The Traditional Winger Is Vanishing From Serie A: Notes From Trigoria and Formello

An October morning at Trigoria, frost still clinging in a thin film to the grass, and I stood at the edge of pitch two watching a seventeen-year-old boy repeat a single movement over and over. Receive the ball tight to the touchline, turn to face the full-back, push the ball outside and run. He did it for forty minutes. Around the twentieth repetition he stopped, turned toward the coaching staff and asked a question I heard perfectly clearly: "But the first-team players always cut inside — why do I have to go outside?" The coach did not answer immediately. He was silent for a few seconds, then told the boy to do it again. At training grounds I come across questions like that more often than people imagine. They are not in the session plan, they never appear in a press conference, and they almost never make the news. But they are where a football nation asks itself what it is going to become. I have followed training grounds in Italy for more than forty years, from afternoons in Belgrade when I was young to winter mornings at Formello, and I have learned one thing: the biggest changes in football do not begin in matches. They begin with a movement repeated countless times on a pitch with no crowd. When the stands are empty, I hear the breathing of the match clearly. That breathing, this season, is changing its rhythm. Over the past fifteen years or so, Serie A and most of European football have shifted to an almost uniform model on both flanks. Right-footed wingers play on the left, left-footed wingers play on the right. They no longer hug the touchline to cross; they occupy the inside half-space, receive on their strong foot, turn toward goal and look for a shot or a cut-back. Width is handed to two high full-backs. This model took shape at Barcelona under Pep Guardiola, was refined at Bayern Munich and Real Madrid, and spread across Europe through Liverpool with Mohamed Salah and Sadio Mané. In Italy it arrived a little later, but when it arrived it arrived heavily. What is worth noting is that Italy was never a football nation of purely English-style wingers, but it always produced players who could work a flank in their own way. Mauro Camoranesi in the 2026 World Cup-winning side is an example I always remember: a genuine right winger who could go outside, go inside, and above all force the opposing full-back to keep guessing. His presence gave Italy's midfield extra space, and gave Andrea Pirlo extra time. In November 2026, Italy lost 0-1 to Sweden in Solna in the first leg of the play-off, then drew 0-0 at San Siro in the return. It was the first time in sixty years that Italy were absent from a World Cup. I remember that night at San Siro, when the final whistle blew and the whole stadium went silent like a church. Months later I flew to Moscow with a group of Italian supporters — not to cheer for their national team, but to be near the tournament their national team was not in. I stood in Red Square and counted roughly twelve thousand Italians crying in each other's arms. They were not crying because they had lost a ticket. They were crying because they missed their country's team. That collapse had many causes, and I do not intend to blame a single tactical model for all of it. But if you ask me what has changed most visibly at Italian training grounds over fifteen years, I will not say pressing or possession. I will say that nobody teaches a child how to go outside the touchline any more. The mechanism of the inverted winger is easy to understand, and it is genuinely effective. Receiving in the inside half-space on the strong foot opens the shooting angle immediately, without an extra touch to set the ball. The curled finish into the far corner becomes a permanent option, forcing the full-back to choose between closing down and protecting the space behind him. At the same time, the number eight or the box-to-box midfielder can push up to occupy the outside lane, creating a two-against-one. And when the inverted winger succeeds, the cut-back into the central area becomes one of the highest-value deliveries in modern football, because it forces the entire defensive line to turn. Probability models recognised this long ago. A cross from tight to the touchline converts into goals at a markedly lower rate than a cut-back from the inside half-space, because a cross from wide must clear several layers of bodies and usually arrives in an awkward posture. When the data says so, coaches listen. And when all coaches listen, the model becomes the default. Over the past three seasons I have kept a very simple tally at the Olimpico and at Formello. I count how many times in a match a winger actually dribbles past his full-back toward the touchline — that is, goes outside rather than cutting in. That number has fallen by nearly half since the first season I began recording. Not because wingers are worse now. Because they are no longer encouraged to do it. A failed attempt to go outside is logged as a wasted loss of possession. A failed attempt to cut inside is logged as an attempt to create. The first consequence is that the full-back becomes the only true winger left on the pitch. At Roma, Alessandro Florenzi was a winger converted into a full-back. Elsewhere the same story repeats: Emerson Palmieri, Cristiano Biraghi, and a long list of men pushed back one line. This sounds sensible, but it creates two costs that few mention. First, a winger moved to full-back learns to defend at twenty-two or twenty-three, when positional habits have already set. Second, a properly trained full-back is asked to become the main creative source on the flank, when he was never taught how to beat a man in short spaces. The second consequence is homogenisation. When every team attacks the same way, the value of that way falls, because defensive blocks are trained against exactly that model. Low