The lowest episode of Italy failed to qualify for the World Cup?

The Azzurri were only spectators for this year's event after being eliminated in the play-offs.

Italy had to bury their dream of competing in the 2022 World Cup after being defeated by North Macedonia by a narrow score of 1-0 in the semi-finals of the Path C play-off in the European zone, Friday (25/3) early this morning.

In the match held in Palermo last night, the Azzurri conceded in the last minute of the match through Aleksandar Trajkovski's goal.

Inevitably this is like Déjà vu for Italy because this failure is not the first time for them.

With this elimination, Italy have now failed to qualify for the World Cup for the second successive edition and for the first time in their history.

At the 2018 World Cup, Italy also did not participate in the tournament in Russia and the incident caused a public stir there because the last failure occurred in 1958 in Sweden.

Italy has missed a total of three World Cups, including 2022, while the 1930 edition in Uruguay was an exception because they were not invited.

Lowest Point

Not even a year after winning Euro 2020 and becoming the favorites to automatically qualify for Qatar, Italy actually lost to compete with Switzerland in the qualifying round.

The Azzurri were only able to finish second in Group C after collecting 16 points from eight matches, two points adrift of Switzerland.

They were actually quite confident in the play-offs because they were 'only' faced with North Macedonia who had no World Cup experience, but instead the team became a stumbling block and crushed their hopes.