On Monday, the reigning European champions secured qualifying.

Italy will compete in the German summer UEFA Euro 2024. As the defending champions, the Azzurri, this should come as no surprise. But since Roberto Mancini’s team defeated England at Wembley in the summer of 2021 on penalties, a lot has happened.

Since then, the Italian national team has been through a serious problem that has unexpectedly caused the Azzurri to miss two World Cups in a row. Despite the significant setback, Mancini opted to continue leading, but a year later he broke away from the Italian federation and signed a contract to take over as manager of the Saudi Arabian national team.

Gabriele Gravina, the president of the Italian Football Association, chose Luciano Spalletti to succeed Mancini as head coach. A seasoned manager, he had just weeks earlier won the Serie A championship with Napoli. The Italian coach’s main challenge was to revive the optimistic mindset in the dressing room, which had seemed to wane at the conclusion of the Mancini cycle. His other challenge was to qualify for Euro 2024 in the same group as England and Spain.

Despite a number of problems, including the ones that made Sandro Tonali and Nicolò Zaniolo abandon the training camp because of their involvement in the illegal sports betting scandal, Spalletti succeeded. Although Tonali has been suspended and will undoubtedly miss the summer Euros, Zaniolo remains on the team while the investigation is ongoing.

To start with, Spalletti was able to swiftly restore goodwill inside the dressing room, which is how things got turned around. That was his primary responsibility since, as the Italian national team’s history demonstrates, successful performances were only achieved when the team’s dressing room was cohesive and on the same page, even with squads lacking in skill, as was the case in 2021 at the Euros. Giovanni Di Lorenzo, one of the top players on the current Italian roster and the captain of Napoli the previous season, was instrumental in making it happen.

Along with these significant and controversial decisions, the Italian coach skipped over the team’s captain, Ciro Immobile, for the team’s final few games because the Lazio striker wasn’t playing at his best. Instead of him, Spalletti opened the decisive match against Ukraine on Monday with Giacomo Raspadori of Napoli as the primary striker and called in Gianluca Scamacca of Atalanta and Moise Kean of Juventus. a blatant indication that Spalletti is primarily concerned with the team’s current situation and doesn’t consider the history.

The Italian team that did not make it to the 2022 World Cup under Mancini is not all that different from the present one. The starting lineup actually didn’t change much, with Inter’s Alessandro Bastoni and Francesco Acerbi starting in place of Leonardo Bonucci and Giorgio Chiellini, two of the most iconic players of the recent success of the Azzurri, on defence.

In their most recent matches under Spalletti, Italy attempted to raise their football game as well, despite the former Napoli manager’s limited time and ability to concentrate primarily on the outcomes needed to secure qualification. Federico Chiesa, an Italian striker, provided a succinct summary of the new cycle and the shift in mindset following the match against North Macedonia.

“Did we give up two goals? All that’s left is the need to play football. We take initiative as the coach requests, and occasionally you may give up certain counterattacks. We demonstrated our desire to rule the game.

Despite their efforts to defend their championship, Italy is not the greatest team in Europe and is not the clear favourite to win the competition in 2024. But after winning the European qualification match against Ukraine, the correct mindset is finally back in the locker room, and history has shown that this is what the Italian national team needs to make a difference at the major championships.