Italy last won the World Cup twenty years ago after scraping out a win against a rival, France, in the home of our biggest rivals ever, the Germans, whom we had just beaten at the very end of extra time in the semifinal. Back in that remote era, these three European countries had reasons to believe we had softly landed at the “end of history”: Football was simply a means of experiencing the beauty of geopolitical competition without any of the bloodshed that typically goes with it—the continuation of war without all of the death and destruction; all of the engrossment without the slaughter. 

We call strikers “bombers,” in Italy, using the English word. That’s what football was for. Our bombers were surrogate B52s. Football was the one safe space where we could still hate, without major consequence, the French and the Germans. Our rivals’ geopolitical ambitions were an afterthought. We were focused on football. 

We now know that France wants to make the most of its ties to Africa and that Germany wants to have the biggest army in Europe. That’s what real winning looks like now, and it’s all theirs. In Italy, we are painfully aware that they are winning and we are not, which is one reason why fascists are running the country again. History, like geopolitics, never really went away, of course. But it didn’t use to demand constant and painful attention. It wasn’t an inexorable part of your sense of space or self; it was something you could selectively tune out. You really could focus on football. 

Twenty years ago, we based our identity on being strong and important on the “international stage”, both in the G-summits and on the pitch. To this day, Italian politics is obsessed with saying we still belong, that we are “players” where war and oil are concerned. Back then we had actual players—Totti, Del Piero, Pirlo, Cannavaro, Buffon—and we were coming off of twenty years of football dominance. Twenty years where our relevance was never in question.

In 2006, Italian men had a football team they could identify with. I am not aware of any studies that examine or analyze what has happened since they lost it. I can only give you my perspective, as somebody who was turning twenty-nine and who had been married for a year—somebody who was starting his adult life. I was looking for a steady income; my wife already had one. I was not really intent on having a job—the Italian publishing world then was in better shape than it is today, so I could envision sustenance via writing and translation work. I was trying to learn how to be good at a couple of jobs so I could be a novelist in a small market.

That 2006 team, a team more or less my age, was a realistic model of manhood. Its players were ambitious but grounded, talented but secure. There was no need to dominate or showboat. If there was a hierarchy no one obsessed over their place in it. They were part of a legacy team and they knew it; no individual result could change that. Not every victory was a triumph and not every defeat was a tragedy, even if it came against a bad team. There was a sense of perspective and collective purpose.

That 2006 team, a team more or less my age, was a realistic model of manhood.

The most important thing to me is that the team won without ever winning. It scraped by. It was a great collection of players that didn’t dazzle. It played a brand of defense steeped in our genius loci. Natural, intrinsic, effortless. We had no dominant striker. Everybody who scored scored one goal—two, tops. The players were classy, but we didn’t brag about it; our pride was silent but it was real. 

During that summer month in 2006, I grew increasingly more mesmerized by the pattern of our goal-scoring. We kept progressing through the tournament and yet we rarely looked like a winning team. We had Totti and Del Piero in attack, but they were not scoring. It was Pirlo’s era—one ruled by his elegance and vision, his playmaking from the back. And yet, game after game, the team seemed to merely be holding the fort. 

The games felt like an orchestra tuning their instruments for two hours. There was no leader, nobody was impressive. Marcello Lippi, the manager, was unappealing, hated by the nation for his success at Juventus and his scent of corruption it carried with it. Lippi was smug and morally bankrupt, with an acid-reflux grin and a cigar. The kit was ugly, too, black and gold on dark blue, unusual in the worst way. This was winning as an act of humility—I felt seen. 

I thought this was what my life was going to look like. It was gonna be sloppy in parts, scrappy when it mattered, and I was going to make it when it counted. It is a feeling I still have in my gut, one that says something crucial about what I am.

The tournament had only one moment of bliss, and that was the late win against Germany in the semifinal. The game had dragged on for two hours, a 0-0 that epitomized where the world, which is to say the US, wanted our countries to be—functional but stuck. Then our only two good goals of the tournament happened.

In the final minute of extra time, Pirlo saw light where no one else could. Fabio Grosso’s positioning was questionable at best—the team’s everyman left-back was not just high up the pitch but on the right side. For Pirlo, this didn’t matter; a perfect pass transformed it into an asset. When the ball hit the far corner of the net, Grosso could not believe it. This was one of the last great sports experiences before social networks and Grosso reacted with pure emotion, not with something choreographed for the feed. He celebrated with real abandon. 

Two minutes later, we scored a second goal. Cannavaro brought the ball out of our penalty area and I remember him balancing it on his head and pecs, before Totti stole it from him and launched the chillest of counter attacks, which ended with Gilardino backheeling it to Del Piero, the only likable player in Juventus history, who slotted it home. Fun, sweet-faced Del Piero gave us the goal that made us bathe in a wave of serotonin, finally. 

The few seconds in between the elation of the first goal and the game-ending signature of the second was the only time we felt we were winning. And we weren’t even champions yet.

The whole final we were never winning. Winning with the last penalty keeps you in a sorry state up until the instant you become the winner, and that sorry state makes the eventual victory feel empty. It’s something I’ve been thinking about ever since. In order to really, properly feel like you have won after the fact there has to be a moment before it’s all over where you’ve felt like you’re winning. Otherwise it feels like some sort of bureaucratic thing that has no real connection to the real world. That’s my theory, at least. Big if true.

In order to really, properly feel like you have won after the fact there has to be a moment before it’s all over where you’ve felt like you’re winning.

