BERLIN (AFP) – Italy are back at square one after a humbling exit from Euro 2024 as Luciano Spalletti was tasked on Sunday with revitalising the Azzurri despite his role in an embarrassing title defence.
A shockingly one-sided 2-0 defeat to Switzerland in Berlin, where Italy won the 2006 World Cup, led to last-16 elimination after Spalletti’s side had scraped through the group stage by the skin of their teeth.
Saturday’s limp loss was one of the lowest points in the history of one of the world’s most important football nations, and the latest in a worryingly large number of recent humiliations, including missing out on the last two World Cups.
Italy were pinned back in the first half and after Ruben Vargas’ brilliant strike doubled the Swiss’ lead seconds after half-time they were easily held at arm’s length.
On Italy’s national broadcaster RAI, the verdict was swift and brutal: “unacceptable”, “slow and predictable”, said disconsolate commentators, while the headlines in Sunday’s newspapers ranged from “Shameful” to suggesting the players take up farming.
Spalletti’s future as Italy coach had been in doubt ahead of a press conference organised on Sunday afternoon.
However the 65-year-old was confirmed in his post as Italy’s football chief Gabriele Gravina said a “long-term project” could not be abandoned.
“The match last night brought us back down to zero, and it’s from there that we need to start again,” said Spalletti.
“We deservedly qualified for the last 16, even if it was hard-earned. We knew we had a very hard group.
“But up until we qualified for the knockout stage I could see the team react and adapt to difficulties in a way which was clearly different to what we saw last night.”
Spalletti had cut a less lucid figure on Saturday evening, complaining that his players did not come into the tournament in the right condition to compete and suggesting that Italy were affected by the heat in Berlin’s Olympiastadion.
It was not a convincing explanation for such disjointed performances over four matches and those comments followed a series of bizarre outbursts from Spalletti, who took the Italy job last summer with a huge amount of credit accrued after leading Napoli to a historic Serie A title.
But his reputation has taken a big hit after an awful tournament in which took a drastic turn for the worse after being comprehensively outclassed by Spain in their second Group B fixture.
“There’s only one way to change things and that’s that when we fall – and unfortunately we fall quite often – we learn how to get back up again,” Gravina told reporters.
Gravina urged Italy’s professional clubs to do more to help bring through talent after a series of promising recent results for the country’s youth teams, including victory at the Under-17 European Championship earlier this month.
“We can’t imagine that a (Kylian) Mbappe or Cristiano Ronaldo or (Lionel) Messi will suddenly come on the scene, so we need to be patient,” said Gravina.
Italy had come into the tournament as a work in progress and there were promising signs from their opening 2-1 win over Albania.
However, things rapidly went downhill with a single-goal thumping at the hands of Spain, in which goalkeeper Gianluigi Donnarumma kept the score respectable, and it took a 98th-minute equaliser against Croatia to send Italy through.
Captain Donnarumma was Italy’s only real bright spot at what was otherwise a miserable tournament and he was visibly upset at the nature of Italy’s elimination.
“It hurts, it really hurts. We can only say sorry to everyone, we were disappointing today and they deserved to win,” said Donnarumma.
“It’s difficult to digest but that’s how it went, we can’t do anything about it.”
His apologies fell on deaf ears however as angry fans in the stands unloaded their frustration on a team which enters yet another period of transition and soul-searching.
