It was hard to not to escape the sense of Italian gloom yesterday as the dust settled on Napoli’s elimination from the Uefa Champions League, less than 24 hours before the draw was made for the group stages of football’s most prestigious club competition.
It seemed another stark statement regarding Italian football’s status: Napoli, a club who have provided some vivid moments in the European Cup since they returned to the competition in 2011 after a long absence, have fallen at the first hurdle, beaten by Athletic Bilbao.
The latter’s limited background in the tournament had cast the Spaniards as the naïve outsiders in the two-legged tie.
It turned out quite the opposite. Napoli, who took a 1-1 score from the first leg, were the team who suffered the kind of concentration lapses that the Champions League famously punishes, leaving broad defensive holes for Athletic to exploit on their way to a 4-2 aggregate win.
Rafa Benitez, the Napoli coach, bemoaned “three clear errors” that each resulted in goals at San Mames. Errors of organisation and focus particularly offend Benitez.
Rigour is his watchword, and Napoli hired him 14 months ago to impose it, and to apply his undoubted expertise as a negotiator of European knockout ties.
Napoli thus will spend another season in the Europa League, which they dropped into last December after finishing third in a tough Champions League group that included Arsenal and Borussia Dortmund.
Being thrust into such company early is an ever-greater risk for Italian clubs, as Serie A’s Uefa seeding declines with each new season of modest achievement in Europe.
Roma, seeded outside the top 24 clubs in this season’s Champions League, and Juventus must now try to arrest the slippage on their own. Yesterday’s heavyweights are otherwise engaged.
Inter Milan, the last Italian club to win the Champions League, back in 2010, are confined to Europa League football; AC Milan are not in Europe at all.
Serie A now ranks below Portugal’s Primeira Liga in the Uefa co-efficient, the mechanism by which nations are ordered according to the successes of their clubs in European tournaments.
Just over four years ago, Serie A stood ahead of the German Bundesliga.
At that stage, in early 2010, Italy were still World Cup holders, too, and though the link between club momentum and international triumph is sometimes flimsy, the idea that Italian football is failing to keep pace with the best of the rest was hardly helped by events in Brazil in June.
Signs of the dynamic Italy who took the silver medal at Euro 2012 were detectable in their opening match at the World Cup, against England.
The inertia and nervousness of the previous World Cup expedition, to South Africa, then returned.
Twice in succession, the national team have returned home from World Cups at the group stage. Cesare Prandelli, the manager, left to take charge of Galatasaray.
Antonio Conte’s decision to leave Juventus and assume command of the national squad, in turn, removes from Serie A another impressive coach, and though his legacy is a Juve will be respected beyond national borders, his pessimistic forecast that “it will be many years until Italy has a club that can win the European Cup” is hard to dispute.
Economically, even the bigger clubs are losing ground against the corporate juggernauts of the Premier League, Primera Liga, Bundesliga and France’s Ligue 1.
Benitez will know that, and wonder if his long list of European titles can ever be padded while he remains in Serie A.
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