Italy national football team players: the 34 Mancini picked after a third World Cup miss
Roberto Mancini is back as Italy coach and has named 34 players for the Nations League, 11 of whom have never been capped. Here is the full squad, and what the caps column says about where Italy are.
Sep 22, 2026
Italy will miss a World Cup for the third time running, and the squad Roberto Mancini has named for his first competitive matches back in the job is the first real sign of what he intends to do about it. Thirty-four players were called up for the 2026-27 Nations League games against Belgium, Turkey and France. Eleven of them have never played for the senior side.
Mancini returned to the Italy bench in late July 2026, three years after resigning, with Claudio Ranieri appointed alongside him as technical director. He is the coach who won Euro 2020, still the only thing Italy have won since the 2006 World Cup, and he is now rebuilding a team that lost a World Cup play-off final on penalties to Bosnia and Herzegovina on 31 March, drawing 1-1 and going out 4-1 in the shootout.
Italy’s full squad for the 2026-27 Nations League
The list below is the squad as it stood on 21 September 2026, after Federico Dimarco withdrew from the camp at Coverciano and Matteo Ruggeri was called in to replace him. Caps and goals are for the senior national team only.
| Goalkeeper | Club | Caps |
|---|---|---|
| Gianluigi Donnarumma (c) | Manchester City | 83 |
| Guglielmo Vicario | Juventus | 5 |
| Marco Carnesecchi | Atalanta | 0 |
| Massimo Pessina | Bologna | 0 |
| Defender | Club | Caps | Goals |
|---|---|---|---|
| Giovanni Di Lorenzo | Napoli | 53 | 5 |
| Alessandro Bastoni | Inter | 43 | 3 |
| Gianluca Mancini | Roma | 20 | 2 |
| Riccardo Calafiori | Arsenal | 14 | 0 |
| Giorgio Scalvini | Atalanta | 8 | 0 |
| Honest Ahanor | Crystal Palace | 2 | 0 |
| Diego Coppola | Paris FC | 2 | 0 |
| Daniele Ghilardi | Roma | 0 | 0 |
| Michael Kayode | Brentford | 0 | 0 |
| Eddy Kouadio | Monza | 0 | 0 |
| Matteo Ruggeri | Aston Villa | 0 | 0 |
| Midfielder | Club | Caps | Goals |
|---|---|---|---|
| Nicolò Barella | Inter | 70 | 10 |
| Davide Frattesi | Lazio | 34 | 8 |
| Sandro Tonali | Tottenham Hotspur | 32 | 4 |
| Samuele Ricci | Como | 11 | 0 |
| Nicolò Fagioli | Fiorentina | 7 | 0 |
| Rolando Mandragora | Torino | 1 | 0 |
| Issa Doumbia | Sporting CP | 0 | 0 |
| Alessandro Romano | Cagliari | 0 | 0 |
| Forward | Club | Caps | Goals |
|---|---|---|---|
| Giacomo Raspadori | Atalanta | 46 | 11 |
| Moise Kean | Como | 26 | 13 |
| Gianluca Scamacca | Atalanta | 22 | 1 |
| Nicolò Zaniolo | Udinese | 19 | 2 |
| Pio Esposito | Inter | 9 | 5 |
| Daniel Maldini | Cagliari | 6 | 0 |
| Nicolò Cambiaghi | Bologna | 1 | 0 |
| Samuele Inácio | Borussia Dortmund | 1 | 0 |
| Sebastiano Esposito | Sassuolo | 0 | 0 |
| Antonio Vergara | Napoli | 0 | 0 |
| Mohamed Ali Zoma | Nürnberg | 0 | 0 |
The caps column is where the story is
Three players in the squad have more than 50 caps. Donnarumma has 83, Nicolò Barella 70 and Giovanni Di Lorenzo 53, and after that it falls away fast: Giacomo Raspadori on 46, Alessandro Bastoni on 43, then nobody else above 34. Gianluigi Buffon’s Italy record is 176, and Donnarumma at 27 is less than halfway there.
The other end of the list is more striking. Eleven of the 34 have never been capped, and another five have played once or twice. Put differently, sixteen of the thirty-four have a senior international career you could describe in a sentence. Massimo Pessina, Honest Ahanor and Samuele Inácio were all born in 2007 or 2008, which means every one of them was alive, if barely, the last time Italy played at a World Cup.
Goals are the number that really shows the gap. The whole 34-man squad has scored 64 international goals between them. Gigi Riva, still Italy’s record scorer more than fifty years after he stopped playing, scored 35 on his own. Moise Kean leads the current group with 13, Raspadori has 11 and Barella 10, and no one else in the squad has reached double figures.
Where Italy’s players play their club football
Twenty-four of the 34 are at Italian clubs and ten play abroad, which is a far more domestic squad than most of the teams Italy will face. Atalanta supply four players, more than anyone, and Inter three. Roma, Napoli, Cagliari, Bologna and Como have two each, and seven more clubs have one.
Of the ten abroad, six are in England: Donnarumma at Manchester City, Riccardo Calafiori at Arsenal, Sandro Tonali at Tottenham, Michael Kayode at Brentford, Matteo Ruggeri at Aston Villa and Ahanor at Crystal Palace. The rest are spread between Germany, France and Portugal. Not one plays in Spain, whose squad won the 2026 World Cup that Italy watched from home.
Italy’s Nations League group and fixtures
Italy were drawn into Group A1 with France, Belgium and Turkey, which is the hardest group in the competition and has no weak fourth team to take points from. On the FIFA ranking published in July 2026, Zinedine Zidane’s France were third and Belgium eighth, against Italy in 15th and Turkey in 27th. Italy are the third seeds in their own group.
| Date | Match | Venue |
|---|---|---|
| 25 September | Italy v Belgium | Stadio Olimpico, Rome |
| 28 September | Turkey v Italy | Bursa |
| 2 October | France v Italy | Paris |
| 5 October | Italy v Turkey | Stadio Dall’Ara, Bologna |
The scheduling is unusual: Italy play Turkey twice inside eight days, home and away, rather than at opposite ends of the campaign. That gives Mancini a quick read on whether anything he changed after the first meeting worked. Our squad guides for Turkey, Belgium and France cover the other three sides in the group.
What Italy have won, and how long ago
Italy are one of the most decorated teams in the game and almost none of it is recent. Four World Cups, in 1934, 1938, 1982 and 2006. Two European Championships, in 1968 and 2020. Only Brazil have won the World Cup more often.
The record since 2006 is harder to square with that. Italy went out in the group stage in 2010 and 2014, missed the 2018 and 2022 tournaments entirely, won Euro 2020 under Mancini, and have now missed 2026 as well. A country with four stars on the shirt has played three World Cup matches in the last twelve years, all of them in June 2014.
Who is worth watching
Pio Esposito is the one. He is 21, he plays for Inter, and he has five goals in nine appearances, which is the best scoring rate in the squad by a distance and better than Kean has managed in 26 games. If Mancini has a centre-forward to build the next four years around, it is probably him.
Donnarumma matters for a different reason. He is the captain, and he is one of only three men here who started the Euro 2020 final at Wembley, alongside Di Lorenzo and Barella. Those three are the whole of the living link between the team that won something and the one that has not qualified for a World Cup since.