The shock value is notable.
The Serie A champions not making it through the Champions League league phase. The current best in class and league leaders by 10 points going out to Bodo/Glimt. Two teams exiting in the play-off round this season. Three last season. Eliminations at the hands of Belgians and the Dutch in 2025, Norwegians and Turks in 2026. Discarded players like Ivan Perisic, Noa Lang, Victor Osimhen and Jens Petter Hauge coming back to haunt their old league.
Headlines calling it a “disaster”. Talk show hosts making sensationalist claims about Bodo/Glimt’s payroll being the equivalent of Catania, Salernitana, Vicenza and Benevento’s in Italy’s third division. The sheer embarrassment of it. A country’s anxieties stoked ahead of the national team’s own play-off against Northern Ireland next month, when the risk of missing out on another World Cup, the third in a row, hangs heavy once again.
It is, as they say on the continent, a bad moment. Italian football was hastily declared dead on Tuesday, then alive again on Wednesday when Atalanta saved face against Dortmund and Juventus found the three goals needed to force extra time with Galatasaray before bowing out after extra time.
Failure makes noise. It is louder than relative success. Italian clubs have made eight European finals in the past five years. They began last season’s inaugural Champions League league phase as leaders in the UEFA co-efficient, starting it with five teams.
The national team won something as recently as 2021. Its youth teams have been champions of Europe at under-17 and under-19 level, and have reached the final of the Under-20 World Cup.
In the age of digital amnesia, doom-scrolling and the hot-take economy, these achievements are swiped past and quickly forgotten. That winning feeling is brief, as Italy discovered in 2022 when they experienced the trauma of losing a World Cup play-off semi-final to North Macedonia so soon after beating England at Wembley in the Euros final, having knocked out Belgium and Spain along the way.
Defeats linger. Inter’s 5-0 loss in the Champions League final to PSG in May, the club’s third European final in five years, left a far bigger echo than dumping Bayern Munich and Barcelona out of the competition over 360 minutes of football. Jose Mourinho’s tirade against Anthony Taylor and his refereeing team after the 2023 Europa League final in Budapest cast a shadow not only over the occasion but also over how Roma came within a penalty shootout of winning back-to-back European trophies. Fiorentina lost the first of consecutive Conference League finals in stoppage time to West Ham.
It raises the question: would attitudes be different about Serie A if its representatives had prevailed in a couple more than two of those eight finals since the beginning of the 2020s? Might opinions be more forgiving today if they’d swept all of UEFA’s competitions as was a possibility in 2023? Or if they’d added a Champions League to the Conference Leagues and Europa Leagues won by Roma against Arne Slot’s Feyenoord in 2022 and Atalanta against Xabi Alonso’s hitherto unbeaten Bayer Leverkusen in 2024?
When it comes to club football, Italy has, in many respects, overcome or outperformed its own shortcomings in infrastructure, spending power and talent development this decade. But perceptions remain unchanged. Anything less than the imperiousness of the late 80s through to the new millennium, when Serie A was the undisputed best league in the world, is taken as evidence of interminable decline when the league has competed relatively well given where it stands in the stratified economic landscape.
Unless the birth rate spikes and delivers a golden generation, sovereign wealth funds suddenly start investing in Italian clubs, leagues and federations do away with cost controls, and a black swan hits the Premier League, those days aren’t coming back. And besides, even in the golden age, it was not unheard of for Milan to lose to Rosenborg or Inter to flounder against Malmo, Helsingborg and IFK Goteborg.
The sweeping generalisations of the last 48 hours either don’t wish to acknowledge Serie A is held to a standard it can no longer reach (particularly in the short-term) or fail to engage on club or season-specific reasons for this season’s results.
Antonio Cote’s fine domestic record has not translated to European football (Carlo Hermann/AFP via Getty Images)
Napoli, for instance, have a coach in Antonio Conte who over-delivers in leagues and under-delivers in the Champions League. They were also faced with an unprecedented injury crisis and haven’t been able to count on the likes of Romelu Lukaku and Kevin De Bruyne this season. Reaching the quarter-finals two years ago was also the furthest Napoli have ever been in this competition.
