosystem that no longer produces the kind of footballers able to carry a historic national team in major tournaments.