Few voices in the history of Italian football carry the specific authority of a man who won it all – the Scudetto, the Champions League, the World Cup – and then watched the system that produced him slowly hollow out.
When that man speaks about structural failure, it is not pessimism. It is diagnosis.
Sitting down with Gazzetta dello Sport in the days before the Champions League Final between PSG and Arsenal – a fixture that featured not a single Italian club – Andrea Pirlo delivered a verdict on the state of Italian football that was as measured as it was devastating.
The game has left Italy behind, he said. And nobody has done enough about it.
A Damning Verdict: ‘Nothing Has Changed’
Asked what is missing for Italian clubs to return to the summit of European football, Pirlo did not reach for comfortable platitudes. He reached for the truth.
“A bit of everything, including the mentality to play a different kind of football. If you look at the teams reaching the finals, they always play attacking football. Obviously, they can also make investments we can’t afford. Once upon a time, the best players used to come to Italy; now they go elsewhere. This is the difference.”
The investment gap is no abstraction. Deloitte’s 2024 Football Money League placed Juventus eleventh, Inter fourteenth, and Milan sixteenth in global club revenues – with no Italian side approaching the financial firepower of Manchester City, Real Madrid, or PSG.
In 2023–24, Premier League clubs spent over €3 billion in gross transfer fees. Serie A clubs combined spent less than a third of that figure.
The best players no longer arrive at Milanello or Vinovo to define their prime years. They arrive, occasionally, to wind them down.
“We’d need to make rules to incentivise clubs to invest. Unfortunately, we’ve been out of the World Cup three times in a row, and nothing has changed.”
That final clause is the one that lingers. Not ‘little has changed.’ Not ‘progress has been slow.’ Nothing.
A Warning Ignored: Pirlo Has Seen This Before
Pirlo is not the first legend of the Azzurri to arrive at this conclusion, and the repetition itself is part of the indictment.
Roberto Baggio has offered his own damning assessment of Italian football’s structural decay, pointing to the collapse of the talent pipeline and the cultural timidity that has replaced the ambition of earlier generations.
Arrigo Sacchi has warned for years that Italian football remains trapped in defensive pragmatism – playing not to lose rather than to win – and that without a cultural shift toward pressing, intensity, and proactive football, the decline will only accelerate.
The warnings have come from every corner. They have been heard and then filed away.
Pirlo’s own career stands as evidence of what Italian football once was capable of producing – a midfielder of such rare technical and intellectual quality that he reshaped the position globally, developed through the academies of Brescia and then refined at the very highest level with Milan and Juventus.
The system that made him is not the system that exists today.
Italy’s 2023 U21 European Championship campaign ended in the group stage, extending a pattern of underachievement at youth level that speaks directly to the lack of minutes afforded to homegrown players in Serie A’s first-team squads.
The structural problems Pirlo identifies have been examined from the outside too – former European champions who played in Serie A at its peak consistently point to the same failures: the financial gap, the tactical conservatism, the absence of long-term institutional vision.
The diagnosis never changes because the condition never changes.
A Generation Lost: Italy’s World Cup Silence
For Pirlo, the abstraction of structural decline becomes personal when the conversation turns to the Nazionale.
Three consecutive World Cup absences – 2018, 2022, and now the spectre of 2026 – represent something that cuts deeper than sporting failure.
It is a rupture in the fabric of Italian cultural life.
“I’m sad that Italy have not qualified for the World Cup for three consecutive times. My sons would love to watch Italy, and I’d love it too. The World Cup is a moment for everyone to stay united… Unfortunately, missing out on three qualifications is sad for everyone.”
Euro 2020 – won in Wembley against England on penalties under Roberto Mancini – offered the illusion of revival.
What followed confirmed it was an interruption, not a renaissance.
The systemic problems that produced the 2018 playoff disaster against Sweden were never genuinely addressed.
The broader picture of Serie A’s competitive decline only reinforces the scale of the challenge facing Italian football at every level.
When asked where he would choose to play if still a professional today, Pirlo did not hesitate. “At this moment, with Italy no longer among the top leagues, I’d surely play in the Premier League.”
A World Cup winner, a two-time European champion at club level, the defining midfielder of his generation – and his considered verdict is that Serie A is no longer the destination a player of his calibre would choose.
Will Anyone Listen This Time?
The Champions League Final Pirlo watched from the outside featured PSG and Arsenal – clubs backed by sovereign wealth and a Premier League ecosystem that outspends Serie A by a margin that grows wider each transfer window.
Inter Milan reached that final, a genuine achievement, but they remain the last Italian club to have won it – in 2010, fifteen years ago and counting.
Pirlo has said what Baggio has said, what Sacchi has said, what a generation of Italian football’s greatest minds have said.
The FIGC has cycled through leadership. The Lega has debated TV rights and stadium reform. The calendars have turned.
And as Pirlo himself put it, with the quiet authority of someone who has earned the right to say it plainly: nothing has changed.
The question is not whether Italian football understands the problem. It has always understood the problem. The question is whether it finally has the courage to fix it.
