Italy's Road to Redemption: Gattuso's Impact on World Cup Qualifiers
There was a time, not so long ago, when the question wasn’t whether Italy could win another World Cup. It was whether they would even get close enough to embarrass themselves again.
When Luciano Spalletti walked away last summer, the Azzurri were a mess. Not a tactical puzzle, not a team in transition – a mess. The man who had been hailed as the perfect heir to Roberto Mancini, fresh from dragging Napoli back to the summit of Serie A for the first time since Diego Maradona, left behind a national side stripped of certainty, confidence and, crucially, identity.
He had done enough to get them to Euro 2024. That was the bare minimum. Germany, though, exposed everything. The squad lacked top-tier quality, yes, but Spalletti only deepened the crisis with muddled selections and odd tactical calls. Italy staggered through the group, needing a 98th-minute equaliser against Croatia just to stay alive, then folded with barely a whimper against Switzerland.
It was the limpest European title defence since Greece in 2008. And it left Spalletti facing a World Cup qualifying campaign he simply could not afford to start badly.
He did.
On June 6 in Oslo, Norway tore Italy apart 3-0, and the scoreline was generous to the visitors. From first whistle to last, Spalletti’s team looked hollow. No control, no bite, no resistance. Just a shell of a football nation.
“I have no words,” Gigi Donnarumma admitted, stunned. “All I can say is that our fans don't deserve this, and we have to find strength from somewhere, because we're Italy and these types of matches are not acceptable.”
Spalletti knew what that meant. “We need to find something more,” he said. “Otherwise, something has got to change.”
The change was him. The FIGC decided after the humiliation in Oslo that his time was up. They let him stay for a 2-0 win over Moldova three days later to ease the shock, but the writing was already on the dressing-room wall. By then, Italy’s path to the 2026 World Cup looked steep and slippery – and there was no obvious guide to lead them up it.
Claudio Ranieri was the romantic choice, the Premier League miracle-worker, but he refused to walk back his decision to end his coaching career and move upstairs at Roma. Stefano Pioli, a recent Scudetto winner, preferred the project at Fiorentina. Big names, closed doors.
So the federation turned to the past. If you can’t find a saviour, you try to find a spirit. They went back to 2006, back to Marcello Lippi’s world champions, and started looking at his lieutenants. Daniele De Rossi, Fabio Cannavaro – both discussed. Gabriele Gravina, though, chose Gennaro Gattuso.
On paper, it was a gamble. A fiery former midfielder with a mixed record on the touchline, a man defined more by snarl and sweat than chalkboards and systems. Gravina, though, sold him as something else.
“He has the qualities, the determination and above all the desire to achieve something great for the Azzurri and our country,” the FIGC president said. “The national team needs him and Gattuso answered the Azzurri’s call without hesitation.”
Gravina talked about sacrifice, professionalism, preparation. About a coach who instinctively says “we” instead of “I”. About someone who knows the weight of the shirt and the noise around it from his days at Milan and Napoli, and who has always shown a feel for working with young players.
“He told me right away that nobody wins alone. We win together, we go to the World Cup together.”
That promise will be tested soon enough. For now, at least, Gattuso has dragged Italy back to a place they haven’t seen since 2014: within one game of a World Cup.
On the surface, the numbers don’t flatter him. Italy’s group campaign began and ended with three-goal hammerings by Norway. In November at San Siro, Erling Haaland and company turned the screw and Gattuso’s side buckled. The coach admitted it himself: his team collapsed once the pressure rose.
Yet underneath those brutal bookends, something has shifted. The two meetings with Israel show it clearly. In Debrecen, Italy were chaotic and exposed, scraping a 5-4 win in a wild, error-strewn contest. By the time they met again in Udine in October, the same fixture produced a composed 3-0 victory. Less panic. Fewer gifts. A team that actually looked like it trusted itself.
The most striking change, though, isn’t tactical. It’s emotional.
Sandro Tonali put it bluntly after the win over Northern Ireland: the players have been “feeling positive since the coach arrived”. You can see why. Gattuso may not be hailed as a master strategist, but he is impossible to ignore. He lives every second, and his players feel it.
