There is a version of Italy that exists in the collective memory of anyone who has ever loved football. The steel of Fabio Cannavaro, the elegance of Andrea Pirlo, the genius of Francesco Totti. The tactical revolutions of Arrigo Sacchi, whose AC Milan side of the late 1980s did not merely win trophies but changed how the game itself was understood.
Four World Cup titles. A country that popularised 'catenaccio', the 'libero', the 'trequartista' … concepts that the Italian peninsula helped spread across the entire footballing world.
Then there is the version that exists now. A national team that has not played at a World Cup since 2014, that has spent a decade watching the tournament from home, that faces the very real possibility on Thursday night in Bergamo of missing a third consecutive edition.
An entire generation of Italian children has grown up without the ritual their parents took for granted. As Sports Minister Andrea Abodi put it: “For generations of Italians, the World Cup was the time when the country came together and waved our flag. It would be nice to share those emotions with younger fans again.”
The upcoming play-offs will determine whether Italy are finally going back to the World Cup. Italy take Northern Ireland in Bergamo on Thursday and if they win that match, will then play the decider next Tuesday.
How Italy got here
Italy's 2026 qualifying campaign began with catastrophe. A 3-0 defeat in Oslo against Erling Haaland's Norway in June 2025 ended Luciano Spalletti's tenure almost immediately. What followed under Gennaro Gattuso was considerably more encouraging: six consecutive wins, results that included a 5-4 thriller with Israel and a 3-3 draw in Dortmund that gave Germany a considerable fright.
But Norway won every single one of their eight group games, and when the sides met again in November, Italy lost once more. Second place, and back to the play-offs. The third consecutive qualifying cycle to end this way.
Gattuso – more psychologist than coach
Gattuso was not the federation's first choice. Claudio Ranieri and Stefano Pioli were considered before he was appointed in June 2025 on a one-year deal. They wanted a fighter, not a tactical philosopher. That is Gattuso's greatest skill, and the results since he took charge tell their own story: six wins from his first seven games, a team that had looked beaten before it started suddenly playing with urgency and belief.
Denied a formal training camp in the four months since Italy last played, he and Gianluigi Buffon, head of delegation, travelled across the globe instead, personally contacting approximately 50 players over the winter, not to discuss formations but to remind them what the shirt meant.
After the Norway defeat he told his squad: “You are stronger than the teams you will face in the play-offs. You just have to believe it.” Where Spalletti had been cerebral and ultimately distant, Gattuso has made belonging feel like a tactical decision in itself.
Why Italy keep failing
The 2006 World Cup victory in Berlin was the last act of a great generation. When those great players retired, it appeared there was no plan.
It seems Italian football does not believe in its own talent. A CIES Football Observatory demographic study from January 2022 found that Serie A gave home-grown players just 7.4 per cent of total playing time, the lowest figure among the big five European leagues. Argentina gave their own youth products nearly 30 per cent in the same period.
Rather than develop the next generation, clubs spend heavily on imports despite generating significantly lower revenue than Europe's top leagues. Last summer, Serie A was the second highest spending league in European football on transfer fees. The money goes on players from abroad. Italian kids watch from the sidelines.
The football has become unwatchable. It is noticeable that when a Serie A player receives the ball, his first instinct is rarely to run forward. It is to pass sideways, backwards, or recycle it to the goalkeeper.
Serie A produces the fewest shots, the fewest clear chances and the fewest open-play goals of any major European league.
A CIES Football Observatory report from October 2023, studying 27 leagues across Europe and the Americas, found Italian players made the lowest proportion of forward runs of any league in possession. A generation raised on not losing has forgotten how to win.
Federation president Gabriele Gravina acknowledged as much, unveiling a youth development programme to tackle what he called “a sort of extreme tacticalism that really worries me”.
Reasons to hope
There are genuine arguments for optimism. Italy have never lost a home game against Northern Ireland across seven meetings and this squad has more quality than it is sometimes given credit for.
Paul Scholes, one of the great midfielders of his generation, named Sandro Tonali as the best midfielder in the Premier League, ahead of Declan Rice. Alessandro Bastoni and Riccardo Calafiori have established themselves as two of the most composed ball-playing defenders in European football. Gianluigi Donnarumma, keeping goal for Manchester City, is among the best goalkeepers in the world.
And the ghost of North Macedonia, while it will never fully leave this team, deserves some context. That night in Palermo in 2022, Italy had 32 shots, 16 corners and dominated every statistical measure of the game before Aleksandar Trajkovski scored with the last kick of the match. It was a freak result that play-off football occasionally and cruelly produces.
Italy are not a great team at the moment. But they are not a mediocre one either.
The key man
Italy's hopes rest heavily on Mateo Retegui, a striker who scored 25 Serie A goals at Atalanta last season to win the Capocannoniere and establish himself as one of the most clinical forwards in European football.
His Saudi Arabia spell tells a more complicated story. He has 15 league goals for Al Qadsiah, his teammate Julian Quinones leads the scoring charts, and Retegui tops the Saudi Pro League in big chances missed per 90 minutes, a category in which Cristiano Ronaldo, with 21 goals this season, keeps him company.
Yet the man who arrived in Florence a week early to train alone while his teammates were still on club duty is clearly not short of motivation. He has five goals in six games under Gattuso, a return that suggests he saves his best for the blue shirt.
The play-offs and beyond
Northern Ireland arrive having finished third in their qualifying group behind Germany and Slovakia, reaching the play-offs only through their Nations League performances. Captain Conor Bradley is absent after suffering bone and ligament damage to his knee in January, while Sunderland centre-back Dan Ballard has also been ruled out with a hamstring injury.
Their squad is largely drawn from the Championship, with several players from England's third division, and Michael O'Neill is simultaneously holding down the Blackburn Rovers job.
They pose a real threat nonetheless. Isaac Price has contributed six goals from midfield for West Bromwich Albion this season and Northern Ireland's set pieces are well-drilled. Italy know better than most what happens when you underestimate a team with nothing to lose and everything to write into history.
Should Italy progress past Northern Ireland, they face either Wales or Bosnia-Herzegovina away from home on March 31 in the final. Win that and they are at the World Cup, where Group B awaits with co-hosts Canada, Switzerland and Qatar.
The four-time world champions have not won a World Cup knockout game in 20 years. Thursday, at Bergamo's New Balance Arena, is where that story either begins again or ends entirely.
