Why Italy have run out of world-class strikers - and what that means for their Euro 2024 chances

For two decades, Italy was the home of some of football’s finest attacking talent. There was the elegance of Roberto Baggio, the inventiveness of Francesco Totti, the ruthlessness of Alessandro del Piero, the thunderous presence of Christian Vieri, the power of Luca Toni. Italian strikers were among the most feared and respected in the world. That has changed.

Forwards who were little more than bit-part players during the Nineties and early 2000s would be instant starters now – head coach Luciano Spalletti would move mountains for a Fabrizio Ravenelli, an Enrico Chiesa or a Vincenzo Montella. Instead, Italy’s two options at number nine for Euro 2024 are Gianluca Scamacca, who struggled to make a dent at West Ham United, and Mateo Retegui, an Argentine-born import who scored just nine goals in the 2023/24 season for Genoa. There is an astonishing dearth of frontline talent, and that issue explains the Azzurri’s visible decline in recent years.

Italy have managed to scrape up eight goals in their last eight games since beating North Macedonia 5-2 in qualifying. They can still score goals against the minnows, but in a challenging Group B they struggled to threaten – their three goals included two against Albania (from just five shots on target) and a late, late goal against Croatia without which they would have been eliminated. Against top-tier opposition like Spain, they look desperately dull up top.

So how did a nation which produced so much fearsome attacking talent over the course of football’s modern era find itself with cast-offs and also-rans leading the line? Ask around Italy and you’ll get a variety of different answers, ranging from youth production to government financial initiatives.

Italy has always had a tradition of prioritising experienced players over youth - breaking through from age group teams at the biggest clubs is, for the most part, no easier now than it’s been in the past. Many clubs still give few minutes to young talent and it remains the case that players seeking much-needed experience have to get it through loan spells down the league ladder or out of Italy entirely. Just look at Leeds United’s Willy Gnonto, a promising player who already has 13 caps for his country, who had to leave Inter in 2020 to find opportunities abroad in Zürich and Yorkshire.

Gnonto is one of few attacking players under the age of 21 who have apparent potential to become regulars with the Italian team. That can, perhaps, be partly attributed to a much broader movement within youth development away from developing traditional strikers – something which is true across Europe, and which can be attributed to the emergence of the 4-3-3 as the go-to formation and to the increased usage of inside forwards and false nines. So many teams prefer to channel talent towards wide and deeper areas that classical number nines are in shorter supply than they were in the past.

There has been a gradual movement in Italy towards more enlightened and modernised academy systems, particularly at Juventus whose Next Gen team play in Serie C, the third tier of the professional game, in much the same way that Barcelona and Real Madrid’s academy teams play in the lower echelons of the Spanish league. That has seen more young players force their way into the Juve first team over recent seasons, but there is a long way to go before such practices become commonplace.

Of course, that’s true of many teams (arguably including England, who have few apparent heirs to Harry Kane’s position when he eventually moves past his prime), and some pundits have found the source of the issue in a recent Italian tax law – the Decreto Crescita, or Growth Decree, which gave Italian teams the chance to offer tax breaks to imported players.

The initiative wasn’t focused on football but rather on attracting skilled workers from outside the peninsula to reverse a perceived ‘brain drain’ caused by migrants leaving Italy – but it also gave Serie A teams a significant tax cut on wages paid to players, allowing incoming player to pay much lower income tax and as a result making Italian sides more attractive destinations for emerging talent.

The impact was immediate – in the 2018/19 season, during which the Decree was passed by the Italian government, around 45% of players who earned minutes in Serie A came from overseas. The very next season, it had jumped to 55%, and as of the 2023/24 season it stood at just over 63%, and many teams used the tax break to sign strikers. Some see this as the reason that almost all of the attacking talent at top Italian teams comes from abroad. The Decree ceased to be in effect as of February, but if that did cause damage to Italian football then it will be a few years before it is reversed.

Then, of course, there has been bad luck. The most recent generation of strikers had a few players who failed to live up to their full potential for reasons often beyond the control of club and national managers (former Manchester City forward Mario Balotelli and Antonio Cassano being very well-known examples), many have had their careers hampered by injuries (Federico Chiesa and Moise Kean, for example) and some are past their prime without really living up to the standards of more illustrious forebears, such as Ciro Immobile and Andrea Bellotti, now 34 and 30 respectively and scoring considerably fewer than they used to at the domestic level.

A more extensive overhaul of the youth system in Italy, combined with the end of the Growth Decree, might see Italian strikers come back around. This is still a nation which produces superb defenders and the talent is still there, but Serie A brings less and less of it through in favour of overseas players and the consequences have been dire for a national side which won Euro 2020 but which will have to improve dramatically in order to successfully defend its crown.

They have a handful of first-class players, mostly at the back but also in the form of the imperious Inter midfielder Nicolò Barella, and that gives Italy a solid core to build from – but there is little evidence thus far that Scamacca and Retegui have been in good enough form to score the goals required, while other attacking players like Davide Frattesi, Lorenzo Pellegrini and Giacomo Raspadori are providers, not regular scorers themselves. Raspadori has managed 10 goals in a full season just once, Pellegrini three times and Frattesi never. Chiesa, one of the heroes of the last Euros, seems out of sorts and has struggled for consistency at Juventus.

Italy need to find a way to extract some firepower from a team which simply doesn’t have a 20-goal-a-season striker in it. If Spalletti can get that sort of level out of just one player and get them scoring the crucial goals required, then they may yet be a serious threat for the entire tournament – but for now, the days of Del Piero seem a very long way away indeed, and their last 16 game against Switzerland feels like a far less straightforward affair than may have been expected before the tournament began.