On March 25, Beijing time, the semi-finals of the World Preliminary Tournament play-offs, Italy lost to North Macedonia 0-1, and it missed the World Cup! This unpopularity really shocked the entire football world, you know that last year the Blues just won the European Championship!
On July 12 last year, Italy reached the top of Europe under Mancini, a somewhat unexpected result, because they had missed the 2018 World Cup, and many people at the time thought that this would be the biggest opportunity for Italian football to re-emerge.
However, coming to the stage of the World Cup qualifiers, the Blue Army was once again disappointed, not only did not qualify directly from the group first, but also drew the weakest North Macedonia in the semi-finals of the play-offs, and even scored 32 shots without scoring, but was killed by the opponent at the last moment of injury time, 0-1 eliminated!
You know, the ST European Champion failed to qualify for the World Cup, having only happened 3 times before. The first was Czechoslovakia, who won the 1976 European Championship but missed the 1978 World Cup. The second time was Denmark, which won the European Championship in 1992 and wrote a "Danish fairy tale", but failed to qualify for the World Cup in 1994. The third time was Greece, who won the European Championship in 2004 but missed the 2006 World Cup.
Today, Italy is the fourth! In addition, in 2018 and 2022, they missed the World Cup finals for two consecutive times, which was the first time in their team history! Moreover, they lost at home in the World Preliminary Round for the first time, the previous result was 48 wins and 11 draws, and this loss, they lost the entire World Cup!
From winning the European Championship to missing the World Cup, England star Reinkel said: "For Italy, this is a huge and devastating failure! Indeed, such a gap is too great, and it is an extremely heavy blow to confidence.