The end of the affair? Italy losing heart in their passion for football

Tennis, along with rugby, F1 and winter sports, is pushing out calcio as Azzurri struggle again to make the World Cup, writes Rory Smith

‘The Italians may well still love football. But they would appear to like winning even more’

29 Mar 2026 - THE OBSERVER / Sport

Rory Smith

As a snapshot of the rude health of Italian sport, it is hard to do better than a single week in the middle of this month. First, in Rome, on 7 March, the country’s men’s rugby team recorded their first victory over England in the Six Nations. The celebrations in the rain at the Stadio Olimpico made clear that this was – as the captain Michele Lamaro said – a significant piece of “Italian history”.Kenneth Richmond/ Getty ImagesPitch battle: Italy are now excelling in more surprising sports, such as baseball.

Eight days later, in Shanghai, Kimi Antonelli won the second race of the Formula One season. In doing so, the 19-year-old became the first Italian in 20 years to stand on the top of a podium.

Both of those triumphs were uplifting, but what happened in between – at Daikin Park in Houston on 10 March – was of a different order. In the group stage of the World Baseball Classic, Italy somehow managed to beat a starspangled line-up from that sport’s unassailable superpower, the United States.

Admittedly, there might be just a little bit of an asterisk here: one of the team’s more familiar faces, the Los Angeles Angels pitcher Sam Aldegheri, was born in Italy, but the vast majority of his team-mates were not. Most had grown up with Italian ancestry in the United States. Others, like the coach Francisco Cervelli, had additional familial connections to Venezuela.

Still, Italy exulted in the improbable triumph. Aldegheri was flooded with messages from back home; the nation, he had been told, was staying up into the small hours of the night to watch. “We’re putting the flag on the map,” Cervelli said. “It’s Italy, everyone’s in the coffee shop, drinking wine, and it’s all about baseball now.”

That might be an exaggeration. Italy remains, at heart, a football nation. For the first time in a long time, though, that status appears to be under at least a small measure of review: it has not gone unnoticed that Italy appears to be excelling at almost every sport other than the one it cares about the most.

As its rugby and baseball teams were basking in glory, Italy’s leading club football sides were busy being eliminated from the Champions League – in the case of Inter Milan, thanks to defeats at home and away against Norway’s Bodø/ Glimt – and its men’s national team were facing the grim possibility of missing out on a third straight World Cup.

Italy’s victory against Northern Ireland on Thursday staves off that humiliation, at least for the time being, but speaking to people in Rome, the lack of trust in Gennaro Gattuso’s side beating Bosnia in Zenica on Tuesday is palpable. Italy were forced to watch both the 2018 and 2022 editions from home, the latter as reigning European champions. The fear that the same will happen again is overwhelming.

Quite how bad things have been is underlined by the fact that Italy have not played a knockout game at the men’s World Cup since winning the final of the 2006 edition, a source of national shame for a country that regards itself as one of the game’s heavyweights. Only Brazil, after all, have won the World Cup more.

There are a variety of reasons for this persistent failure: the decline of Serie A as an economic force; the country’s total inability to produce young players in the same volumes as Spain, France, Germany and, yes, England; what many regard as an over-reliance on tactical scheming instead of natural talent.

The effect, though, has been to broaden Italy’s sporting palate. The successes in rugby, F1 and baseball came just a few weeks after the close of the Winter Olympics, in which the home nation picked up 10 golds, finishing fourth in the medal table. Italy are world champions in men’s and women’s volleyball.

The greatest challenge to football’s hegemony, though, comes from tennis. Italy has spent most of the past two years or so in the grip of “Sinnermania”: the nationwide adoration of Jannik Sinner. When he faced his great rival, Carlos Alcaraz, in the final of an ATP event in Turin last year, as many as seven million people tuned in to watch.

Along with Sara Errani and Jasmine Paolini, Sinner has been credited with turning tennis into Italy’s second sport; there are, according to figures published this month by la Repubblica, now more than a million tennis players registered with the national federation. Just 20 years ago, that number was just a little shy of 200,000. Tennis is growing; calcio is stagnating. Italy may well still love football. But it would appear to like winning even more.