The defeat of Italian soccer is in the numbers: no youth, no world cup

The 12th edition of the ReportCalcio, prepared by the Figc Study Center in collaboration with Arel (Agency for Research and Legislation) and PwC Italia (PricewaterhouseCoopers), has been presented. Published in full on the Federcalcio website.

It clearly emerges that the difficulty of our national team is largely determined by the difficulty of young players to find space in Serie A teams. In fact, the average number of Italian Under-21 players in the Serie A league is 2.7 boys per team. The percentage of minutes played by Italian Under-21 players out of the total minutes in the league is 4 percent. Those deployed as starters per team per game in Serie A is 0.43.

Returning to the national discourse, emphasis should be placed on the fact that of the 75 players born after 2001 who have taken part in a Serie A match, only 46% are of Italian nationality (35). In addition to not having too many youngsters in the Italian league, more than half are not even eligible for Italy. In the last convocations for the U21 national team, coach Nicolato called 27 players and only 11 were those from Serie A (including 5 boys from 2000).

The second glaring difference concerns, unfortunately, the amount of national U21 players fielded in their respective leagues: as mentioned above, in Serie A only 46% are eligible for the Italian national team. In Spain as many as 72% of the U21 youngsters deployed are Spanish. In France they are 64 percent and in England 58 percent. Germany’s is the only league where there is a lower percentage than ours (43 percent), even though their youngsters participate more in clubs. The Italian U21s as a whole have collected 112 starting appearances since the beginning of the season, while the German ones already have 137 appearances (and let’s leave out that they have only 18 teams in the Bundesliga).

Thus, a depressing picture emerges for the Italian league. We are not even close to the levels of the other major leagues. Moreover, the young U21s present in Serie A are not included in the top teams.