Cosa e successo al calcio Italiano?
In amongst the wailing and gnashing of teeth at the Champions League night of the long knives which saw four English unceremoniously dumped out of the competition, another more pertinent question was being asked.
What has happened to Italian football.
Atalanta’s 10-2 aggregate drubbing at the hands of Bayern Munich signalled the end of Italy’s interest in this year’s Champions League at the last-16 stage. It is the first time since 1988 that Italy has not been represented in the last eight of Europe’s prime club competition.
No Italian club has won the Champions League since 2010 when Jose Mourinho’s Inter Milan lifted the trophy and as things stand, it doesn’t look as though Serie A clubs will be threatening to win it soon.
And the national team look in an even worse state, needing to battle through play-offs against Northern Ireland and then the winners of Wales-Bosnia Herzegovina to avoid missing the finals for a third successive time, something that would have been unthinkable as they lifted the trophy for a fourth time in 2006, second only in number alongside West Germany/Germany and behind Brazil.
To have a World Cup without Italy is like having a ragu sauce without pasta, if for the only reason that they have the best, soul-stirring national anthem.
Perhaps FSOM is a bit of a softie, always having a moist spot for what seemed a romantic side to Italian football.
FSOM’s love affair of Italian football
Back in the 1960s and 70s, the lack of saturation coverage that football is afforded now, gave an air of mystery, thanks to grainy, flickering black and white images on that box in the corner of the living room, to European football in general and Italian football in general.
In in the early 60s Italy produced three successive European Cup winners as AC Milan and Inter (twice) ended Real Madrid’s near monopoly of the trophy.
FSOM didn’t have the football nous to know that the catenaccio system devised by Inter’s coach Helennio Herrero, was strangling the life out of the game. FSOM only knew that players with names like Fachetti, Mazzola, Rivera and Riva sounded good and on the brief occasions they popped on Sportsnight with Coleman on Wednesdays, they looked good too.
From the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s Serie A dominated the European scene, with four Champions League wins in the 1990s – four for AC Milan and one for Juventus, and the all-Italian final between AC Milan and Juve in 2003 underlined the point that Italian football was the place to be.
And why wouldn’t it with Italian clubs, backed and bankrolled by millionaires, possessing the financial clout to attract the best players in the world.
Italian football’s historical heyday
As far back as 1966, Inter got West Germany’s Franz Beckenbauer and Portugal’s Eusebio – two of the world’s biggest stars – to put their John Hancocks on contracts only for the Italian federation to react to Italy’s embarrassing exit of the 1966 World Cup to North Korea by banning the signing of foreign players.
This ban lasted until it was lifted in 1980, coincidentally the last time the scudetto was won – by Inter – with a team composed exclusively of Italian players.
Released from this ban, Italian clubs acted like kids in a sweet shop having been given a tenner by nan as the world’s best players were mopped up by Italian clubs.
English clubs could only watch as their best players hopped on Alitalia flights; Ray Wilkins and Luther Blissett to Milan, Graeme Souness and David Platt to Sampdoria, Paul Rideout to Bari, Liam Brady to Juve, Des Walker and Trevor Francis to Samp while latterly, Italian football still carried enough clout to draw David Beckham to AC Milan.
AC Milan went Dutch in the 90s, with their great side under Arrigo Sacchi signing Ruud Gullit, Frank Rijkaard and Marco van Basten, while Inter peeped just across the Alps to sign the likes of Karl-Heinz Rummenigge, Andreas Brehme and Lothar Matthaus from the Bundesliga.
Money, money, money…
All this, of course, was made possible by hugely wealthy owners putting their wallets where their mouth was.
Inter owner Massimo Moratti invested up to €1.5billion of his own money, to bring in Brazil’s Ronaldo and Christian Vieri for a then world-record fee.
Silvio Berlusconi controlled AC Milan for 31 years and took time away from his bunga-bunga parties to divest some of his vast media fortune into the club, while Juve were bankrolled by successive generations of the Agnelli family, who owned FIAT.
Workers pumping out Pandas and Cinquecentos on the Fiat production lines saw their productivity rewarded as the company opened its wallet to sign, at various times, Michel Platini, Zinedine Zidane, Zbigniew Boniek and Didier Deschamps.
But while Italian clubs splashed the cash, the foreign signings added decoration to squads that contained brilliant domestic players.
Juve’s domestic stars included Roberto Baggio, Paolo Rossi, Roberto Bettega, Gaetano Scirea and Alessandro Del Piero.
AC Milan’s all-conquering team might well have contained Dutch masters, but they added lustre and shine to a domestic backbone of players like Franco Baresi, ‘Billy’ Costacurta, Roberto Donadoni, current national team boss Gennaro Gatusso and that prince among defenders, Paolo Maldini, a defender so good he never got his shorts dirty; his reading of the game was so good he rarely had to make last-ditch tackles.
Changing of the guard within European football
But somewhere along the line, things started to unravel. The megabucks owners stopped putting their money in Serie A could not compete with the Premier League and the top foreign talent drained from Italy at the same time as domestic talent dried up.
No longer could Italy look to the calibre of brilliant individuals who had won them World Cups in 1982 and 2006; midfield maestros such as Giancarlo Antognoni and Andrea Pirlo, and razor-sharp strikers like Rossi.
Despite the apparent dearth of talent, Italy still managed to win the 2020 European Championship, but their clubs lacked the clout to trouble the scorers in the Champions League.
The top four revenue generating clubs in Europe in 2025 were Real Madrid, Barcelona, Bayern Munich and Paris Saint-Germain. Thee highest-ranked Italian club was Inter in 11th spot, with Milan 15th and Juve 16th.
That ties in with Deloitte’s ranking of European football which puts the Premier League way out in front with €368m per club in 2024, followed by LaLiga, Germany’s Bundesliga with Italy in fourth. The gap between the Premier League and Serie A is now so vast, it may never be closed.
Altering ownership landscapes
An indication of how Italian football is financially hamstrung is the fact that both Inter and AC Milan are now owned by capital management companies.
American company Oaktree Capital management, whose other brands include Quiksilver and Billabong surfing clothing, have owned Inter since 2024. Having stood as guarantors for a loan for the previous owner, the Suning Commerce Corporation, headed by a Chinese group, Oaktree took over when Suning defaulted on a payment.
It was similar tale at AC Milan, where American equity fund Elliott Asset Management took the reins after previous owner Li YongHong defaulted on a loan payment to Elliott.
It’s a far cry from the time when Berlusconi’s bunce kept the Rossoneri top of the European pile.
Italian football needs to sort itself out. Domestically first and wider glories will follow, but that is not a simple task.
Italy is due to host the Euro 2032 with Turkey but the major stadia – Rome’s Stadio Olimpico, the San Siro in Milan, are either crumbling like a week-old cannoli or redevelopment plans tied up in endless Italian red tape.
Youth development of players also appears to be an issue with clubs reluctant to trust in young talent and short-cutting by using foreign players to seek success. Italy ranked an astonishing 18th in Europe’s top leagues last season for the total league minutes played by under-21 players.
Reasons to be hopeful
But there may be light on the horizon.
Italy were champions at the Under-17 and U19 Euros and finished runners-up at the U20s World Cup so perhaps the talent is there.
It might require a degree of bravura to bring that talent to the fore and get Italy back to the world’s top table.