blocks are now organised to seal the inside half-space first, accepting the concession of the touchline, because they know a cross from wide is the less dangerous option. The competitive advantage of the inverted winger has been flattened by its own popularity. It is an old law of football: every good idea destroys itself once it becomes the standard. The third consequence, and in my view the most serious, lies in the academies. From around the age of twelve, the fastest and most technically gifted children are placed on the flanks and taught the inside cut. Youth coaches select for that criterion, because they are judged on producing players who fit the first team. A child capable of dribbling outside and crossing with his weaker foot is considered incomplete rather than a different prototype. The result is that the traditional winger disappears not because he is useless, but because he is no longer manufactured. At this point I often think of another industry. Esports professionals have playing careers far shorter than footballers, while their youth development and post-retirement support systems are close to non-existent. Football is the opposite: it has a patient, expensive academy system stretching over ten years, something esports does not have. But if football uses that patient system to manufacture identical players, it is wasting precisely the advantage the other industry lacks. An academy is only truly valuable when it produces difference, not uniformity. In November 2026, also at Trigoria, I filmed a three-minute clip of Nicolò Zaniolo, then a young talent. The clip reached five hundred thousand views in a single hour. What made me keep filming was not the technique but the running style. Zaniolo was a direct, powerful runner, willing to push the ball past a man in short spaces — an old-era prototype in a new-era body. Then came two cruciate ligament injuries, then a move to Galatasaray in February 2026. I am not saying the tactical model caused the injuries. But I am saying the system always rewards the man on the rails, and always taxes the man who steps off them very heavily. Ciro Immobile is an example in the opposite direction, and it shows what is lost when the supply from the flanks changes. In the 2026-20 season he scored 36 goals in Serie A and won the European Golden Shoe. A very large share of those came from balls delivered from the two flanks and from his ability to move across the near post. If that supply changes in nature, the centre-forward prototype that lives on positioning inside the box changes with it. A player does not simply vanish. The conditions for his existence vanish first. Outside Italy, the traditional winger is still alive, and I follow them with curiosity. Filip Kostić at Juventus is a player who almost only goes outside, and he still produces value. Nico Williams at Athletic Club is a clearer example still: a winger who dribbles straight into the outside lane, and whose existence stretches the opposing defensive line in a way the inverted model cannot. In Serie A, Mattia Zaccagni and Federico Chiesa are two interesting cases, because both can go outside but are frequently pulled inside by the system. Here I have to say plainly what I believe. The prevailing view is that inverted wingers are more efficient, and that this substitution is therefore progress. I do not dispute the data. I dispute how the data is read. Efficiency is always measured relative to opponents, and in this case every opponent defends the same way. When all clubs optimise for one model, you are not measuring that model's absolute advantage; you are measuring what is left of a race everyone is already running in the same direction. Probability models cannot price surprise, because surprise is not in the historical data. Saying "the traditional winger is dead" is a misreading. He was not eliminated; he was relocated. He was pushed into the defensive line, where he must do exactly the old job from a worse starting position and with heavier defensive duty. Calling that extinction conceals the cost. And that cost is paid in conceded goals, in counter-attacks nobody managed to run back for. The biggest blind spot is this: clubs optimise for the average, but the average is only a consensus. Knockout football is not played at the average. A cup tie, extra time, the last twenty minutes of a match with nothing left to lose — that is when the game leaves the familiar data zone and falls to the man who does the unexpected. A winger who can go outside on his weaker foot is a winger the full-back cannot prepare for. You cannot rehearse defending against a man when you do not know which way he will go. Everyone speaks fast in this era, but football needs people who listen slowly. The slow listener here is the one who realises that a trend dominating for fifteen years does not mean it will always be right. It only means nobody has yet found a cheaper way to respond. So what is the next internal signal? I will be watching three things next season. The first is the return of asymmetry: a team letting one flank play inverted and the other play traditionally, forcing the opposing defence to solve two different problems in the same match. The second is two-footed wingers, because a man who can go both ways does not need the system to protect him. The third, and most important, is what is taught in academies from the under-twelve age group. A contract is only paper; a team is signed with the rhythm of feet. If you want to know how a club will play in five years, do not read the transfer news. Go to a training ground on an October morning and watch what movement someone makes a child repeat. I am nearly sixty, but the kick-off whistle makes me young again for ninety minutes. And in those ninety minutes, I still want to see something I could not predict. If every winger is exactly the same, who will be the one to open up the match in the ninetieth minute?