On March 31, 2026, Italy lost on penalties to Bosnia and Herzegovina and missed the World Cup for the third consecutive time. The front page of Corriere della Sera called it “the World Cup curse,” former Prime Minister Matteo Renzi called it a sign that Italian football has failed, and Italy’s Sport Minister called on the federation president to resign. The recriminations were loud and predictable. What has been absent is any serious reckoning with the structural problem that have characterized Italy for the longest time.
This is not a story about one bad coach or one missed penalty. As a matter of fact, Gattuso, the latest coach has done a great job. This failure is an indictment of Italy’s entire soccer federation, from the lowest levels of player development to the highest levels of decision-making, and especially so in 2026, when the expanded 48-team World Cup field means qualifying is easier than it has ever been. Sixteen European teams are playing in North America this summer. Italy is somehow not one of them. Can
The rot goes deeper than tactics. The stadiums and infrastructure across the league have not been modernized. Serie A is slower-paced than the other top European club leagues and more reliant on aging players. Italy has the investors who want to fix exactly this. It has been blocking them at every turn.
And yet Italy has potential that no other country in European football can match. The combination of Serie A’s global brand recognition, the world’s most passionate regional football cultures from Turin, Venice to Palermo, the depth of Italian-American capital now embedded across the entire country, the unrivaled lifestyle and hospitality ecosystem surrounding every Italian stadium, and a football heritage that produced four World Cup titles makes Italy uniquely positioned for a new renaissance. No other league has this convergence of assets waiting to be unlocked and monetized. The question is whether Rome will finally act like it knows that.
The lunch that said everything
Gerry Cardinale sat down with the Financial Times over lunch at Milanello, just days before Milan’s derby victory over Inter, and was candid about the cultural and political barriers he has faced since acquiring AC Milan. Cardinale is the founder of RedBird Capital, a man who built the YES Network for the Yankees, helped finance Yankee Stadium, and now controls one of the world’s most iconic football clubs. He is Italian-American. He wants Italy to win. He has staked real capital on that belief and love for the country.
What he described over that lunch was not ambition blocked by competition. It was ambition blocked by red tape. On the stadium project, he was direct: in the USA he would do it with his eyes closed. In Italy there are cultural and political barriers. He wants the stadium to be an Italian product, Italian banks financing it, Italian companies competing for naming rights, Italian commerce and hospitality surrounding it. He is not asking Italy to step aside. He is asking Italy to show up and help him play a role.
Cardinale drew an explicit comparison with the public-private partnership model he witnessed under President Trump, calling it a game-changer. He said that is exactly what he wants to see in Italy, and that he would like to reach a point where, having built enough credibility, he can go to Rome, sit down with Prime Minister Meloni or whoever else, and lay out a plan to relaunch Serie A and make it one of Italy’s greatest exports.
Read that again. A man managing billions of dollars of capital is still waiting to be given a serious hearing in Rome. He should not have to earn that meeting. It should have been the first call after he signed the papers on AC Milan. The fact that it has not happened is the same failure that produced Tuesday’s penalty shootout in Zenica.
Serie A already reaches 200 countries. It already commands passionate supporter bases across the United States, Latin America, Asia, and Africa. The global appetite for Italian football is real and it can only grow if nurtured. What is missing is the infrastructure, the stadiums, the academies, the digital platforms, and the management culture that would allow that appetite to be commercially harvested at the scale the Premier League has mastered. Cardinale knows how to build all of that. So do the other American owners already sitting inside the Italian game. Italy is the only country in world football with this quality of committed foreign investor already in place and still failing to give them a functioning framework to operate in.
The coalition already assembled
In my 2024 analysis on SempreInter I documented what I had been tracking for years. US interests owned 14 clubs across the Italian football ecosystem, with American owners present at AC Milan, Roma, Fiorentina, Genoa, Atalanta, and Inter Milan, where Oaktree Capital took control after Suning defaulted on its loan in May 2024 (SempreInter). Since that piece the number has grown further. Nine of the 20 Serie A clubs in 2025-26 are owned or co-owned by American or Canadian shareholders. Further down in other leagues, American investors co-own Campobasso, which earned promotion from Serie D to Serie C in 2024.
These owners are not passive investors. Joey Saputo turned Bologna into a Champions League club. Kyle Krause brought Parma back to Serie A. Dan Friedkin is rebuilding Roma. Cardinale’s model has consistently been to partner with a rights holder and build terminal value businesses around those rights, drawing explicitly on what Fenway Sports Group achieved at Liverpool before winning the Champions League in 2019. These are people who know how to build. Italy keeps making it harder than it needs to be.
The Italian advantage here is structural and underappreciated. Italian-American investors bring not just capital but genuine cultural affinity, language, family roots, and a desire to see the country succeed that purely financial actors never carry. That is a different quality of investor. It is the kind of investor that stays through the difficult years, reinvests, and builds institutions rather than portfolios. Italy has assembled this coalition almost by accident. It now needs to treat it as the strategic asset it is.
The real cost of the red tape
Italy’s third consecutive World Cup elimination and Cardinale’s frustrated stadium project are the same problem wearing different jerseys. Both are symptoms of a state that talks about supporting Italian football while systematically obstructing the private sector forces that could actually save it. Italy’s federation president, speaking after the Bosnia defeat, lashed out at a perceived lack of support for football from the state, while the sport minister fired back with calls for resignation. Both are right and both are missing the point. The issue is not who resigns from the FIGC. The issue is that Italy has never built the public-private framework that would allow serious investors to modernize the infrastructure, the academies, and the competitive ecosystem that produces World Cup footballers.
Meanwhile, Italian men’s tennis is in the middle of a full-blown renaissance, driven by Jannik Sinner and backed by heavy national investment in courts, coaching, and events. There are now six Italian men, none older than 30, ranked among the top 75 tennis players in the world. That happened because the state and private capital worked together with a shared long term plan. Football is waiting for the same partnership. The model exists and it works. The investors are already committed. The cultural passion for the game in Italy will never decrease, as any street in Naples or Milan or Bergamo on a match day will confirm. What does not exist is the political architecture to connect all three.
What needs to happen
The Italian government needs to call every one of its American football club owners and ask one simple question: what do you need from us to invest more, build more, and stay longer? Faster permitting for stadiums. A single government contact point instead of a labyrinth of regional bureaucracies. Tax frameworks tied to infrastructure and youth development. A formal, structured dialogue between Rome and the investors who now control a significant share of Italian professional football across all four divisions.
Italy’s advantage in this conversation is that it is not starting from zero. The capital is already here. The relationships are already here. The love for the game, in the boardrooms of Los Angeles and New York just as much as in the curvas of San Siro and the Olimpico, is already here. No other European league is having this conversation with investors of this quality and this depth of personal commitment to the country. That is Italy’s edge and it is being squandered.
Cardinale is ready to go to Rome. Rome should be ready to welcome him and every other American owner in this coalition, investors who chose Italy, who are of Italian heritage, and who want to build.
The third World Cup elimination is a national humiliation. But it is also a tipping point. Italy cannot keep watching its football decline while simultaneously blocking the people who want to fix it. The private sector is here. The capital is committed. The vision has been stated clearly, over lunch with the Financial Times, at Milanello, on the eve of a derby.
All that is missing is an Italian government willing to sit down and meet its investors at the table. That table is long overdue.
