🏆 Italy in the play-offs, less joy more pain: old ghosts 🔙, taboos ❌
🏆 Italy in the play-offs, less joy more pain: old ghosts 🔙, taboos ❌ Italy is preparing to write another chapter in its football history: qualification for the World Cup will be decided through the playoffs, and it’s not the first time it has happened. Watch the entire Serie BKT live on OneFootball for just €9. 99 per month.
Click here to buy the LaB Channel Monthly Pass with no automatic renewal. On one hand, the Azzurri are one of the most successful national teams ever — with 4 World Cups in the trophy cabinet and 18 appearances in the final tournament — but on the other, every playoff is experienced with the anxiety and pressure of those who know they cannot afford to make a mistake. The contrast is all here: a historic powerhouse that, when it reaches a crossroads, often turns tension into trauma.
👀 A 'giant' at a CROSSROADS There’s a fascinating contradiction in Italy’s World Cup story: the Azzurri have won four editions — 1934, 1938, 1982 and 2006 — but they have also experienced the humiliation of failing to qualify. Before 2018, Italy had put together 14 consecutive appearances in the final tournament; that’s precisely why playoffs were never seen as normal, but as a red alert. ❌ 1958: the first SHOCK The first exclusion dates back to 1958, when Alfredo Foni’s Italy failed to qualify after losing 2-1 in Belfast to Northern Ireland.
That defeat became the symbol of a national team less brilliant than in the past and remained for decades as a historic wound. A match that went down in history as the one that made Italians realize that even the Azzurri could miss out on the World Cup. ✅ 1997: the only World Cup playoff WON The last World Cup playoff won by Italy dates back to 1997.
In qualifying for France 1998, the Azzurri eliminated Russia: 1-1 in Moscow and 1-0 in Rome, with the decisive goal scored by Pierluigi Casiraghi. It is the only truly positive modern precedent, and for that reason today it is remembered almost as a happy exception within a much more bitter story. 🧱 2017: everything falls apart against Sweden The playoff against Sweden for Russia 2018 permanently changed the collective perception of the national team.