Here’s what I can infer from it: we bragged so much about that World Cup later because what happened on the pitch never really felt like winning. It was a victory that eluded the sensation of really winning because we never were. Instead, the dominant emotion was one of relief, of having escaped the worst. If we wanted to summon the feeling of winning, we couldn’t reach for memories of that final. We had to manufacture it on our own, which is why we kept talking about it after the fact. 

Everyone remembers Zidane’s headbutt, but that’s lazy storytelling, a detail for people who need to be entertained and never feel anything. Zidane was sent off; France lost; so what? Italy had won the World Cup without really winning it. That was real pain. Even today, nobody is willing to discuss that. It was a crucial experience for the rest of my life, of achieving success without quite being able to taste it.

So you have a team that was never on top and won without ever winning. But there’s more. 

The totem of 2006 was not the team’s best player, but its most mundane. Andrea Pirlo provided the assist to beat Germany and slotted in his penalty in the final shootout, a game where he was also named man of the match. But Fabio Grosso scored the goal that beat Germany and converted the last penalty in the final. The two biggest moments of that World Cup—the goal that made us feel like we were winning and the penalty that sealed the deal—will forever belong to someone who does not deserve them, even if he earned them. For most of the tournament, Grosso was forgettable, practically anonymous. Watching Italy, you could not imagine yourself as Totti or Del Pierro, let alone Pirlo, but identifying with the lumbering, everyman at left-back was more plausible. 

For most of the tournament, that was Grosso’s function—the blank space a man watching Italy could insert his face onto. Now he, not Pirlo, is the face of 2006. 

In the lead-up to the tournament that year, fashion designers Dolce & Gabbana put five players in a fake, vintage looking locker room. They were in their underwear, a bulge in white surrounded by a lean Mediterranean body. In the one picture I remember most fondly, Gennaro Gattuso, the team’s hard-nosed defensive midfielder, was standing in the forefront. What an improbable star and sex symbol. Pirlo was sitting in the back, manspreading (before we knew that’s what it was called), offering his bulge with the most lascivious, drunken look. Zambrotta, who played fullback opposite Grosso in defense, but memorably, with real zest, and Cannavaro, a center-back whose preternatural knack for being in the right place at the right time made up for his small stature, were there too. But who was the fifth? I couldn’t remember. 

It was only when I looked up the image that I saw it was Manuele Blasi, a journeyman midfielder who was decidedly not a national team guy. He may have played eight games for Italy in the qualifiers but he didn’t make the cut for the World Cup. What was he doing there? Providing another blank space where we could insert our face?

In retrospect, it was the year of the everyman. Putting Blasi besides so many genuine stars in the ad was a genius, cheeky, vicious, sadistic move. The elegance and class of Italy’s stars was never definitive; 2006 was the triumph of the mundane and the ordinary. For every Pirlo, there was a Grosso; for every Cannavaro, a Blasi. We were coordinated, humble, and occasionally elegant, a team where no star was more important than any other. We had talent but no dominance; we had white underwear with turgid bassorilievi. We had a win that didn’t feel like a win. 

We had talent but no dominance; we had white underwear with turgid bassorilievi. We had a win that didn’t feel like a win. 

This was all in 2006. Of all the times I’ve thought of that World Cup, that never really occurred to me—only the duty of putting things in context for this piece of writing shook it loose. But this was 2006, which also means it was the end of a world.

The next two years brought about a world economic crisis caused by US consumer debt and dodgy mortgages and the widespread adoption of social networks. Economic crisis and technological change created a rupture, a clear before and after.  People were different on the other side. Just a couple of years later, I started coming across a mutation—people in their twenties were turning into cynical hustlers, bringing back the Eighties coke-addled brand of ambition with a new desperate (endearing) spin. “Millennials.” Establishing your life at an even pace with talent and a serious defense-first approach was suddenly not an option anymore. 

My wife and I broke up. Rates for articles and stories and essays went down. I started looking for jobs as an editor.

Those men in the D&G ad were one last even-keeled attempt at a model of masculinity before it all went to shit. Seen from the present, from the era of influencer culture, those young men seem to have struck a perfect balance: Not obsessed by their own image, not aggressive, just casually delicious. They exist together, as a unit, without alphas. 

You can’t deny the fact that it was only after that team ended its glorious run that fascism returned to Italy (with a woman as its leader, to boot). Italian men can’t identify with strikers anymore. Instead they insist that real conflict and violence—not the pretend version that happens on the pitch—is necessary. They demand police who kill people on the streets and then lie about it afterward by falsely claiming they were armed. 

Italy has not won a World Cup knockout game since that ad, since Grosso’s penalty won it all twenty years ago. A team of non-famous players managed by Gattuso, of all people, failed to qualify for the 2026 World Cup after losing to Bosnia and Herzegovina in the playoffs.

We have had two victories since 2006, however, though both were fluky and wrong, if you ask me. The first came when Jose Mourinho brought Inter the last few good gallons of his aggro fuel before abandoning it, leaving Materazzi crying in the parking lot, more or less in the instant after he lifted the 2010 Champions League trophy. The other came over a decade later from another penalty win we got thanks to lesser models of manhood: Andrea Barzagli, Leonardo Bonucci, and Giorgio Chiellini, the three defenders who made up the so-called BBC. They were textbook-tall and strong, with a distinct fascist vibe. When Italy won the 2020 Euro final against hosts England, it wasn’t enough for Bonucci. All tournament the English fans had been singing “it’s coming home” as their unofficial motto. Fed up, Bonucci screamed “It’s coming Rome” into the camera. 

It didn’t really make sense but you got the point, which was that Bonucci was trolling England. “Slop” and “brainrot” hadn’t entered the lexicon but here was fascist slop and Italian brainrot. Here was Italy.