Italy Has Failed to Qualify for Three Straight World Cups. Are the Country’s Immigration Policies to Blame?
The night Italy defeated France in the 2006 World Cup final, Mario de Rossi was studying at a small university in Puglia. Though he had exams the next day, he still ventured out into a piazza afterward and celebrated late into the night. He showed up to his exams bleary-eyed, and wearing his Azzurri shirt. With four World Cup titles, Italy had, at that point, more than any other European country. “Back then, we were at the center of the football world,” de Rossi, now a forty-year-old football agent who specializes in international player transfers, told me. “And to think that from there a decline began that now feels almost irreversible.”
At the next two World Cups, in 2010 and 2014, Italy didn’t live up to its reputation, getting bounced in the group stage. Then, leading up to the 2018 World Cup, the unthinkable happened: Italy failed to even qualify, a national scandal that seemed to mark the nadir of Italian football, until four years later, when the national team fell short of qualifying again.
Going into the 2026 World Cup qualifying process, no former champion had ever failed to qualify three straight times. And while Italy’s longtime European football rivals—France, Spain, England, Germany, Portugal, Belgium, and the Netherlands—all played well early, easily making it through, Italy struggled, leaving the team to scrabble in a playoff tournament with smaller countries like Northern Ireland and Bosnia and Herzegovina. After a pair of losses to Norway, Italy’s last chance for a World Cup bid came on March 31st, in a winner-take-all game in Zenica against Bosnia and Herzegovina, a thirty-four-year-old country with a population roughly a twentieth the size of Italy’s, and just one previous World Cup appearance. After an early goal by the Italian forward Moise Kean provided a period of optimism, Bosnia and Herzegovina tied the score in the seventy-ninth minute, then snatched victory in penalty kicks, sending the home crowd into jubilation. On the other side of the Adriatic Sea, a reckoning awaited.
After the match, de Rossi described his phone buzzing with “calls and a lot of text exchanges with colleagues, people working in the football industry, club executives, and also just friends.” All across Italy, on television and podcasts, at dinner tables and bar counters, in group chats and message boards, a furious debate unfurled in the search for answers to the agonizing mystery: How did Italy’s storied football program fall so far behind the rest of Europe’s?
Theories abound. Some blame outdated coaching tactics that prioritize caution over goal scoring. Some say young people in Italy aren’t as interested in football as previous generations were. Some blame clubs in the country’s top domestic league, Serie A, for filling their lineups with foreign players, while Italian prospects languish on the bench. To de Rossi, the problem is rooted in an issue that few in the football world have discussed publicly: Italy’s pool of eligible young players is shrinking because of racist immigration policies. “Everyone turns their heads around because they don’t want to look,” he said. “They don’t know that the world has changed.”
While top European football rosters like France’s and Spain’s reflect recent migration patterns in Europe, Italy’s team remains almost entirely white. That visible distinction has become harder to overlook amid the team’s struggles. Daniela Conti, a policy manager for the advocacy organization Italian Association of Sport For All, said the team’s homogeneity reflects laws and practices that have excluded a large swath of “the young people who live in our country,” adding that “football reflects exactly what’s happened in society.”
Italy has the oldest population in Europe, with a median age that has risen from around forty-one in 2004 to forty-nine in 2024, four years older than the European Union average. This means that those younger than fifteen make up an ever-shrinking portion of Italy’s population. Moreover, compared to nearby countries that have counteracted the economic effects of aging populations with new immigrants and their children, Italy has set more hurdles on the path to citizenship for those without native ancestry, even if they are born in the country. A lack of citizenship, of course, means that you are ineligible to play for the national team. And the people who have run the national football system have seemed determined to limit their options even further: Arrigo Sacchi, who oversaw the national team’s youth-development program from 2010 to 2014, said in 2015 that “Italy has now lost all dignity and pride” because there are “too many players of color in our youth sectors”; Carlo Tavecchio, the president of Italy’s football federation from 2014 to 2017, was banned from holding any FIFA roles for six months for saying that Black players were “eating bananas” before joining Serie A.