Inter have a coach in Cristian Chivu who is in his first big job. Juventus and Atalanta’s attempts to move on from Max Allegri and Gian Piero Gasperini did not produce the desired results. Both changed coach three times in 2025. In Juventus’ case, the transfer spend overseen by former sporting director Cristiano Giuntoli 18 months ago has lumbered the team with an expensive and underwhelming squad.
Giuntoli paid with his job in the summer and, in addition to a replacement for Thiago Motta and Igor Tudor, the club needed an entirely new structure headed by general manager turned chief executive Damien Comolli.
Not to get too micro, but moments matter, too. A year ago, Serie A went into the final day of the league phase with Inter, Milan and Atalanta in the top eight. Two unexpectedly dropped out. Milan dropped the ball in Zagreb, while Atalanta, more understandably, were held to a draw in Barcelona. A similar dynamic occurred this season. Atalanta looked almost certain to receive a bye after beating ‘world champions’ Chelsea in December, only to unexpectedly suffer a 15-minute blackout to Athletic and lose to Union Saint-Gillois.
Meanwhile, Inter won their first four games only to lose to Atletico by dint of a stoppage-time corner kick, and Liverpool on account of a soft penalty. They hit the woodwork three times against Bodo and had the higher xG in both games. A toxic and highly strung Derby d’Italia before the first leg helped neither Inter nor Juventus in the play-off round.
Juventus, in particular, had played, unjustly, with 10 men at San Siro for a half, equalising in the 82nd minute, only to lose in the last second. An injury to their best defender, Gleison Bremer, early in Istanbul, and the red card Juan Cabal picked up so soon after coming on for Andrea Cambiaso, who had been taken off at half-time by Luciano Spalletti to avoid Juventus potentially playing with 10 men for the second time in three days, compromised the tie. It hasn’t helped that Juventus goalkeeper Michele Di Gregorio’s form has dropped off a cliff. He was benched for the return leg, which Juventus still took to extra time despite the injustice of another absurd red card, this time for Lloyd Kelly.
Lloyd Kelly was given a harsh straight red card (Stefano Guidi/Getty Images)
To some, these are small margins. To others, excuses. But the devil isn’t in a headline or the online reels: it’s in the detail. This is not as bad as when Serie A only had two automatic Champions League places and the third team was forced to and often failed to make it past a preliminary play-off, let alone overcome one for the last 16. This is not as galling as the years Milan and Inter spent outside of the Champions League and Serie A had to depend on Juventus to keep up appearances or Roma to make a Champions League semi-final after the ‘Romantada’ of 2018.
The talent coming through may not be on a par with the overlapping golden generations of the 1980s and 90s, sure. But Gigio Donnarumma, Riccardo Calafiori, Sandro Tonali, Federico Chiesa, Michael Kayode, Guglielmo Vicario and Destiny Udogie all play in the Premier League.
On DAZN at the weekend, the former Milan midfielder Cristian Brocchi said he didn’t want to hear people saying Italy doesn’t produce players when Francesco Pio Esposito, Marco Palestra, Giovanni Leoni, Antonio Vergara, Davide Bartesaghi, Niccolo Pisilli and Honest Ahanor have all emerged in the last year.
These are good players. Esposito, Palestra and Leoni have a chance to be very good, if not great.
Italian football has, undeniably, been more volatile than its peers in Europe over recent years. Euros have been won, World Cups missed. An all-time great Champions League semi-final has been followed by a historically bad final (but a final all the same!). No one has retained the Scudetto this decade (that’s a good thing, right?). And while it seems impossible to catch the Premier League in TV rights, progress is being made to make Serie A more stable.
It stands a chance of becoming the best of the rest as a league, rather than settling to become something for one or two clubs to do between Champions League games, as is the case with La Liga for Real Madrid and Barcelona, the Bundesliga for Bayern, and Ligue 1 for PSG. More than half the clubs in Serie A are foreign-owned and, in the case of the Milan clubs, finally in solid hands. This is investment Germany can’t attract because of its 50+1 rule. Those takeovers aren’t happening in Spain either, in part, because of the socios model. Co-hosting Euro 2032 with Turkey means stadium reform, as anyone who has been to the Artemio Franchi in Florence will have noticed.
Sure, Serie A might not be as good as it used to be in the 90s. But nor is it as bad as they’d have you believe.