Roberto Mancini and Luca Marchegiani told the truth, the situation in Italian soccer is desperate. It is a situation without solutions if one is forced to summon foreign athletes de facto, as they have trained and play abroad but with Italian passports.
The alternative is to summon youngsters who play in leagues lower than Serie A, so as Marchegiani points out the concept of merit is lacking, in fact “the national team was a point of arrival, now Mancini has to call up rookies.”
The problems to talk about would be too many and I get a headache just thinking about them. One out of all of them that has not been talked about concerns the issue of what interest foreign ownership of teams has in promoting Italian players when you can win by having 11 foreigners on the field as well. In Serie A alone there are as many as 7 foreign owners, accounting for 35% of the total. In Europe, only in Germany is there not this phenomenon, which in the Premiere League has reached 75% of ownership.
We are witnessing a clash of different cultures, where those with economic power will win. There is no more time for the discovery and formation of the heritage represented by young people playing soccer, interest has shifted only to the result of the teams, which in turn is independent of the function of the youth sector. Those with economic power can choose players for their teams all over the world, why should they pay attention to a narrower market?
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