Italy, in 2003, established a government agency, the National Office Against Racial Discrimination, to investigate allegations of racism in institutions like the football federation. Its director general, Mattia Peradotto, pushed back when I suggested that racism has played a role in the football team’s struggles, and said it was the first time he’d heard anyone mention the possibility. “It’s kind of strange to me, this theory,” Peradotto told me. “I don’t see that having a roster that is less diverse can be related to structural racism. I don’t see a link between these two things.” He also said that it was unfair to compare Italy’s racial diversity with other European countries, such as France and England, that had more extensive colonial occupations spurring earlier waves of immigration. He noted that Italy’s junior teams have more players of non-European descent than ever before, and that he attributed this trend to government investment in sports facilities “in the marginalized blocks of cities.” He also pointed out that Kean, a star player on the team, is the child of immigrants from Côte d’Ivoire.
But, in the game against Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kean, who scored Italy’s only goal, was the sole nonwhite Italian player to take the field. He also led the team in goals through the qualifying tournament, even after missing half the games with an injury. One of the matches he missed was against Norway, which beat Italy 4–1. Two players of African descent took the pitch for Norway, Europe’s northernmost country, while Italy, at the gateway to the Mediterranean Sea, with a population ten times bigger, fielded none.
Riccardo Bia had been optimistic this year. The sports agency he runs with his father represents more than a hundred Italian football players, including one on the national team, and he believed that his country had enough talent to earn one of the forty-eight spots for the World Cup. “Big delusion,” he told me recently.
When he contemplated the problem, his mind turned to a Serie A match he had attended last year, A.C. Milan against Bologna, the final game in the Coppa Italia tournament. Of the twenty-two athletes that started for the two teams, he noticed, just three were Italian. “We have too many foreign players in Serie A,” he said. “The only way to save” the national team would be “to obligate the clubs to play the young Italian players.” Bia was worried about a vicious cycle, imagining a young fan who “probably doesn’t know the names” of the players on their favorite team, he said. “I’m scared the new generation will lose that passion about football.”
This idea seems to be the conventional wisdom in Italy these days, common on analysis programs, in newspaper columns, and on internet forums. Peradotto, the director general of the government agency that investigates racism, told me that “not having Italian players” in the top Italian clubs has “led to having a less competitive national team.”
It’s an old claim that traces to the earliest years of Italy’s football dominance. After taking power in 1922, Benito Mussolini prioritized strengthening the national football system, recognizing its value in forging a unifying identity for a country that had existed only six decades and was losing as many as three hundred thousand emigrants a year. Italy’s national team was mediocre at the time, failing to medal at the Olympics in 1920 and 1924. Mussolini’s government built new stadiums, established a new league, Serie A, that barred foreign players, and successfully bid to host the second-ever World Cup, in 1934. Mussolini used the tournament to showcase a national transformation embodied in the football team’s ascent. Italy won that World Cup, and the next one, in 1938, along with the 1936 Olympic gold medal.
After the Second World War, Italy opened up Serie A to foreign players. But, following a string of disappointing national-team performances, including failing to qualify for the 1958 World Cup and shocking losses to both the Soviet Union and North Korea at the 1966 edition, the league reinstated the ban. At the following World Cup, in 1970, Italy reached the final, and then in 1982 Italy won its third World Cup. That decade, Serie A loosened its prohibition on foreigners, setting quotas that allowed three foreign players per club by 1988. Seven years later, a court ruled that the restrictions couldn’t apply to players from European Union countries, ushering in a wave of international talent that hasn’t slowed. “There are too many foreigners,” de Rossi said, “because currently the foreigners playing in Italy are better than Italians.”
