Italy isn't at the World Cup. Look Where Its Talent Went Instead
07 July 2026
Our founder spent the last week of June in Tuscany and Umbria, and reported back on the heat, the welcome, the architecture, and a pizza he swears was the finest he has eaten. One evening, he went to a village bar with his family to watch England play DR Congo and found the whole village there, not for the football especially, but for the ritual of it: a drink, a chat, a few snacks the owner had set out, winding down the day together. Had Italy been playing in the World Cup, they would have watched it together there, and were happy to accommodate a few England fans using their TV. It was a lovely slice of Italian life.
A great deal has been written about why Italy, a four-time world champion and the country that lives and breathes football, is not at the 2026 tournament at all. The three failed qualifications in a row, the ageing league, the missing striker, so we won’t add to that pile. The more interesting observation is that Italian sporting talent has not vanished at all. A quick look at the rest of the sport this year shows a nation thriving, with plenty of winners and champions for fans to follow.
Another TSP Theory!
Here is a thought that we can’t prove but can’t shake either. In a previous article, we wrote about how each country has a finite number of sports fans. Using that theory, it is safe to assume that every country has a finite pool of exceptional athletes, men and women born with the physiology, competitiveness, and coordination to reach the top of some sport. Which sport they end up in is not fixed at birth. It is shaped by opportunity, by money, by which game the local club plays, by who their heroes are. The golfer Ernie Els was a junior tennis player, reportedly good enough to have played professionally. Roger Federer was a promising footballer as a boy before he chose the racket. Many NFL stars could have played in the NBA. Pick up one ball or implement instead of another, and the world gets a different champion.
It happened in Italy. Marcell Jacobs, who won Olympic 100 metres gold, tried everything as a boy, swimming, basketball, football, and by his own account, a school coach told him that since he was fast but not much of a footballer, he should try athletics. He did, becoming the fastest man in the world.
Is it possible that this generation of gifted young Italians grew up dreaming, as all Italians do, of football? But some of them looked at the current state of the game in Italy, a league that gives its own under-21s almost no minutes and would rather buy a finished foreigner than blood a teenager, saw a pathway blocked and the chance of making a living precarious, so instead they picked up something else. A racket. A crash helmet. A pair of spikes or a rugby ball? The talent didn’t disappear when football faltered; it looked elsewhere.
No study proves this, but look at the sports where Italy is thriving and see if it doesn’t ring true.
Tennis: A Whole Country Rising
Start with tennis, because the rise over the last five years is remarkable, and it’s not just about Jannick Sinner.
Sinner is the world number one and, as we write, defending his Wimbledon title. In May, he completed the Career Golden Masters with victory at the Italian Masters in Rome. Behind him stands a system. Italy has six men in the world’s top 100, the fourth most of any nation. Lorenzo Musetti is ranked in the top five. Jasmine Paolini is the world number 4 in the women’s game. As a nation, Italy has won the Davis Cup three years in a row, beating Spain in the 2025 final. And this summer, Flavio Cobolli, who is not even Italy’s best player, reached the French Open final, only the third Italian man in the modern era to do so, on a weekend when three Italians reached the Roland Garros quarter-finals. He has backed up that performance with a run into the second week at Wimbledon. This is not a fluke. It is a defining era for Italian tennis, built on careful planning.
Last year, This Sporting Planet spoke to Stefano Semeraro, around the time of Jannik Sinner’s doping ban. We asked him about the boom and what was behind it. Semeraro, who writes for La Stampa and edits Il Tennis Italiano, the world's oldest tennis magazine, watches this more closely than most. There is no single secret, he told us. It is a mix: more tournaments at every level, which keeps costs down for young players trying to come through; strong coaching; a federation that learned to work with the private game rather than against it; and a deliberate push onto hard courts. Add a generational talent like Sinner (a hard-court specialist), a little luck, and a whole country rises together.
It is the mirror image of the football story. Where the football pathway narrowed, the tennis pathway widened, cheaper, better coached, more open, and the talent poured through it. Semeraro nodded to the link himself: the tennis boom has coincided with, and not been hurt by, the downturn in football fortunes, and, as a result, eyes and ambition have been drawn elsewhere.
