MILAN (AP) \u2014 Italy coach Gennaro Gattuso left his role \u201cby mutual consent\u201d on Friday, three days after the national team failed to qualify for a third consecutive World Cup.<\/p>\n
The Italian soccer federation announced the news in a statement thanking Gattuso \u201cfor the dedication and passion\u201d during his nine months in charge.<\/p>\n
Italy\u2019s chances of reaching this year\u2019s tournament in North America ended on Tuesday after a penalty shootout loss to Bosnia and Herzegovina in a qualifying playoff.<\/p>\n
\u201cWith pain in my heart, not having achieved the goal we had set ourselves, I consider my experience on the national team bench to be over,\u201d Gattuso said.<\/p>\n
Gattuso\u2019s departure comes a day after Italy\u2019s soccer federation president Gabriele Gravina resigned along with Gianluigi Buffon, who was the national team\u2019s delegation chief.<\/p>\n
The defeat to Bosnia added more misery for four-time champion Italy after being eliminated by Sweden and North Macedonia, respectively, in the qualifying playoffs for the last two World Cups.<\/p>\n
Gattuso took over from the fired Luciano Spalletti in June with the squad already in crisis mode following a defeat at Norway in its opening qualifier.<\/p>\n
The Azzurri then went on a six-match winning streak before another loss to Norway in November to finish second in their group and end up in the playoffs again.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"MILAN (AP) \u2014 Italy coach Gennaro Gattuso left his role \u201cby mutual consent\u201d on Friday, three days after…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1813,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[1637,2548,492,1148,5,503,26,21,444],"class_list":{"0":"post-3159","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-italy","8":"tag-gabriele-gravina","9":"tag-gattuso-italy-coach-world-cup","10":"tag-gennaro-ivan-gattuso","11":"tag-gianluigi-buffon","12":"tag-italy","13":"tag-luciano-spalletti","14":"tag-package-100502-member-choice-sports-option","15":"tag-product-30599-ap-sports-news-s-wire-only","16":"tag-product-42059-world-cup-text"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3159","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3159"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3159\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1813"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3159"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3159"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3159"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}