The 1910 Founding Era

Lore & Background

The 1910s produced no World Cups to win (the tournament would not arrive until 1930) and no continental titles to chase. What the decade produced was infrastructure — a federation that learned to function, a coaching culture that was only beginning to be imagined, and a generation of players who understood they were not merely representing a club but a country. That conceptual leap, small as it seemed in the muddy fields of 1910, was the true foundation upon which Vittorio Pozzo's 1934 and 1938 champions would later build.

In Their Own Story

The morning of the first match, the dressing room was a borrowed room behind a Milanese ground, the air thick with the smell of liniment and damp wool. The captain — a factory worker from Genoa who had not yet finished his shift — laced his boots in silence while the others argued about who would take the first corner. A journalist from a Turin paper sketched the squad in a notebook, unsure if anyone would ever read it. The crowd was thin, the wind off the Po was cutting, and the opposing team arrived in a single hired carriage. When the whistle blew, the blue shirts moved as one, not because a coach had drawn a diagram, but because for the first time they had agreed, in a back room in Florence the year before, that they were the same team. The final whistle was barely a sound over the applause. No one knew yet that the shirt they wore that day would one day carry the weight of four World Cups. They only knew it was blue, and it was theirs.

Reader's Guide

The 1910 Founding Era is best understood as a decade of institutional birth. There was no permanent head coach in the modern sense; selection committees of club representatives chose the squad match by match, and tactical instruction was minimal. The style of play was direct and physical, reflecting the sport's still-early adoption in Italy. Northern clubs — Genoa, Pro Vercelli, Torino — supplied virtually the entire squad, as football had not yet penetrated the south. The team's identity was therefore regional before it was national, a tension that would take decades to resolve. By the mid-1910s, the Azzurri had played a handful of internationals against Switzerland, France, and other neighbours, winning some, losing others, and learning the rhythms of international competition. The era ended without a major trophy — none were yet available — but it ended with something more durable: a federation, a badge, a colour, and the unshakeable precedent that Italy, as a footballing nation, existed.

Did You Know?

• Early Azzurri squads were drawn almost exclusively from northern Italian clubs such as Genoa and Pro Vercelli, as football had not yet established a meaningful presence in the south.
• The nickname 'Azzurri' (The Blues) dates back to this founding period, when the blue shirt was chosen to distinguish the national side from the white kits worn by most clubs.
• Italy's first World Cup victory would not come until 1934 under Vittorio Pozzo — more than two decades after this founding era — but the institutional and cultural groundwork was laid in the 1910s.