The decline of Italian football, a mirror of the country

AC Milan is out of the Champions League, too. Nothing wrong in losing to mighty Manchester United, of course. But the thrashing 0-4 is just another confirmation of the long decline of our football. There's the serious chance that, for the third year in a row, no Italian teams will play in the quarter-finals of Europe's most prestigious tournament. Don't be deceived by Inter Milan's first leg victory against Chelsea (quite a lucky one, and let's wait for the match in London next week): Inter is an Italian team only on paper, and it's been built by outspending the rivals for years, building up a huge debt. The crisis of football, a mirror of Italy in so many ways, is here to stay.

In the Eighties and Nineties, Italians boasted that Serie A was the toughest league in the world. They were probably right: our teams would regularly advance in all sorts of European cups, the best world players would come to play in Italy. Then, things stalled. AC Milan's triumphs masked the progressive loss of competitiveness of the others. When English and Spanish teams where transforming their clubs in merchandising machines, rooting out hooligans from their brand-new stadiums, or scouring the world for football talent, Italians got stuck. Today, stadiums are decrepit and still city-owned. Referee scandals have fed the never-ending suspicions that game officials are bribed. Italian prospects grew scarce, and few teams realised the potential of the opening up of frontiers.

Now, I can already hear some of you saying: “Don't forget that Italy won the last World Cup! English and Spanish teams are in debt up to the neck, wait until the collapse of the Premiere League!”. Right. It's true that lots of the richest teams are on the verge of financial breakdown, and we're still World Champions until next July. But this sounds so much like the usual refrain by Berlusconi during the financial crisis, that hit Italy less than other countries. Steady as we go, our downhills are less evident. But only because we're always flat or slightly going down anyway, while the others enjoyed a boom for years.

Once, a key to any conversation with adult males around the world was muttering the names of our football players; now, I find taxi drivers that know Chelsea's or Liverpool's line-ups by heart, but when it comes to Italy they only remember Baggio, or Totti if you're lucky. In the next World Cup, the world will discover Italian football players they have never heard of.

Clinging to our past seems to be a strategy also of Italy's manager, Marcello Lippi: he's still leaning heavily on the core of players that – against all odds – won in 2006. But time takes its toll on the best athletes. There's only one potential game-changer: Italy's knack for pulling together, right when nobody is expecting that anymore. It worked wonders four years ago, when the country was still shocked by a huge referee scandal, which united and motivated the Nazionale's players. But now, in the air there's something different: only resignation for a much-debated decline, with solutions nowhere to be seen. Precisely like everything else in Italy.