Bia sees a quota system mandating a certain number of Italians in Serie A as one solution to help the national team get better, but he also described a number of problems at the root of why there are so few Italians capable of earning more playing time in the first place. Youth training facilities, he said, have been “a disaster” owing to a lack of funding. Coaches have implemented “boring” tactics, he said, that restrict players from developing the offensive skills they need to keep up with the game’s evolution. He also wondered if kids were still going outside at all. His father, who played professionally for Napoli in Serie A, told him stories about spending his childhood kicking a ball around on the street with other neighborhood kids. Maybe it isn’t safe for kids to go outside anymore, Bia said. “The times have changed.”
Bia observed Italy’s divergence from France since the two countries met in the 2006 World Cup final. At the time, France was establishing itself as a major force, having won its first World Cup in 1998. In the two decades since that championship game, France has become the preëminent football power. Amid Italy’s World Cup dry spell, France won the tournament in 2018 and placed second in 2022, and boasts a star-filled lineup for this summer’s tournament, with a roster featuring several players from the country’s top club team, Paris Saint-Germain, winners of the 2025 U.E.F.A. Champions League, a Continent-wide competition no Italian club has won in sixteen years. Bia also claimed that many of France’s top football players come from areas “where they have more immigration,” he said. “Why? Probably because they played in the street. They have to try to bring in money because they are in a poor situation. When they have the opportunity, they play well. So now France has one of the best national teams in the world.”
The Italian national team is still inspiring all-nighters. After the loss to Bosnia and Herzegovina, Davide Valeri, a lifelong football fan from Rome, couldn’t sleep. “I opened Instagram, then YouTube, then Twitter, and I stayed up late listening to podcasts and reading tactical and statistical analyses,” Valeri, a sociologist studying the legacy of colonialism in sports, told me. “The motif here in Italy is that we lost because in Serie A there are too many foreign people, but all of this is connected to history and to citizenship.”
More than half of France's 2006 runner-up team included players of African descent, and its teams since then have looked similar. Many trace their ancestry to countries that France colonized. Before modern Italy was formed, in 1861, France had claimed territories on nearly every continent, imposed its language and culture around the globe, and has since granted French citizenship to certain segments of its colonized populations. Italy occupied Somalia for around sixty years, Eritrea for about the same, Libya for thirty-two, and Ethiopia for five, but didn’t encourage migration from those places. Unlike the migration patterns in “France and the U.K., these are not waves of arrivals from ex-colonies,” Teresa Fiore, a Montclair State University professor who studies migration in and out of Italy, told me. “What distinguishes Italy from other countries is a sense of guilt. Italy doesn’t feel this pressure. It doesn’t need to be redeemed.”
In the nineteen-eighties and nineties, people from Africa and Asia began arriving in Italy by the thousands. This was new. For most of the twentieth century, more people were leaving Italy than coming, beckoned by economic opportunities in the Americas and elsewhere. So, in 1992, Italy reformed its citizenship laws, ostensibly to make it easier for its diaspora to return, but also to preserve nationality restrictions for those without Italian ancestry. Children of immigrants born in Italy aren’t assured citizenship, and can apply only within a twelve-month window after turning eighteen. The football star Mario Balotelli, born in Palermo, débuted for Inter Milan when he was seventeen, yet he couldn’t suit up for the national team for another year because his parents were from Ghana. At one of his matches, a group of spectators unrolled a banner that read “Black Italians don’t exist.” In 2011, after being granted citizenship in 2008, he became the first Black player to score a goal for Italy’s national team.
In the past fifteen years or so, Spain went from taking in fewer immigrants than Italy to accepting three times as many. Its football team, all white when it won its first World Cup, in 2010, featured three players of African descent in its starting lineup for the 2026 World Cup qualifiers, including Lamine Yamal, the eighteen-year-old star forward whose parents came from Morocco and Equatorial Guinea. Germany, which had similar age demographics and immigration levels as Italy in 2010, took in more than twice as many immigrants in the next five years, and its median age now sits three years younger than Italy’s. Eight years after losing to Italy in the World Cup semifinals with an all-white starting lineup, Germany won the 2014 World Cup with starting lineups featuring players with immigrant parents from Ghana, Tunisia, and Turkey. Its current team includes eleven players of African or Asian descent. In an interview with the Italian newspaper La Gazzetta dello Sport last month, Oliver Bierhoff, the manager of Germany’s 2014 title team, cited Germany and France as countries that have “improved significantly thanks to players who are the children of immigrants.” “The social aspect matters a lot and is essential in modern football: how you are doing, where you want to go, how much you’re willing to endure already at a young age,” he said. “The hunger of newcomers. Everyone needs it.”
