POOR Sergio Parisse. When the colossal Italian finally retires, he will be an obvious candidate for the World Rugby Hall of Fame: he is widely regarded as one of the best number eights ever to play the game, having twice been nominated for the World Rugby Player of the Year award. But whilst Mr Parisse is a rare talent, combining the power of a gigantic forward with the handling skills of a centre and the majestic stride of a winger, he also has the misfortune to play for Italy.
In the 16 years since they were given Tier 1 status and admitted to the Six Nations, the annual round-robin competition for Europe’s best national sides, the Azzurri have had a dismal record. They have won just 12 of their 81 matches, picking up the wooden spoon on ten occasions. They will probably add to that unenviable collection in 2016: RugbyVision, a predictive model for fixtures and tournaments, gave Mr Parisse’s men an 84% chance of finishing last at the start of this year’s edition. Italy have fared no better on larger international stages. They have never qualified from the pool stages at a World Cup, and languish in 12th place in RugbyVision’s latest world rankings—below Fiji and Samoa, both Tier 2 sides who do not play regular international fixtures. A decade and a half after they were promoted from emerging-nation status to play with the giants, Italy are still regarded as a minnow. They came close on the opening weekend to achieving a nine-points-to-one upset against a sluggish France, but as so often before, fell just short. The final play was symbolic: Mr Parisse, a man whose job is to martial his forwards, took on the responsibility of a winning kick at goal, a burden which should have been borne by one of the backs. He missed. Even an all-time great can only carry a weak team so far.
The Azzurri’s continued poor performances are puzzling. Superficially, they seem to have most of the ingredients that an emerging national team might need to succeed. The most obvious is that Italians are generally good at sport. The Global Sports Index, a ranking compiled by Sportcal, a marketing intelligence company, reckons that Italy is currently the ninth-most athletic nation in the world, when weighted across 140 different disciplines. Italians benefit from being both numerous, since there are 60m of them, and prosperous, with $35,000 GDP per capita—each of which are important factors when it comes to delivering success on the playing field. A paper published in 2008 by SPLISS, a research group which analyses policy factors leading to international sporting success, discovered that 34% of the variance between countries’ athletic achievement could be explained by how many citizens they had, whilst a further 17% was due to GDP per capita. Put simply, these “background” socioeconomic factors were responsible for about half of the difference between nations’ sporting prowess.
By those measures, Italians should be bringing home a hefty number of medals and trophies anyway: their homeland is in the top 30 for both population and GDP per capita. But even after taking into account those advantages, Italy outperforms its expected level of sporting achievement, excelling most famously at football, but also at skiing, swimming, cycling, volleyball, tennis and water polo. In fact, SPLISS identified Italy as an exception amongst European countries of a similar size, since it exceeded its projections by so much, and so little of its athletic success could be explained by socioeconomic factors. Rather, SPLISS celebrated Italy as an example of having an effective sports development strategy. The country was good at controlling the “meso” layer of variables (i.e. sporting policies), which sit between the “macro” (population, GDP) and “micro” (individual athletes and coaches).
And the evidence suggests that at least some of this strategic expertise has been transferred into Italian rugby. Participation, which is one of SPLISS’s “pillars” of successful sports policy, is high: Italy has 82,000 registered players, more than Scotland and Wales, and 25,000 more than Argentina, who reached the World Cup semi-finals in both 2007 and 2015. Of course, having more amateurs involved in a sport doesn’t guarantee success. Japan and the United States both have more registered players than Ireland, who are vying for a third consecutive Six Nations title. But SPLISS have reported a “significant correlation between mass participation and medals won during the Olympic Games”. Having a big, constantly refreshing pool of talent certainly makes it easier to sustain success. The annals of international sport are littered with one-hit wonders, like the Kenyan cricket team who reached the semi-finals of the 2003 World Cup with a pool of only 5,000 players, or New Zealand’s “Tall Blacks”, who finished fourth at the 2002 FIBA World Cup, despite basketball not being one of the 20 most popular sports in the country. This is an obstacle that Italian rugby has cleared.
