Italy out of the Under 21 European Championship is not a failure. Don’t try to figure out why yes

The Italy of football will not participate in the Paris 2024 Olympics. It is not new, it has been like this since 2012. And in 2008 we went out in the quarter-finals against Belgium, a strong team at the time, but not very strong, but which in itself he already had something of the national team which he then did well, without winning anything, in the following years. Few of that team still play, almost none at great levels: Emiliano Viviano, Luca Cigarini, Giuseppe Rossi, Daniele Dessena, Andrea Coda, Lorenzo De Silvestri, Andrea Consigli, Antonio Candreva, Andrea Russotto. After them, Italy disappeared at the Olympics, because the Under 21 national team disappeared, at least in those editions of the category European Championships that put qualification for the Olympic Games up for grabs.

There has been a lot of controversy in recent years, and not only in Italy, about the criteria used for access to the Olympics. Some say they are wrong, some revisable, some correct. There is no full agreement, usually the opponents are always those who do not see their own qualified representative. In Italy there is a lot of opposition, but these are the rules for access, so that’s it.

The last failed qualification came on Wednesday evening. The Under 21 national team lost to Norway 0-1 and after days in which there was a lot of talk about the possible “cookie” between France and Switzerland that would have eliminated us (France won 4-1), the Azzurrini have coddled themselves. Switzerland went through because they scored one more goal. Elimination in the first round: the fifth in twenty years, in between two semi-finals, a fourth and a failure to qualify for the finals.

The Under 21 selection led on the bench by Paolo Nicolato and on the pitch by Sandro Tonali failed to achieve the minimum objective and therefore everything seems to be thrown away; and so everything looks like a catastrophe, because the expectations were there, the young players were good, coach Roberto Mancini had left coach Nicolato the best of the squad. Italy played reasonably well, certainly nothing exceptional, but not bad either. At least until the last few minutes. He created good deeds, risked scoring on occasion. He could have gone ahead, he could then equalize the goal, a little lucky from Erik Botheim. He didn’t. It often ends up like this: if you don’t score, maybe you don’t lose, you certainly don’t win. Italy Under 21 has scored four times in this European Championship: with Pietro Pellegri, against France, with Lorenzo Pirola, Wilfried Gnonto and Fabiano Parisi against Switzerland. Two, Pellegri and Gnonto, are the forwards, the others the defenders even if Parisi played winger in a five-man midfield and when this is the case it is always difficult to understand whether it is the midfield that is five-man or the defence, a matter of interpretation.

Italy is out for many reasons, one of which is because those who should score goals don’t. He doesn’t do them in the Under 21s and he doesn’t do them in Mancini’s national team, which remained out of the last World Cup and it’s not like he does amazing things even in the qualifiers for the next European Championship. He hasn’t done that in a while. In a football where more goals are scored than in recent years, Italy has a top scorer in the Azzurro called Gigi Riva. Gigi Riva was a great striker, not just a Rumble of Thunder, sometimes an Iradiddio. He stopped playing in 1977. Then with the national team jacket they played good centre-forwards and excellent attacking midfielders, midfielders, playmakers or whatever you want to call them. That record, Gigi Riva’s 35 Azzurri goals, has never been reached by anyone. Pellegri and Gnonto, Immobile and Belotti are not the only ones who score little, at the moment they are the last in a long series. Certainly Italy in the meantime has won, World Cups and a European Championship, even without a top scorer with many goals. He won by being a team, playing together and finding a way to score many, because it’s not always easy to find someone who scores a lot.

And perhaps this is where the real problem lies. That long line of men sitting on the bench capable of teaming up, playing together and letting many score, got a bit lost along the way. Or they can no longer convey to their players what was conveyed to them. Because it’s not true that good young players aren’t there or never play: eleven play as starters in Serie A, four play very often, others will most likely do so from next season. What is missing is to make them play as a team. Why, sorry to say, but there are no phenomena in Mancini’s Under 21 and national team, good players yes, some excellent players, but there are none of top-level footballers around in Italy. At least not where it’s needed to create and score. And it is here, to remedy this, that the inventiveness of those who don’t play is needed. Roberto Mancini managed it at the 2021 European Championship, when somehow, by dint of passing, he overcame the strikers’ lack of feeling with the goal: Federico Chiesa, Ciro Immobile, Lorenzo Insigne, Manuel Locatelli, Matteo Pessina finished with two goals. He finished that European Championship with the feeling, later amply demonstrated, that everything had gone particularly well (and this doesn’t mean that it was all luck, rather a crossing of events that were difficult to repeat).

Paolo Nicolato isn’t entirely to blame, he did his own: he made a lot of players grow, gave them an international dimension, didn’t waste talent and knew how to choose who could be more functional for him. But something went wrong. And it is not the first time. When there is something important to play it seems that something never turns as it should turn. And perhaps those who lead Italian football should ask themselves why this happens all the time. Of course, saying that everything is always fine doesn’t help. Neither the movement, nor young people. There is no divine law that requires Italy to always be a protagonist in football, there is no innate talent in our DNA that guides us to victory and four world and two European titles do not mean that Italy is a nation of winning. It went well many times, others it went very badly. However, there has always been a long and complicated job of creating a football model, perhaps not very spectacular, but there was a project. Now it seems that predestination is the only way forward.