A World Cup without Italy is going to be so incredibly weird

Italy have not qualified for the 2018 World Cup. This is weird, and it’s going to get weirder.

It’s not just weird because Italy are four-time winners of the trophy, or have one of the world’s most established footballing cultures and professional leagues, or have been to every tournament since 1958. Though that’s all true. It’s a weird at a deeper, more existential level.

Perhaps it’s the relative infrequency of the games, or the fact that the World Cup is such a significant occasion, but international football teams, particularly the big ones, have specific roles to play in the great drama of the World Cup. And these roles have quite astonishing powers of persistence, even in the face of inconvenient reality. The notion that Brazil are a thrilling, sexy football team that everybody should fear, for example, has survived not one but two spells under Dunga’s tender ministrations.

This matters when it comes to Italy because their role, how they should be as a team, goes beyond the usual stereotypes of defensive rigour and breathtaking cynicism. When it comes to the World Cup, they are one of the sides that should always be there. Good, bad, or scandal-ridden, they are a key part of the tournament furniture.

As noted above, this isn’t just because they’re a massive football nation and it’s been generations since they missed one. It’s that Italy are a true tournament team. Most teams that attend the competition can’t win it; only a few can. But any given squad of Italian players could win the trophy, or crash out of the group stage, and it would make a certain amount of sense either way. Their last two victories, after all, came in the midst of domestic disarray: match-fixing in 1986 and calciopoli in 2006. Then, in 2010, they couldn’t get past New Zealand. This is their job, in international football. This is what Italy are for. To turn up to the World Cup, and promise all its possibilities.

So next summer’s tournament will feel like returning home and being unable to shake the nagging feeling that something, somehow, is slightly wrong. You can’t quite put your finger on it, but it’s definitely there. Obviously you’ve got plenty to do, so you try to put it from your mind. You potter around, you take care a couple of chores ... and then it hits you. Didn’t there used to be a table over there?

And so, next summer, at some point in the buildup, you’ll suddenly realise “Huh, I haven’t seen a replay of Marco Tardelli celebrating”. As the group stage ends, you’ll think to yourself “Wait, shouldn’t a load of professional footballers in extremely well-cut suits be ducking from a hail of tomatoes about now?” And when you think back to the 2018 World Cup, years after the event, at Habitation Vault 646’s monthly pub quiz, it will take you a second to remember that Italy didn’t crash out in the group stage. Nor did they grind their way to the quarter-finals. They didn’t even walk off the trophy. No, they didn’t attend at all.

This is not to say that Italy will be much missed in the sporting sense. Beyond Gianluigi Buffon’s chance to say goodbye to the world, there’s not a huge amount to get excited about, and manager Gian Piero Ventura seems to have no idea what to do with the talent he has. In qualifying they were comfortably better than Albania, Israel, Georgia, and Macedonia, but were taken apart by Spain in Madrid, and then failed to make any real impression on a well-organised Swedish team in the playoff.

More generally, since their victory in 2006 they’ve won precisely one World Cup game, finishing bottom of their group in 2010 and then third in 2014. Yes, a mess of an Italy side stands just as much of a chance as a good one. Maybe even more. But the evidence suggests that Russia 2018 would have been another adventure in underperformance, frustration, and recrimination.

At least it won’t be that. But it won’t be anything, really, except strange and unsettling. Whether the tournament is one of the greats, or a bloated mess, it will never seem entirely complete. At some fundamental level, a World Cup without Italy doesn’t quite make sense.