Top Italian sporting officials have decried the citizenship law’s impact on Italian athletics. In 2017, the president of the Italian National Olympic Committee, Giovanni Malagò, estimated that in the previous fifteen years Italy had “lost four and a half million potential athletes between the ages of fourteen and nineteen.” Four years later, Malagò described the bureaucratic process for athletes applying for citizenship as “a Dante-esque circle.”
Italy’s recent immigrant diasporas are more visible in sports other than football. Alberto Tappa, the former secretary-general of the Italian Boxing Federation, publicly advocated for the government to “take a step forward” and approve citizenship for Sirine Charaabi, a Tunisian-born boxer who arrived in Italy before turning two and has since won world-championship medals in 2023 and 2025. Italian track-and-field athletes born to Senegalese or Nigerian immigrants have medalled in each of the last two Olympics. The national women’s volleyball team, which won the 2021 European Championship and finished fourth in 2023, features players with parents from Nigeria and Côte d’Ivoire. The national cricket team, which competed in its first-ever cricket T20 World Cup earlier this year, includes several athletes of South Asian descent. The tennis star Jasmine Paolini, a 2024 Olympic gold medallist and Wimbledon finalist, descended from a Ghanaian grandfather. “You see evidence of this diversity being represented in other sports but not when it comes to the most visible and most symbolically important sport,” Max Mauro, a sociologist who interviewed dozens of young football players with immigrant parents in Italy for his book “The Balotelli Generation,” told me. “So why is football not like that?”
Even among athletes with citizenship, untangling the motivations behind why one player gets selected over another is complicated. There are countless ways to justify a player’s fate in either direction. John Foot, a historian who has written extensively about Italian football, said he couldn’t say for sure that national-team management held racist biases, but he called for a closer look “at the players who aren’t playing for Italy,” including at least a couple of Black players “who could have easily been selected.” He and others have named the twenty-two-year-old forward Wilfried Gnonto, the twenty-four-year-old center back Caleb Okoli, and the twenty-three-year-old defender Destiny Udogie, who are all good enough to play for English clubs but have received little or no playing time with the national team.
In April, shortly after Italy’s disqualification, Italy’s football-federation president and national-team coach resigned. An assembly of football officials will select the next leader, who will face the task of not just developing homegrown players but making sure they end up representing the Azzurri. Valeri, the sociologist, said that he’s curious about the prospects of Honest Ahanor, a promising Serie A defender born in Aversa to Nigerian immigrants. Nigeria’s national team, which missed two straight World Cups after reaching six of the previous seven, has pursued him. After he turned eighteen, in February, and attained Italian citizenship, Italy’s senior national team called him up for friendlies against Luxembourg and Greece. Valeri wonders if some young players might reconsider which country will give them the best chance to play on the brightest stage.
Kean, the national team’s current superstar, might offer a cautionary tale. Though his parents had emigrated from Côte d’Ivoire, Kean has said, they’d lived in Italy long enough to attain Italian citizenship by the time he was born, in 2000, making him automatically a citizen. He was training with Juventus’s youth academy by the time he was ten, recruited to Italy’s junior national team when he was fifteen, and promoted to the senior national team at eighteen. In the World Cup qualifying process, he scored six goals in five games. An impressive showing, but not enough to save the Italian bid. Côte d’Ivoire’s national team, on the other hand, is going to the World Cup. ♦