Italy World Cup 2026: Bosnia-Herzegovina Ends Run With Shootout Win
Italy world cup 2026 ended on March 31 when Bosnia-Herzegovina knocked the four-time champion out in a penalty shootout. The result extends Italy’s absence from the tournament after misses in 2018 and 2022, and it leaves the country facing three straight World Cup failures.
March 31 in Bosnia
The shootout loss was the final step in a collapse that pushed Italy out of contention for the 2026 World Cup. It also means the team will not appear when the tournament opens Thursday in Canada, the U.S. and Mexico.
That absence carries extra weight because Italy last won the World Cup in 2006, beating France in Berlin to claim a fourth title. On July 10, 2006, about 500,000 soccer fans flooded into the Circus Maximus in Rome for the celebration.
Abodi and Gravina
Andrea Abodi, the sport minister in Giorgia Meloni’s government, said Italian football had to be rebuilt “from the ground up” and called for the ouster of Gabriele Gravina. Matteo Renzi called Italy’s no-show “a sign that Italian football has failed.”
The language around the latest miss has been severe, with newspaper headlines calling it a sporting tragedy, a disgrace and a disaster. Italy’s problem now is bigger than one shootout defeat, because the country has gone through three straight World Cup absences and still has to confront the same leadership and development questions that followed the earlier failures in 2018 and 2022.
Italy's long absence
The cleanest measure of the damage is generational. An entire generation has grown up never seeing an Italian World Cup team in action, even as Brazil has continued to set the standard with five World Cups and Italy has remained stuck on four.
For Italy, the next step is not a tournament match but a reset. The pressure now falls on the people running the system, the scouting network and the youth pipeline, because another missed World Cup has turned a proud record into a prolonged absence.