“The coach has so much love for the Azzurri shirt,” Moise Kean told Sky Sport Italia. “He pushes us to never give up.”
That passion alone doesn’t win games. Against Northern Ireland, Gattuso showed there is more to him than rage and rhetoric.
He started with the venue. Instead of the vast, unforgiving bowl of San Siro, he pushed for the New Balance Arena in Bergamo. Smaller, tighter, less likely to turn toxic if the first half went wrong.
“If there had been 70,000 in the stands, trust me, a good 30 percent would've started jeering at half-time,” he said later, pointing out that the game was still goalless at the break. “So, we did well to pick Bergamo, because the fans helped us and they were fundamental in not putting more pressure on my players.”
The choice paid off. The first half was tense, scrappy, exactly the kind of occasion where Italy’s recent scars usually start to itch. This time, the stadium stayed with them. So did the coach.
Gattuso kept his composure and, crucially, kept his players’ heads clear. Tonali admitted the tension was suffocating before he finally broke the deadlock in the 56th minute. Kean confessed he felt the weight of an entire World Cup on his shoulders until he buried the second.
“There was some nervousness at the start of the second half,” Tonali told RAI Sport, “but after taking the lead, we really started to feel free of pressure with our mentality.”
That didn’t happen by accident. In the dressing room at half-time, Gattuso cut through the anxiety with a simple line: “You didn't think it was going to be easy, did you?” He also changed the shape of the game by nudging Manuel Locatelli higher up the pitch, instead of leaving him anchored deep.
“I had the feeling on the pitch that I could help the team more from there,” the Juventus midfielder said on RAI. “But the coach told me to get into a more advanced role, and we did better in the second half.”
Italy found goals, control and, for once, a sense of calm in a high-stakes qualifier. They have not, as Locatelli pointed out, shed their burden just yet.
“We haven’t taken a weight off our shoulders,” he warned. “Because we still have a play-off final to play.”
That final, at least, looks kinder than it might have been. Winning in Cardiff against Wales would have been a brutal assignment. Instead, Bosnia and Herzegovina await in Zenica, after Sergej Barbarez’s side edged a shootout in the Welsh capital. Several Italian players openly celebrated that result. They know the difference.
Bosnia sit 66th in the FIFA rankings, far below Italy’s 12th place, and they still lean heavily on Edin Dzeko, their 40-year-old captain, record scorer and appearance leader. Yet this is no walkover. Bosnia were 13 minutes from automatic qualification before Austria turned their final group game around, and they showed steel in Cardiff, coming from behind both in the match and in the shootout.
The stage, though, belongs to Italy. All the pressure, all the expectation, all the ghosts. This is a football nation in a fragile state. Two straight World Cups missed. A domestic league under fire after failing to place a single club in the Champions League quarter-finals this season. A generation of children who have never seen the Azzurri on the biggest stage.
There are reasons to believe this might finally be the night the tide turns. Tonali is playing like the midfielder Premier League clubs have been circling for months. Alessandro Bastoni has returned from injury at just the right time, restoring authority to the back line. Across the pitch, Italy simply have more quality than Bosnia.
They also have something they lacked against Sweden and North Macedonia: a sense of togetherness. Fabio Capello, not a man prone to hyperbole, told Gazzetta dello Sport that Gattuso’s team looks far more united than those that failed before it.
“Against Northern Ireland,” Capello said, “we saw a team that put its heart and soul into it.”
They will need exactly that in Zenica. Because Italy aren’t just playing Bosnia and Herzegovina. They are playing their own history. The “demons”, as Tonali called them, that crept into the room before the semi-final and whispered about Stockholm and Palermo and everything that went wrong.
“I’m not saying we were scared,” the midfielder said. “But, unfortunately, it can happen to think about those past defeats.”
This time, there is no margin left. No safety net. No alibi.
“There's no option but to win,” Tonali stated.
He’s right. They owe it to themselves. They owe it to Gattuso, who has given them back a sense of purpose. They owe it to a football culture desperate to feel relevant again.
Most of all, they owe it to the kids who have only ever heard stories about Italy at a World Cup and are still waiting to see those blue shirts under the brightest lights of all.
