With just one Italian in Hellas Verona’s starting eleven, Richard Hough, author of Verona Campione, the Miracle of 1985, asks “Where are all the Italians?”
This week I thought I’d take the occasion of the international break to take a wider view. After all, contrary to Romeo’s brash assertion, there is a world without Verona’s walls.
I have mentioned previously that Hellas Verona’s starting eleven against Lazio on matchday two contained just one Italian player, goalkeeper Lorenzo Montipò. The other nationalities represented in that starting eleven included Brazil, Cameroon, Croatia, Denmark, France, Gambia, Germany, Morocco, Spain and Sweden.
Lazio’s starting eleven, for the record, contained, four Italians, including Mattia Zaccagni and Matteo Cancellieri, both of whom launched their senior careers in the gialloblu of Verona, alongside Nicolo Rovella and Ivan Provedel.
A dearth of Italian talent?
The problem isn’t that Verona isn’t producing and nurturing young Italian talent. Two of the club’s most promising prospects, Daniele Ghilardi and Diego Coppola, left during the summer for Roma and Brighton respectively. They were both on the verge of breaking into the Italian national team but so far have managed just two minutes of game between them this season (Coppola was a 95th minute sub as Brighton stunned Manchester City with a 2-1 home victory). It’s that young players are no longer finding a pathway into the first team squad. And those that do break through are swiftly sold on.
In recent years Verona has nurtured a steady stream of young Italian talent, including the likes of Filippo Terracciano, Mattia Zaccagni, Matteo Lovato, Destiny Udogie and Marash Kumbulla, who have each gone on to achieve varying degrees of success elsewhere. The Hellas squad has always contained a handful of local youngsters who had made the step up. That doesn’t seem to be the case this season, with highly regarded director of football Sean Sogliano increasingly looking to the international market as he attempts to pull off yet another unlikely miracle that will keep Hellas in the top tier for one more season.
But now that flow seems to have been reduced to a trickle and the only Italians in the 35 man Hellas squad this season are four goalkeepers. That is a pretty sorry state of affairs, but what are the factors underlying it?
In Italy, the step up from the youth team (primavera) to the first team is significant, so club’s favour seasoned pros from other leagues. Foreign players represent good value for money with potentially lucrative resale potential. Meanwhile, Italian academies seem to have fallen behind their international counterparts, not least in terms of resources, while the ex-German international Philipp Lahm has recently argued, somewhat controversially, that Italians are less physically and tactically equipped to deal with modern football than their international counterparts.
Of course, it hasn’t always been like this.
The cream of the crop
Back in the 1980s, Italian teams were permitted just two foreign players. That meant that those who arrived from overseas were the cream of the crop, the best of the best. The front cover of the 1984/85 Panini album features the likes of Souness, Platini, Laudrup, Zico, Socrates, Junior, Rummenigge and, of course, Maradona. Each of the 16 Serie A clubs seemed to have a bona fide international icon.
The strictly enforced rule meant that Italian players had the space to thrive, and it is surely no coincidence that the Italian national team enjoyed one of the most successful periods in its history, winning the World Cup in 1982 with a legendary squad that included the likes of Zoff, Scirea, Bergomi, Gentile, Tardelli, Conti and Rossi. In 1986, they were prematurely eliminated in the round of 16 by Platini’s France, who would go on to win the third-place play-off.
Remarkably, in the 1984/85 season, Hellas Verona fielded an all-Italian team.
It happened just once, on 16 December 1984.
Verona’s opponents that day, of course, were Lazio!
An all-Italian eleven
With Verona’s Danish striker Preben Elkjær Larsen nursing a lingering thigh strain and the German “Panzer” Hans-Peter Briegel suspended, Osvaldo Bagnoli chose an all-Italian lineup for the first and only time that season.
Lazio, meanwhile, was a club in crisis. Even the emerging talent of a young Michel Laudrup couldn’t inspire them.
Bagnoli had built his team around Roberto Tricella, Antonio Di Gennaro and Pierino Fanna. Those three Italian players represented the spine of Bagnoli’s team, with Tricella even emerging as a possible successor to the legendary Giuseppe Bergomi. All three would join the ill-fated 1986 World Cup squad alongside diminutive striker Giuseppe ‘Nanu’ Galderisi, himself touted as a possible successor to Paolo Rossi.
For Laudrup, it was yet another disappointing performance, as he acknowledged after the game:
‘I’ve had enough. We can’t go on like this. They all take it out on me but they never give me the ball. I’ve run 10km for nothing. On the pitch, it takes 11 players to make a team […] [Verona] – that’s a football team where everyone fights for each other. That would really be the ideal club for me.’
Verona’s all-Italian team brought an invaluable point back from the Stadio Olimpico that day, winning by a solitary goal. It was a point that would take them two points clear of Torino at the top of the table, and three clear of Inter and Sampdoria, with the Christmas break approaching.
While the chances of Hellas ever again playing with an all-Italian team are now seemingly impossible, perhaps it’s time to reconsider some kind of quota. I for one would love to see a few more Italians playing for my local team!
Richard Hough is the author of Verona Campione, the Miracle of 1985.