Oriali, Mancini and the Turned Backs: Italy Enters a Difficult Phase

Italy does not lack memory. Italy lacks a future in which to place its memory. On the stands of the Allianz Stadium, a minute of silence was announced. Not for a defeat, and not for an injury. A minute of silence for Sandro Mazzola — the man who wore the Inter shirt and the Italy shirt, the man who once brought Ronaldo to Serie A from a director's chair. The whole stadium stood. But in one corner of the stands, some people turned their backs to the pitch. A few hundred kilometres away, at Pinetina, Gabriele Oriali was preparing for Italy's first training session under the returning Roberto Mancini. People asked him about tactics, about the game against Belgium. He answered about the backs. "I remember the first training sessions at Pinetina," Oriali told Rai 2. "Mazzola was one of the first to welcome me with open arms. One day after training he drove me home. People could not believe it when they saw him. I only have lovely memories of him — as a team-mate, as a man, and as a great director who brought Ronaldo to Serie A." Then his voice changed: "The Ultras turning their backs was an ugly image. I hope these people are identified and removed from the stadium. It is a disgrace. There are heroes who transcend the shirts they wear." A minute of silence that is not respected leaves a country with what, exactly, to respect itself by? That was the opening of a week in Italian football. But it may matter more than the week itself. Italy have begun their first training camp under Mancini. Friday's game against Belgium will be his first of this spell, before an away trip to Turkey on 28 September and then France on 2 October. Three matches, three opponents, and one question larger than all of them: is Italian football still itself? Oriali is back alongside Mancini after their previous spell together — the one they crowned with the Euro 2026 title. I was at Wembley that night, in the press area, when England collapsed and Italy sang. It is one of the deepest professional memories I carry — not the goals, but the way two nations looked into the same dark pool and saw two different people. That win was not simply a trophy; it was a sentence suspended. And now Mancini is back. Oriali hides nothing. "It is certainly not the best moment for Italian football," he said. "We know we are heading towards a difficult phase." He added: "The players need to be aware of that too. What matters is that everyone understands the moment, shares it, takes collective responsibility, along with respect and a bit of discipline — none of which ever hurts." And: "By finding this team spirit, this collective cohesion, we can achieve results." It sounds like a pre-match speech. Read closely, it is a confession. When a team talks about "collective spirit" before it talks about the quality of its players, it is usually hiding a gap. Oriali's Italy does not lack pride. Italy lacks concrete people to hand that pride to. These three matches — Belgium, Turkey, France — are not matches that decide a trophy. The Nations League has never been the final destination. But they are a laboratory. Across three games, Mancini must answer a question no friendly can answer: can Italy play at the highest level without a miracle? Italian football missed the 2026 World Cup in Russia and the 2026 World Cup in Qatar. Two consecutive World Cups, a nation that has won the world four times, absent. That is a crack no amount of spirit can fill. But look at the squad, and the problem is not spirit. It is who stands on the pitch. In defence, Italy lived too long in the shadow of Giorgio Chiellini and Leonardo Bonucci — two men whose international careers stretched so far that they became an institution rather than a position. When they left, no one inherited them whole. Alessandro Bastoni and Alessandro Buongiorno are both talented, but they were cast in a role whose scriptwriter had departed with the two old centre-backs. In attack, the story is harsher still. Italy have no striker. For a decade, the names mentioned — Ciro Immobile, Andrea Belotti — have been good players but not the men who decide major tournaments. Immobile has scored more than 200 goals in Serie A, yet at international level he often plays like a guest who arrived late in his own house. Modern football no longer has room for a centre-forward who only waits for the ball inside the box. I have followed Italy's matches for years, and one pattern repeats. Every time the national team meets an opponent that presses high, Italy's midfield loses control of the ball. The PPDA figure — the number of passes an opponent is allowed before each defensive action — drops sharply for Italy against top sides, meaning they must defend more and initiate less. That is not a one-match problem; it is the problem of a development system. Serie A long ago became a league of foreigners. Italy's big clubs buy strikers from Argentina, from Nigeria, from Poland, from France — wherever a finished number nine can be bought. There is nothing wrong with that as sport. But it means a 16-year-old boy in Turin struggles to find a compatriot to model himself on. The clubs do not develop what they need; they import it. And this is where my view of the transfer market becomes unavoidable. The bubble in the price of young players is bursting. A club willing to pay 100 million euros for a player who has not yet played 50 top-flight games is making a naked bet on a dream priced by fear — the fear that if they do not buy, a rival will. In that system, a youth academy is treated as a cost, not an asset. And when academies are not valued, the national team pays the price a decade later. In goal, Gianluigi Donnarumma remains a world-class goalkeeper. But I have always been sceptical of the way people sanctify a goalkeeper's distribution. A keeper can play a 60-metre pass onto a striker's foot, but if his reflexes and reading of situations decline, he is still paid the price of a man who does both. Football is paying for a secondary skill while the primary one rots. Italy are lucky that Donnarumma does both well — but Italy cannot rely on luck forever. Italy do not lose because they lack technique; Italy lose because they lack a generation that knows where it belongs. If you only listen to Oriali, you would think Italian football's problem is spirit, discipline, cohesion. But look at Euro 2026 — the only title of Mancini's first spell — and you see the opposite. Italy won not because they had the best individuals, but because they were one cohesive block in a specific historical moment that cannot be repeated. Chiellini and Bonucci were older than any tournament should allow. Mancini did something extraordinary: he took what he had and welded it into a whole. But that was the miracle of one season, not a model that can be reproduced. Mancini's return is not a strategy; it is a hug from the past. Italian football's collective memory has been blurred by one night at Wembley — and in that blurred light, people believe that repeating the person means repeating the result. The question is not whether Mancini is good enough. The question is whether Italy is using a legend to avoid facing a void. And about those backs at the Allianz Stadium: removing them from the ground treats the symptom. The deeper cause is a football culture that has taught people to love the shirt so much that they forget the human being. Those who turned their backs deserve criticism. But if Italy needs a minute of silence to remember Mazzola, then the problem is not in the stands — it is that Italy is slowly forgetting how to produce men like Mazzola. Italian football does not need another minute of silence. It needs a generation that knows where it belongs. When Mancini steps onto the touchline on Friday, he will not carry the memory of Euro 2026 with him. He will carry a void — and the only question worth asking is this: is Italy ready to look into that void?