It has not been an auspicious eight days for Italian football’s status or self-esteem.
First came the unwelcome news from Brazil, where the national team found themselves placed in what a consensus deemed the toughest of all the first-phase groups for next summer’s World Cup. Italy will kick off against England, and play their third match against the South American champions, Uruguay.
On paper, the Azzurri should be strong enough to take the four points they must target as a minimum from those two fixtures to progress, but they are haunted by recent precedent.
They gathered a mere two points from a group containing Paraguay, New Zealand and Slovakia at the last World Cup.
And when a country’s reigning club champions, league-leaders and the main supplier of players to the national squad, namely Juventus, cannot make it out of the group stage of the principal international club competition, it has repercussions for how Italy’s broader football culture feels about itself.
Juve tumbled out of the Uefa Champions League last week, quickly followed by Napoli. “It’s a low point,” said Cesare Prandelli, the Azzurri coach, of the double setback suffered by Serie A.
Juventus, beaten in snowy Istanbul by Galatasaray, managed only one victory in their six group games. Napoli, third-best by the narrow margin of goal difference in their tough group, will be joining Juve in the Europa League next month.
Only AC Milan survive from Italy in the Champions League’s last 16. Given that four Bundesliga clubs, a quartet of Premier League sides and three Spanish teams also made the knock-out stage, they will not be among the favourites come the Uefa draw on Monday.
“It is a concern that we might get to a situation where our clubs are only rarely involved in the later stage of the Champions League,” Prandelli said.
The national coach, whose popularity and decency give him a role as the conscience of Italian football, also cast his gloomy gaze beyond the pitch.
Three Ajax followers were stabbed in the lead-up to the 0-0 draw against AC Milan in the San Siro on Wednesday, and 18 Lazio fans are still in detention in Warsaw following their arrests around the club’s visit to Poland for a match against Legia last month.
“These sorts of events can get clubs pushed out of European competitions,” Prandelli said.
A four-strong Italian contingent heads into the knock-out phase of the Europa League: Juve, Napoli, Fiorentina and Lazio.
The latter club, it is fair to say, will be under the closest scrutiny. Last season, the Rome-based side served a series of Uefa supporter bans for violence and racially abusive behaviour by their followers and Lazio continue to house, among their loyalists, those who tarnish the image of the Italian game.
Many fans’ association with far-right politics is something various Lazio presidents have tried to tackle, but it is an aspect of the club’s identity that is hard to shake off. Fixtures like tomorrow’s meeting with Livorno tend to stimulate its expression, too.
Lazio-Livorno is back on the domestic schedule for the first time in four seasons, with the Tuscan club returned to the Serie A ranks from Serie B. Certain supporters from both sides will have inked the fixture in as a special date, for which distinctive paraphernalia is traditionally prepared, voices cleared for extra-loud singing and chanting.
It is not a local derby, nor a fixture with a long history of on-the-field melodrama. It is a special rivalry because of politics. Livorno, from the port city where the Italian communist movement is said to have come into being, style themselves as the club with the most markedly leftist support base.
Lazio, the club of Benito Mussolini, Italy’s fascist leader in the past century, play the arch-blues to Livorno’s Reds. The enmity is folkloric, but fervent enough that Rome’s police will apply extra vigilance around the Stadio Olimpico and central train station.
Neither team go into the meeting with great confidence, either. Despite the return of the German striker Miroslav Klose after a month out with injury, Lazio drew 0-0 at home against Trabzonspor in their Europa League group match on Thursday. The players were booed off the field at the end.
Livorno, meanwhile, sit in the relegation zone. Edginess in the crowd might quickly spread to the participants on the pitch. Neither club have a victory from their past 10 Serie A matches combined.
sports@thenational.ae