Amid the Major Tournament Season, Football Still Needs Slow Listeners

Eleven at night in Rome, I sit alone in the newsroom long after the match has ended. The screen still flickers, the last headlines about a qualifying round of the major tournament season drift by slowly, and in my headphones the final whistle still echoes. When the stands are empty, I hear the breathing of the match clearly. That is the moment I always wait for, not the decisive play, but the silence behind it, when the crowd has left the stands and only what truly happened remains on the grass. I am about to turn sixty, yet the kick-off whistle still makes me young again for ninety minutes, and it is precisely those minutes after the whistle that teach me the most.

The major tournament season always arrives like a flood. Flags flutter on balconies, shirts fill the shop windows, and an entire nation holds its breath for its national team. I understand that feeling better than most. In March 2026, when Italy lost to Sweden in the play-off by 0-1 and missed the World Cup for the first time in sixty years, I flew to Moscow with a group of supporters. I stood in Red Square and watched twelve thousand people cry in each other's arms. They cried for a lost ticket, and for the longing for a national team that had barely grown before fading. From that night, I abandoned the dry style of line-ups and formations, and began every piece with the small story of one specific person.

In November 2026, while following AS Roma's youth team at the Trigoria training centre, I filmed a three-minute clip of a young talent, Nicolò Zaniolo, controlling the ball, and posted it on the newsroom's Facebook page. The clip reached five hundred thousand views within an hour, a figure unprecedented for me. That sense of being overwhelmed mixed with a worry: when images travel that fast, will viewers still have the patience to understand what the boy was trying to do? Then in March 2026, Serie A was suspended indefinitely. At fifty-three, I could not enter the Olimpico, but I stayed in contact with Lazio's medical staff and asked them to describe life inside the quarantine at Formello. I wrote an online diary of fifty instalments, each about three hundred words. The fifth instalment told of the striker Ciro Immobile running alone in the parking garage, and the piece drew more than two thousand comments. Those responses taught me that readers do not need another table of statistics; they need someone to sit beside them while they wait.

My trade is that of a training-ground observer. Over forty-three years, I have learned something that seems simple: most answers do not lie in what people say after the match, but in what happens before it. I arrive at Trigoria early in the morning, stand at the corner of the pitch, count how many times a young player touches the ball with his left foot, note the rhythm of the midfield's breathing in transition drills. Those notes are not glamorous, but they are the foundation. When the major tournament season comes, pressure makes people want to conclude very quickly, and that is exactly when the foundation is most easily ignored.

I once saw an internal analysis halted halfway, simply because the writer did not have enough facts. No match name, no information about the squad, not a single data point to hold on to. The only correct thing then was to say plainly that no conclusion could yet be drawn. It sounds bland, but that is the line between a journalist and a peddler of rumours. Amid a major tournament season, the greatest value of a reporter lies in knowing clearly what he does not yet know, not in the speed of his conclusions. That honesty does not weaken a piece; it makes it more trustworthy.

I have always thought of football as a collective ritual. At the training ground, I came across a player crying over a misplaced pass, not because of the pass, but because he knew he had just lost his coach's trust. Such moments appear in no table of statistics, yet they decide how a team walks into a big match. When a national team gathers, I watch how players arriving from different clubs try to find a rhythm together, how a defender used to sitting deep learns to push up, how a striker used to being served learns to create his own chances. These are small signals, and they only reveal themselves to someone willing to sit still long enough.

A contract is only a piece of paper; a team is signed by the rhythm of its feet. What binds eleven people into one block is thousands of training sessions repeated until the body remembers by itself. So when someone asks me which team will win, I usually answer with another question: how long have they trained together, and how many cold mornings have they walked through side by side? No table of statistics answers that in place of observation.

There is a common misunderstanding I have met throughout my working years: people believe that more data means closer to the truth, and that speaking faster means appearing more knowledgeable. I think the opposite is true in most cases. When a big match ends, hundreds of headlines appear within minutes, and most of them are written by people who were never at the training ground that morning. They recycle one another, and whatever is recycled most becomes what everyone believes. The noise spreads so fast that it detaches from the grass, and the reader is swept away before seeing what actually happened.

The blind spot lies here: we measure the quality of information by the speed of its spread, not by the depth of its verification. A winger who cuts inside and scores in the eighty-eighth minute is praised as a tactical genius, while the decisive pass came from a traditional full-back no one noticed. Modern football is gradually homogenising its roles, and in that process old values are being written off unfairly. A good reporter does not chase the applause; he stands still, counts, and waits until the facts speak their own meaning.

I am not against data. I am against using data as a screen for haste. When an analysis does not have enough information, the right answer is not to invent a conclusion to fill the page, but to admit the gap and return to the training ground to fill it with real observation.

Everyone speaks fast in this age, but football needs slow listeners. I am about to turn sixty, and I know I no longer have many major tournament seasons to follow in full. So I choose to walk a beat slower: arrive early, stay longer after the whistle, and write only when I truly have something to tell. If you too are following a national team this season, perhaps the thing worth keeping is not who will win, but which ears we are using to listen to the match.