He also spoke about the case that shadowed Sinner’s rise, the ban he accepted after a banned substance got into his system through a member of his team. His framing stayed with us: Sinner was innocent of any intent to cheat, but responsible, as any professional is, for the people around him. At home in Italy, he said, the affair barely dented a player who remained adored, still skiing and still filming videos for fans throughout his suspension. Outside Italy, in the locker room, he sensed more coolness and a shadow following Sinner than at home. The more the wider game doubted him, the tighter Italy held its champion.
Motorsport, Rugby and the Winter Games
Motor racing tells the same story. Ferrari is the iconic brand in Formula One, but this year, a nineteen-year-old from Bologna, Kimi Antonelli, is leading the drivers’ world championship in only his second season, driving for Mercedes. A long season can still turn. But an Italian teenager leading the sport is something the country has waited a generation for, and Ferrari, the most Italian thing in all of motorsport, carries the national hope every year and is a genuine challenger. So, Ferrari to win the constructors’ and Kimi the drivers’ championship might be the best outcome for Italian F1 fans. Can you imagine what would happen if Antonelli won the world championship while driving for Ferrari?
MotoGP is a national obsession in Italy as well. The machinery at the front is Italian to the core. Aprilia and Ducati dominate the grid, and Marco Bezzecchi and Fabio Di Giannantonio are two leading riders in the overall standings, following in the footsteps of the legendary, seven-time champion Valentino Rossi.
Even rugby, long the poor relation, has turned around. Under coach Gonzalo Quesada, Italy finished fourth in this year’s Six Nations, matching their best-ever finish, and beat England for the first time in the championship’s history, 23-18 in Rome. The old “whipping boys” tag has quietly been retired.
Finally, in February 2026, Italy hosted the world. The Milan-Cortina Winter Olympics put the country centre stage, and it found a home hero in Federica Brignone, who returned from a serious knee injury to win two golds on the snow.
Taken together, a golden Winter Games, a tennis boom, an emerging F1 star and Italian dominance on two wheels have given Italian sport plenty to celebrate, even in a summer without the football.
The Norwegian Mirror
Here is the irony. The country that knocked Italy out is the perfect proof of the argument as a whole.
Norway topped Italy’s qualifying group and sent them into the play-off, where they lost, then reached the World Cup knockout stages for the first time in twenty-eight years. A nation of five million, cold and dark half the year, with no obvious business being a football power. And they did it on purpose. Where Italy let its pathway close, Norway built one from the grass up: indoor pitches to beat the weather, elite and grassroots clubs kept deliberately intertwined so young players stay in their communities, volunteer coaches properly trained. Erling Haaland and Martin Odegaard were both coached, as boys, by unpaid volunteers at local clubs.
Norway also gives its girls the same pitches, coaching and investment as its boys, and was among the first nations to pay its women’s and men’s teams equally. The result is a proud women’s side and a Ballon d’Or winner in Ada Hegerberg. It is the lesson Scandinavia keeps teaching that when you open the door equally, champions follow, and the same corner of the world that made equal opportunity a principle has produced a long line of world-beating female golfers, too.
Norway built the door, and its talent walked through. Italy let one close, and its talent went looking for others. A nation’s sporting success depends less on the talent it is born with than on the paths it builds for that talent to travel.
Nature needs nurturing
An outsider may consider Italy solely as a football-mad country and think that with no team at the World Cup, it is in the sporting doldrums. But it is a nation winning almost everywhere else you look, on a tennis court, in a racing seat, on a motorbike, on the snow, even on a rugby pitch. The passion hasn’t gone anywhere. And football, the game Italy loves most, will rise again.
The talent still exists; the youth teams still win; the fans still fill the grounds. The structure around them broke, but structures can be rebuilt.
Investor money is watching Serie A closely, drawn by exactly that gap between how far the league has fallen and how much it could still be worth. Money tends to arrive when the fundamentals are sound and the price is low. If Italian football reopens the pathway it closed and provides opportunities for its younger talent, as tennis and motorsport now do, the flow will reverse, and maybe other sports will suffer as a result.
Until then, there is plenty of other sport for Italian fans to enjoy. And talent, in the end, is like water. Block one channel, and it doesn’t disappear; it finds another way down the hill. Italian talent is running through a dozen other sports right now, and it is a joy to watch.
