The 4-1 defeat suffered by Norway at San Siro is not an accident: it is the clinical report of a sick Italian football, led by a self-referential, presumptuous ruling class incapable of renewing itself. There are defeats that hurt, and then there’s Italy-Norway 1-4 at San Siro. It couldn’t have been the evening in which to secure the qualifying group for the 2026 World Cup, the impossible feat of winning 9-0 was unthinkable even in a parallel reality film, not even with artificial intelligence. Or playing play.

However, the minimum wage was to think of a dignified match, an authoritative response to the general discontent generated by a qualifying group decidedly below expectations and characterized by fearful performances of very little depth. A victory would have been expected. Strengthened by an important response from the public, 67 thousand people and record takings, Italy played a discreet first half, not very lucky. To sink into recovery without any extenuating circumstances, building the conditions for public humiliation. Illusory advantage from Pio Esposito, comeback and Norwegian deluge with Nusa, a brace from Haaland and the seal from Strand Larsen when half the crowd was already outside the stadium while the other half deafeningly booed the team with not exactly polite chants. The best of whom invited the Azzurri to find a job. Normal. Gattuso, who had responded controversially to criticism for the modest victory against Moldova, was forced to admit that the fans deserved an apology.

When excuses are no longer enough

But the truth is that this time excuses are no longer enough. Because this 4-1 is not the usual bad evening: it is the clear photo of a system that looks in the mirror and no longer recognizes itself. It is yet another chapter in a saga already seen: failure to qualify for the 2018 World Cup, failure to qualify for the 2022 World Cup, a nightmare European Championship 2024, an anonymous Nations League, and now a group towards 2026 closed in an embarrassing way with the fear of failing the most important event for the third time in a row. In the middle, the victory of the 2021 European Championship in England: evidently the real accident of an unpresentable team that represents an even more unpresentable managerial and managerial structure of our football. The paradox is that faced with a situation in which in any normal country a president would resign, the Football Federation lives hostage to Gravina: who not only did not resign, but managed to get re-elected – the only candidate – with 98.7% of the votes. A success directly proportional to the failures of the national team and the inability of the ruling class to regenerate itself by presenting credible alternatives. When Gravina was asked some time ago why he didn’t step aside, the answer was… “because it would be worse”.

Worse than that?

It is worth underlining that in all this chaos the only one who stepped aside was Roberto Mancini, convinced to leave when one by one they had taken away all those collaborators who had built an effective team that for the first time had managed to lead the national team to win something. But above all to build a cycle.
Mancini, 61 games, the third longest-serving coach in the history of the Azzurri: 37 victories and nine defeats. After him, Spalletti, who experienced only one season more disastrous than his time as coach, was sacked, recalled and relegated to Serie B with Sampdoria.

From the missed World Cup to the disaster with Norway

The paradox is that, every time Italy hits a wall, the response is always the same litany: “Let’s start again with young people”, “We need a project”, “We must change”. We have been hearing the same things since 2014, while in the meantime the numbers tell a different story: since 2010 the number of registered footballers has decreased, the number of coaches has doubled and the number of managers has even tripled. Costs have grown enormously: the ownership of Italian football is mostly foreign. Football is something else. Solbakken knows this well and has created a real project around a champion and a couple of good players with a squad of 30 players who play at all latitudes. Except in Norway. He was asked how he did it: «For us, the national team is the value par excellence. There isn’t a player who doesn’t dream of playing for Løvene (the lions) and now, thanks to the results, the number of kids in football schools and nurseries is increasing. It is played in all compulsory schools: we have a number of members that has never been higher.”

Give it to the goat

Out of politeness, Solbakken perhaps doesn’t say that in Norway, or in any country where his team’s players play, there are presidents who say that the national team is a detriment or athletes who almost have to justify the fact of having been called up. Because the club would have preferred them at home. It’s not just a technical problem: it’s a cultural one. It is the mentality of a movement that has stopped considering the World Cup an objective and has started to see it as a possible surprise and which has always considered the club dominant compared to any Italian objective. The worst thing, however, is that if tomorrow we were to fail in the playoffs too, no one would really be surprised. We would limit ourselves to looking for another scapegoat on the bench, changing technical commissioners like you change coaches in a club in crisis, pretending that the problem is the bench and not the whole building.

A ruling class that never pays

Yet another fool for the national team comes in a context in which the crisis of Italian football has been x-rayed far and wide. Investigations and analyzes have explained that the national team is only the reflection of a system that is financially exhausted, politically contentious and technically stuck at twenty years ago. Forbes Italia reported on failed investments in stadiums, accounts in the red, even mafia infiltration in the corners of some big clubs and a sick relationship between footballers and illegal betting, with cases of gambling addiction emerging in recent years. Abroad they describe our football system as a “decoction”: in terms of turnover and UEFA ranking, what was once “the most beautiful championship in the world” is now a distant pursuer: the big European teams have up to four times more revenue than the Italians and the distance continues to widen. And it’s not like a lucky spell in the cups is the rule. It’s the exception. In the meantime, investigations into monstrous debts and creative capital gains have certified that Italian clubs have drugged their balance sheets for years, chasing tomorrow morning’s result at the cost of mortgaging the day after tomorrow. Only Inter, Milan, Juventus and Roma have accumulated hundreds of millions of losses in just a few seasons, in a situation increasingly one step away from the collapse and the definitive point of no return. Every now and then some team collapses among the amateurs: and they tell us that it is the system that regenerates itself.

A football excuse…

In this scenario, the governance of Italian football has promised reforms on everything: second teams, youth sectors, championship formats, salary caps, owned stadiums. We hear these speeches from Italia ’90. In reality, every attempt at change is stopped by the usual crossed vetoes: to the point that many foreign investors appear, take a look, and run away. And if at best they invest they do so for a limited number of years.
One might think that the 4-1 against Norway serves at least to shake up the clubs, to force an awareness. But here too, recent history invites pessimism. The owners have lived above their means for years, recapitalizing with hundreds of millions, asking the State for aid, exemptions and understanding to portray themselves as a strategic industry to which everything should be owed.

An armchair is forever

When the numbers don’t add up, the pandemic is to blame. When the stadium is half empty, piracy is to blame. When the national team falls, the fault lies with the coach. In this eternal game of passing the buck, the only thing that is never questioned is the ability – or rather the inability – of those who decide. In the meantime, they continue to squeeze the same players, without really having a plan to create new ones. The analyzes on the “ignored generation” of young Italian footballers underline how, without a serious project on youth sectors and real playing time in Serie A, the national team will remain condemned to live on nostalgia and regrets. The finger and the moon. This is why Italy-Norway 1-4 is not just a sporting defeat. It is a political ruling on our football. In those four goals conceded at San Siro there is all the distance between a national team that continues to describe itself as “great” by acquired right and a movement that no longer holds its own against the best. The Meazza whistles aren’t just for Gattuso. They are years of wasted opportunities, of reforms announced and never implemented, of federal councils that meet, produce press releases and then return exactly to the starting point. I am for a ruling class that, after two missed World Cups, a failed European Championship and now another qualification process transformed into a nightmare, still manages to talk about “episode” and “bad evening” without ever pronouncing the necessary words: resignation, replacement, responsibility. But don’t worry: starting this morning, after you have hopefully read these lines thus far, someone will tell you that we must rally around the team, that the future is in our hands, that the World Cup is a priority that cannot be failed and that everything will be fine. The finger and the moon. And if we manage to qualify it will be a triumph: until the next crash…