In fact, the Italian Rugby Federation (FIR) has done a decent job of installing most of SPLISS’s strategic pillars. The availability of training facilities, for example, is crucial, and one of the reasons why football has become a truly competitive global game (since it needs only four markers for goalposts and a ball), whilst ice hockey is dominated by the “Big Six” of Canada, America, Finland, Russia, Sweden and the Czech Republic, who between them have collected every Olympic medal for the last 40 years. No complaints here for the Azzurri: Italy had more rugby clubs than Australia or New Zealand at the last count in 2011, whilst it has nine academies to supplement the national centre in Parma. Those players who do come through the system get many opportunities to compete for club and country, and “to measure themselves against rivals, individually or as a team”—another important ingredient for success, according to SPLISS. Since 2010, two Italian domestic sides have taken part in the Pro12, the annual league for Irish, Welsh and Scottish teams, and whilst they have struggled against some of Europe’s stronger teams they have also been exposed on a weekly basis to some of the world’s best players. Meanwhile, the Italian squad for the 2015 Rugby World Cup could feasibly have fielded an entire side of players with experience in the English and French leagues, which are the strongest in the northern hemisphere. Many of Mr Parisse’s compatriots, though perhaps not quite at his level, have been imported to top clubs.
And then there is the Six Nations, exposing Italy to high quality annual international competition. Most emerging teams could only dream of such access. In rugby union, both the developing European countries (Georgia and Romania) and the Pacific Island nations (Fiji, Samoa and Tonga) have long complained of being denied regular fixtures against elite teams. In cricket, Ireland, long regarded as the best team beyond the ten Test-playing nations, played just nine one-day internationals against Test opposition between the 2011 and 2015 World Cups. In rugby league, no emerging nation has participated more than once in the Four Nations, suffering thrashings at the hands of Australia, England and New Zealand. Aside from football, perhaps basketball has been most successful at integrating emerging nations. Basketball has grown significantly in countries like France, Spain and Turkey in recent years, benefiting from its inclusion at every Olympics since 1936 and the continued expansion of its World Cup, which will include 32 nations in 2019.
Could coaching, another SPLISS policy area, be to blame for Italy’s failures? Not at the national level: their last four coaches have been a World-Cup-winning player (Sir John Kirwan), a former coach of the French side (Pierre Berbizier), a former coach of the South African side (Nick Mallett) and currently the former assistant French coach Jacques Brunel. The pattern is similar to that of Sri Lanka’s national cricket team, who benefited from a series of fine coaches, many with experience of managing some of the world’s best sides, after being awarded Test status in 1982. A similar strategy involves bringing inspirational former players back into the national set-up in a management role, as the Argentinian rugby team have done with legendary scrum-half Agustin Pichot, whilst Greece’s retired basketball captain, Panagiotis Giannakis, led the country to the final of the 2006 FIBA World Championship as a coach. Sri Lanka, Argentina and Greece have all enjoyed sustained success in their respective sports: the Azzurri haven’t.
With so many factors going in their favour, it seems almost implausible that Mr Parisse’s compatriots haven’t been able to compete at the highest level. But whilst they have benefitted from good participation levels, facilities, opportunities and management at the national level, there is one policy area which has been neglected: youth development. Italy does produce decent players, as the number being recruited by top clubs suggest—but not enough skillful ones. The FIR has introduced a doctrine of “progetta statura” (“Project Size”), which prioritises taller and heavier young players for development, in the hope that they will compete with their ever-growing international opponents. Additionally, many in Italy believe that their youth coaches are inferior to those in other top countries: Paolo Pacitti, a leading Italian rugby journalist, argues that the quality of training is poor compared to that in Argentina, and that player development has been neglected in the south of the country. This is emblematic of deeper administrative failings: “The Italian Rugby Union is not particularly forward-looking,” says Rob Kitson, rugby union correspondent of the Guardian.
