Italy Has Failed to Qualify for Three Straight World Cups. Are the Country’s Immigration Policies to Blame?

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.”