Italy’s mixed start in the UEFA Nations League has revived debate about its declining ability to produce stars of the calibre of Francesco Totti, Alessandro Del Piero and Roberto Baggio. Italy lost 2-0 to Belgium, then responded three days later with a 4-1 win over Turkey.
Mancini rebuilds Italy with new names
Between the two matches, the challenge facing coach Roberto Mancini became clear: building a team reliant on collective organisation amid limited individual options of real distinction. Italy produced a subdued performance against Belgium, particularly in the first half, and goalkeeper Gianluigi Donnarumma had to intervene several times to prevent the gap from widening.
But the team’s display changed against Turkey, as Italy looked more effective and secured a comprehensive victory. That raised the question of whether collective work can compensate for the absence of the names that gave Italy individual weight in previous generations. The current squad does include prominent players, including Donnarumma, Alessandro Bastoni, Nicolò Barella and Sandro Tonali.
Mancini acknowledged, however, that the national team is going through a different phase from the periods when it had a group of football’s leading global stars. Before the Turkey match, he said Italy had previously produced generations containing great champions such as Totti, Del Piero and Baggio, stressing the need to nurture a new generation and build a team capable of competing.
Refreshing the squad broadens the pool of options
The starting XI Mancini selected against Belgium highlighted the scale of the renewal under way within the national team. In attack, he relied on Moise Kean, Francesco Pio Esposito and Nicolò Cambiaghi, while giving Alessandro Romano his first international start in midfield alongside Barella and Tonali.
In his first squad during the international break, the coach called up 34 players, including 9 new faces, in an attempt to broaden the pool of options and reshape the team. The change is clearer when the current side is compared with the generation that won UEFA Euro 2020, a tournament held in the summer of 2021 after being postponed for a year because of the coronavirus pandemic.
That squad included Giorgio Chiellini, Leonardo Bonucci, Marco Verratti, Jorginho, Federico Chiesa and Lorenzo Insigne, before the team won the title against England in the final. UEFA selected 5 Italian players for the tournament’s team of the tournament: Donnarumma, Bonucci, Leonardo Spinazzola, Jorginho and Chiesa.
Donnarumma also won the award for the tournament’s best player. The continental success did not, however, establish a long period of stability, as the 2021 triumph came amid a run of Italian failures to reach the World Cup finals.
Serie A narrows the pool of local talent
Mancini’s task is not limited to the names in his squad. Data from the Italian Football Federation point to a broader problem linked to the level of participation by local players in league competitions.
The number of regular participants also shows how narrow the pool available to Italy’s coaching staff is. Only 89 Italians were among the 284 players who had played at least 30 minutes per match by matchweek 31, including 10 goalkeepers. The crisis is more acute among young talents.
Serie A ranked 49th among the 50 competitions monitored by the CIES Football Observatory, based on the percentage of minutes given to under-21 players eligible to represent the national team. Those players received only 1.9% of the total minutes available in the competition.
Weak local development lowers the value of Italian talent
The data used in the Italian federation’s report also showed Italy lagging in the revenue generated over the past decade from international transfers of players developed domestically.
Italian clubs ranked behind their counterparts in France, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, England and Germany in this area, reflecting limited domestic production of players and conversion of them into sporting assets capable of generating transfer-market revenue. Only Atalanta and Juventus appeared among the world’s top 50 academies, measured by the sale value of players developed within the club.
These indicators return the issue to the opportunities clubs provide Italian talents before they reach the senior national team. Local players face limited playing time, and that space becomes even narrower for the younger groups expected to form the next generation.
The shrinking pool of options affected the national team’s World Cup qualifying campaign despite its European title in 2021. After missing the 2018 Russia and 2022 Qatar editions, Italy drew 1-1 with Bosnia and Herzegovina in the final of its European qualifying play-off path for the 2026 World Cup, then lost 1-4 on penalties, missing the finals for the third consecutive time.
According to FIFA, Italy became the first country to have won the World Cup whose national team missed 3 consecutive editions of the finals. Italy’s last World Cup appearance was at Brazil 2014, illustrating how its global results crisis has lasted for years, even as the team won the European Championship during that period.
In the match against Turkey in Bursa, Italy showed it had elements on which to build after Alessandro Bastoni, Davide Frattesi, Michael Kayode and Francesco Pio Esposito scored its four goals. Kayode’s goal came in his first international appearance, one of several signs supporting the coaching staff’s approach of testing new names and giving them roles within the team.
After the victory, Mancini said all his players had delivered an excellent performance, arguing that collective play could help Italy overcome the absence of an individual star. Before the match, he had cited Italy’s 2021 European Championship win without Totti, Del Piero or Baggio, reinforcing his view that success can come through a cohesive system that does not depend on one player.
The new generation faces a tougher test against France in the UEFA Nations League, as Mancini seeks to establish a team that offsets its limited number of stars through collective work, alongside the need for a broader pool of players supplied by the domestic league. Before the match, the Italian coach said: “We face a great team; it will be a difficult match and a good test.”
