Roberto Mancini, coach of Italy’s first football team, wonders about where the next generation of Italian talents will come from, before the defending champions begin their qualifiers for the European Cup 2024, Thursday, at home in a strong match against England.
Mancini begins a rebuilding journey again after Italy missed the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, the World Cup finals for the second time in a row.
As the rest of the teams prepared for the finals in Qatar, Italian football was once again contemplating its place on the international stage, with Mancini lamenting the lack of young players in a country accustomed to exporting global talent.
Italy has three clubs in the quarter-finals of the Champions League for the first time since 2006, and three other clubs in the quarter-finals of the other two competitions, the Europa League and the Conference League, but Mancini does not see that this rare success should be celebrated continentally in the last years of the Italian League.
Mancini said: “The Milan, Napoli and Inter clubs, which are still in the Champions League, have seven or eight Italian players among them. This is the truth and we must do something different.”
He continued, “Italian football has not been reborn, we can say that maybe if there were 33 Italians on the field, or even half of them would be enough.”
Mancini privately lamented the lack of strikers and used Leeds United’s English winger Willy Nionto as an example of how Serie A clubs ignore young talent.
But he was also criticized for some of the selections in the 30-man squad for Thursday’s match in Napoli, which included the first call-up of Argentine-born striker Matteo Retigui, who plays for Argentine club Tigre.
Mancini said, “Years ago, it was said that you had to be born in Italy in order to represent the national team, but the world has changed, and all teams now have players who are naturalized or come from other countries.”
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