A journey through Italy’s winning spirit

Who would ever have thought that the sporting summer – a sombre one for us Italians – of the American football World Cup would have given us a finale of profound, almost Olympic-level emotions? Probably no one, although with hindsight, a well-deserved thank you must go to the organisers of the European Athletics and Swimming Championships for allowing us, through their organisational ineptitude and the overlapping of the two events, to experience the exhilaration of simultaneously dominating the respective medal tables – something objectively incredible and unprecedented. Joking aside, these successes highlight the depth of our sporting human capital, and the truly commendable ability of those who develop, select and train it – a part of Italy that bucked the trend compared to almost everything else. Never before, however, has the ‘eternal ideal course’ (copyright Giambattista Vico) of our sporting identity presented itself to us in such clear terms as in 2026, represented by two distinct, separate and contrasting Italies: that of football and that of other sports. This is a theme I have already addressed in the past in "Il Foglio Sportivo", but one that is always worth revisiting and reflecting upon.

Let’s start with a simple fact: there are two Italies with contrasting sporting fortunes, with a spiralling decline in international competitiveness on the one hand and a level of excellence never before enjoyed to this extent on the other. There is another factor to consider: whether it be Angelo Binaghi or Sara Curtis, the ‘second’ Italy in sport is always highly combative in its opposition to the ‘first’, driven by a legitimate envy born of a relative lack of attention, and by equally legitimate ambitions for growth and recognition. The Italian football system is now caught in a double vice-grip: an external one, represented by the increasingly formidable international competition from richer and/or better-structured leagues (England, Spain, Germany and France, and to some extent Portugal) or simply richer nations (Turkey and Saudi Arabia); and the other internal, that of the Olympic sports, which leverages the possession of reputational capital – a currency that is not only symbolic but also potentially economic and political. It is no coincidence that this capital is reinforced by Mattarella’s decade-long, consistent work in sports pedagogy, in which – obviously against his intentions – the age-old theme of the exemplary value of athletes, always highlighted in his numerous speeches on sport, backfires on football as a mirror of the ‘scum of Romulus’ (copyright Vico, again, and Cicero), with its players who are not very successful and highly addicted to gambling; and, by contrast, it elevates the image of the ‘amateur sports’ championed by Gravini, in which – just to give an example – the multi-medal-winning Nadia Battocletti and Micol Majori manage to balance a life of gruelling training with their studies in building and civil engineering.

Let us continue our analysis with a topic of intriguing realism. This struggle, in fact, gives rise to two myths that need debunking. The first false myth: it is impossible to balance the two sporting Italies by treating them as equals. The successes of one are not mirrored by the decline of the other, acting as a counterbalance, as many sports fans naively tend to believe. In terms of the intensity of financial capital, human capital, infrastructure and the depth of social cultures required, contemporary football systems possess an industrial and managerial complexity that is incomparable to that of individual sports, whilst also mobilising, to a far greater extent, factors linked to the general aspects of their respective national systems. Comparing football to sports such as athletics, swimming or tennis is therefore like comparing the automotive industry – not coincidentally referred to as the ‘industry of industries’, a definition we could today extend to the semiconductor industry as well – to industrial sectors that are considerably smaller, almost artisanal by comparison. There is also a profound sporting difference. The numbers required by an intensely cooperative game such as football, and its extensive international competition, demand the selection of talent from pools of hundreds of thousands or millions of young and very young people. Becoming Sinner (or Kimi Antonelli) is, in terms of statistical probability, vastly easier than becoming Mbappé, given also the vastly different economic accessibility of the respective disciplines. Furthermore, the development of footballing talent requires an element of free, autonomous and informal childhood play that is unknown in the development of talent in other sports. Those who have recently flooded social media with facile anti-football jibes about ‘you can’t swim in the streets anymore’ should read what has been written on the subject by a highly intelligent ‘voice crying in the wilderness’ such as Filippo Galli.

Second false myth: there is no possibility that the ‘second Italy’ of sport could serve as a source of inspiration and guidance for the ‘first’, perhaps to restore it to its former glory. For example, the organisational model of Italian swimming and tennis is based on a highly centralised, personality-driven and long-established federal power structure, which is capable of successfully managing the various aspects of a system far less complex than that of football. These models, characterised by a blend of Machiavellianism and managerialism in Italian football, are literally impossible to replicate. We are faced with a system comprising a complex web of figures and powers that cannot be organised by ‘authoritarian’ means, characterised by little or no trust between the parties – a factor that prevents genuine and fair cooperation. Far-reaching plans and projects are therefore not possible; only limited actions, survival tactics and adaptations, tactics rather than strategies, and at best precise diagnoses of the situation – which, however, do not lead to action. Italian football is, at its core, unreformable, except through improbable schemes hovering between prophecy and utopia, which would require the intervention of authoritative and enlightened external dictators (Mattarella, again?).