As Italian football collapse has become clearer than ever following their shocking hattrick of qualification failure, I think we may try to wonder if its system has been rotten from within. And I agree with anyone stating that, it did become rotten since 2006. Still, anyone in the football community that has taken part in r/AskHistorians and r/history may need to acknowledge Italian football crisis is part of a wider cultural problem of Italy, one that defined them 200 years:
- Italian identity did not exist until suddenly Napoleon Bonaparte imposed one). Until that fateful moment, Italy as a unified identity did not exist, and people expressed their Italian identity from the geographical location instead of a statehood. That artificial creation suddenly forced Italians to begin to look for something called statehood.
- Italian unification was a very chaotic and messy campaign. It was driven by Piedmont, but its ability to do so was very limited, yet surprisingly not short of lucky moments. It couldn't take over Lombardy when the land was under Maximilian (brother of Franz Joseph) before Franz Joseph made him dumb move by removing Max from Viceroy position. It had a very terrible performance versus Austria in 1866, but because Prussia crushed the Austrians in Königgrätz, Italy was able to annex more land. Italian military was inferior to France, but because of Prussia's war that led to French withdrawal of garrison from Paris, it was able to capture Rome.
- In WW1, Italy switched side to join the Entente despite being originally part of the Central Powers. Yet even with this opportunistic move, Italy performed so poor against the equally dysfunctional Austrian Army and lost the 12th battle of Isonzo that nearly collapsed the whole war machine. Only after a forced reshuffling did the Italian military improve (though the Austrians were demoralised by then).
- Italy's most catastrophic experience came in WW2. Despite knowing Italy was unready for the war, Mussolini threw Italy to war anyway, resulted in dysfunctional performances everywhere. It took the Germans to reorganise the Italian military to become much more effective. Italians failed to question the Mussolini regime until 1943 when Allied troops stepped into the Italian shore that forced the Fascist regime to remove Mussolini; but it was followed with 46 days of confusion that ultimately stripped of Italy's necessary time to prepare when the German Army came and occupied half of the country, causing Italy to be pillaged by a civil war within a global war. After the war ended, it took the Allied command to shake up Italy's political system (though not at the scale of Germany or Japan), including the approval of the new Constitution of 1947.
Maybe you look at their desperate quest to finally overhaul and reform football to align with Western European standard (especially with Spain, Germany and France), but this desperation came only after they admitted they only fixed things when damages were done. And you look at the pattern and you suddenly realise it would come one day because of the way how Italians behave themselves for 200 years. Indeed, Germany, France, Japan and even Brazil made proactive reforms immediately in response to their crises, while Italy frequently pushed itself to the brink of forced reforms and catch-up situations.
The biggest question is how can Italy become proactive. And it requires a complete reset of a football system that, in many way, mirroring the state's behaviours for two centuries. If they can acknowledge a painful and bitter reset is a must, then its anthem will be sung again in 2030. The challenge is what kind of reforms Italy must offer to convince outside experts (since Italians are, unfortunately, not good at reforming internally) to come and save their ailing football conditions.
by Tall_Pressure7042