Behind the goal where the shootout ended, Bosnia’s ultras unfurled a choreography showing a U.S. visa. The Fanaticos are going to the World Cup. Watching them from the halfway line, a rabble of Italy players turned away and tried to console one another. They cried while everyone partied around them.
“It’s a nightmare,” a tearful Leonardo Spinazzola said. “I’ve been on the national team nine years and still haven’t played at a World Cup. It’s awful. For Italy. For us.”
None of his other teammates, including skipper Gigio Donnarumma, spoke. They were too distraught, too angry with the result and the refereeing of Clement Turpin. The Frenchman, fatefully, had also officiated the last World Cup play-off Italy lost against North Macedonia in 2022.
Under questioning, Gennaro Gattuso bit his bottom lip. It looked like a coping mechanism in distress. He apologised to the 500 fans who had travelled to Zenica and the millions watching back home. “It hurts,” he said, needing a moment to gather himself. The Calabrian thanked his players in the firm belief they deserved better. “It was years since I saw the national team play with such heart,” Gattuso claimed. He had a couple of regrets. The first: Alessandro Bastoni’s red card before half-time. The second: the chance Moise Kean missed to make it 2-0 with 10 men.
Italy’s coach Gennaro Gattuso walks off the pitch after losing in a World Cup qualifying playoff final soccer match between Bosnia and Italy in Zenica, Bosnia, Tuesday, March 31, 2026. (Fabio Ferrari/LaPresse via AP)
Moments like these are why Italy have become the first former champion to miss out on three consecutive World Cups. Moments that often get forgotten in the grander, more generalised telling of Italian football’s decline. For instance, in 2017, the players and the Italian Football Federation (FIGC) didn’t seize their moment. They should have acted on their instincts and staged a mutiny to remove the inadequate Gian Piero Ventura from his position as head coach between the first and second legs of their play-off against Sweden. In 2022, Jorginho’s missed penalties against Switzerland home and away were the difference between qualifying automatically and not. In other words, there have been fine margins and a set of circumstances specific to each shortcoming.
On Tuesday night, in the cramped press room at the Bilino Polje, Gattuso, FIGC president Gabriele Gravina, and delegation chief Gigi Buffon sat down, knowing they would face calls for a resignation en masse. Buffon wore a pained expression on his face. He was in goal against Sweden nine years ago when a snap-shot from Jakob Johansson deflected wildly off Daniele De Rossi. That was when Italy’s trauma of not qualifying for the World Cup began. Putting it right evidently means a lot to him, as a proud Italian and his country’s most-capped player of all time.
Buffon was the one who chose Gattuso last summer, even though his former team-mate had spent a year working in the Balkans with Hajduk Split. It did not, with all due respect for Gattuso’s career as a player, fill everyone with confidence in his ability to succeed where others had failed in taking Italy to the World Cup.
“We’re glad you’ve noticed that things are improving,” Buffon said amid faint praise for the team. “But our main goal was to qualify for the World Cup.” Lucidly, he said the FIGC wouldn’t rush to judgement on what to do next. “The season ends in June and until then, I think it is right for me to carry on my duties to the FIGC and to the president,” Buffon added.
Nobody resigned. This was a source of consternation back in Italy. Gravina, the president of the FIGC, didn’t quit after the defeat to North Macedonia in 2022 or the insipid performance against Switzerland at the Euros in 2024 when they were humbled 2-0 in the last 16. As the common denominator, his critics do not understand how Italy can break the cycle while he is still at the helm.
Rather than focus on the result, Gravina complimented the players on their performance. “Gattuso defined them as heroic,” he said. Italy had played with their backs against the Soviet-style tower blocks overlooking the Bilino Polje for more than 90 minutes. They could have crumbled after Bastoni’s expulsion and Haris Tabakovic’s equaliser, but they made it to penalties and hoped Donnarumma, who had already made more than 10 saves, might perform to the level he did in the shootout that decided the Euros in 2021.
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Bosnia and Herzegovina players and fans were in full celebration mode after they sealed their place at the country’s second-ever World Cup, following a penalty shootout win over Italy.
Donnarumma had spent much of the second half of extra time arguing with the fourth official for not sending off Tarik Muharemovic for a challenge on Marco Palestra on the edge of the box. How much a different decision would have changed things is unknown. All we know instead is that Pio Esposito, who, it should be said, showed tremendous courage in stepping up to take Italy’s first penalty, and Bryan Cristante then missed from the spot. These are yet more details in Italy’s downfall, ones Gravina might cite in support of an argument that Italy were only a couple of kicks away from an epic qualification in Bosnia.
“Gattuso is a great coach,” he said. “I asked him to stay, him and Buffon.” Patient to some, it is dithering to others. Continuity is not a convincing answer right now, not in what Gravina acknowledges is “a time of great crisis”.
As hostile as the atmosphere was in Zenica, Bosnia’s fans followed their captain, Edin Dzeko, in applauding the Italian national anthem before kick-off. Dzeko had asked them to do it because Italy were the first team to play in the capital Sarajevo after the Bosnian War 30 years ago. After the game, a Bosnian reporter asked Gattuso, as a friend of Italy’s since that friendly in 1996, why Italy can no longer qualify for World Cups. Gattuso said there were people better placed than him to give a response. Again, it did not inspire confidence.
Italy have tried to reform themselves since they went out of the group stages as holders in 2010 and then again in 2014. Arrigo Sacchi was brought in to coach the coaches bringing through the next generation. More age groups were introduced. Government intervention, via CONI (the Italian Olympic Committee), led to a series of new proposals. For instance, Serie A clubs were allowed to enrol B teams in Italy’s third division to help bridge the gap between youth-team football and the men’s game.
These changes have borne fruit. After reaching the final in 2013, 2018 and 2019, Italy won the Under-17 Euros in 2024. Francesco Camarda, who broke Paolo Maldini’s record as the youngest player ever to make a debut for Milan, was part of that team. Michael Kayode got the winner in the final. After reaching the final in 2016 and 2018, Italy also won the Under-19 Euros in 2023. Esposito, the Inter starlet who missed Italy’s opening spot kick, was a member of that team.
So not everything is going wrong for Italy. For all the focus on the Italian teams falling out of the Champions League, it was only last season that they started the league phase with five teams after topping the UEFA coefficient. The ownership mix is also far, far healthier than it was a decade ago, with Milan, Inter and a number of other clubs under stable, highly capitalised management. Co-hosting Euro 2032 means the first stadium overhaul in nearly half a century is underway. A new San Siro has finally been given the green light. The Artemio Franchi in Florence is under reconstruction. These are all signs of progress.
And yet the national team’s travails in World Cup qualification occlude all of it, including the win at the Euros as recently as 2021. When Italy failed to qualify for the World Cup nine years ago, Gravina’s predecessor, Carlo Tavecchio, called it an apocalypse. Apocalypses aren’t, by their very nature, supposed to have sequels. Apocalypse Now was a standalone film. Unlike The Godfather, Francis Ford Coppola never made it into a trilogy. He left that to the FIGC. And as trilogies go, this is a footballing tragedy.
This article originally appeared in The Athletic.
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