The qualifying playoff for the 2026 World Cup is still far away but monta the tension in the environment surrounding the Italian national team. The news is not yet official but everything indicates that it will not be possible to find the time to allow the Italian coach Gennaro Gattuso to reunite the group to best prepare the match. challenge from inside or outside against Northern Ireland. As anticipated by Corriere della Seraover the next week the Serie A football league will make the officialimpossibility to free up a few days in the busy competitive calendar of Italian football to dedicate to the national team. There disappointment on the part of the coach, who had repeatedly reiterated the need to have Italy’s players available for as long as possible, it is evident and demonstrates how the support of the football system for the needs of the national team is largely solo Of facade.
No postponement of the 30thanew internship
Immediately after the draw for the UEFA qualifying playoffs in view of the 2026 World Cup, the Italian coach had expressed without mincing words the need to work on a group that still knows little about itself: “Stage before the match? It’s not up to me to decide, we have a president. I’m a coach. Of course the more days we have the better”. The potential double match on 26 and 31 March which could give Italy the ticket to the North American World Cup is too important for Italian football and Buffon himself had said he was certain that, in the end, Gattuso would “invented something”. According to what we read in the piece published by CorSeraHowever, when the Lega Calcio Serie A communicates advances and postponements of the matches at the beginning of February and the quarter-finals of the Italian Cup, it will be official that financial logic has prevailed over Italy’s needs. The ideal solution is to move the entire 30 as a wholea Serie A day, scheduled for March 22nd, it seemed immediately too complicated and was immediately removed from the list of options.
However, it would still have been possible to find a solution, perhaps moving the quarterfinals of the Italian Cup to free up a few days for one or more internships in Coverciano. The dates indicated would have been 2-3 or 9-10 February, using these slots for the quarterfinals of the national cup so as to allow Gattuso to have as many players as possible available. Just when these internships seemed possible, here comes the League she got in the wayrefusing to move the Monday postponement. At that point Gattuso would have blurted out, saying that “if these are the conditions, it is better not to do the internship”. Even if it would have only been a few days of work, the coach could have evaluate new grafts before the call-ups or try tactical solutions before the double match but there was nothing to be done.
The only concession from the Lega Serie A was the promise of move up most of the championship races scheduled between March 21st and 22nd, so as to start the meeting in Coverciano a day earlier. Once again the bombastic declarations on the importance of the national team were revealed little more than hot air.
When money from television rights is involved, the reasons for football must go aside, with all due respect to those who believed that, faced with the possibility of a third world championship consecutive without Italy, the ranks would have closed somewhat.
