The Italian baseball team has become the darling of the World Baseball Classic. With a miraculous victory over Team USA, an undefeated record in the group stage and an affable squad of espresso-chugging, Armani suit-wearing paisans, the Italians quickly became fan favorites as they prepare to face Puerto Rico in the quarterfinals on Saturday.
The fact that the team is almost entirely composed of Americans with Italian heritage is by now well-known and lovingly mocked on both sides of the Atlantic. Lesser known is the fact that the success of this team wearing Italia shirts comes precisely at a time when the Italian judiciary is hearing arguments over who is considered an Italian citizen.
On Wednesday, hours before Team Italy took on Mexico in the decisive group-stage game, Italy’s Constitutional Court held a public hearing to discuss challenges to a newly enshrined law that limits the transmission of Italian citizenship. Until last year, anyone with an Italian ancestor and sufficient paperwork, even if they’d never stepped foot in Italy, could claim an Italian passport. But a deluge of applications from people with Italian heritage in the Americas forced the government to take drastic action: The transmission of citizenship is now limited to children and grandchildren of Italians.
Antonio Tajani, Italy’s foreign affairs minister, said at the time the reform was undertaken to “stop the abuse” of claiming the nation’s passports while “protecting true Italian citizens,” according to Il Giornale. The newspaper also reported that the ministry had 60,000 pending citizenship applications at the time, while residents of South America claiming Italian citizenship had exploded from 800,000 to over 2 million within the past two decades.
On Thursday, after the public hearing, the Italian constitutional court said it had rejected as unfounded challenges to the citizenship law, which were brought by a regional court in Turin.
The reform is part of a broader discussion within Italy about who is considered Italian: as easy as it has been for third- and fourth-generation descendants to claim a passport, it has been prohibitively difficult for children of immigrants who were born, raised and educated in Italy to become citizens. A referendum last year that would have eased their path to citizenship failed due to insufficient turnout, after Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni urged a boycott on the vote.
Meanwhile, Team Italy at the WBC is prompting renewed analysis of who is considered a paisan. Just three members of the squad were born in Italy, with the rest hailing from North and South America. According to WBC rules, players are eligible to suit up for a national team if they meet any of seven criteria, including that they can provide sufficient documentary evidence that they could obtain the nation’s citizenship if they applied. In other words: no actual passport needed.
It isn’t known how each member of the Team Italy roster specifically qualified for eligibility, though several have previously spoken about their roots in the boot. Some American-born members of Team Italy have been open about the fact that they are not citizens of the homeland, at least yet. Asked about his own connection to Italy on the Pat McAfee show on Thursday, first baseman Vinnie Pasquantino said, “my grandfather is from Niagara Falls, and I did all this research in 2022, so I don’t 100% remember correctly, but I believe it was his father, born and raised in Italy.”
Under the new Italian citizenship law, Pasquantino would not qualify for a passport, but he remains eligible to compete for Italy in the WBC because he previously played for the Azzurri at the 2023 tournament.
“I totally get why people have opinions on it, about eligibility, and things like that,” he said on the Rich Eisen show Thursday, “but I think it’s an honor.
Spokesmen for the Italian baseball team didn’t respond to requests for comment. To be sure, several squads competing in the WBC feature non-native players who have heritage of the national team, including Austin Wells for the Dominican Republic and large portions of Team Great Britain and Team Israel, both eliminated in the group stage.
Citizenship in sports has long been a fraught topic. Many top-flight European soccer leagues maintain roster limits for players with non-EU passports, prompting some talented players from the Americas to claim passports from their ancestors’ homelands. U.S. men’s national team star Christian Pulisic has competed in the Bundesliga and Serie A on a Croatian passport for years. Lionel Messi was cited by Corriere della Sera as claiming Italian citizenship through his last-known Italian relative: his great-great-grandfather, born in 1866.
The International Olympic Committee mandates that athletes hold passports for the nation they represent at the Olympic Games, prompting controversy in high-profile cases. Eileen Gu, the San Francisco native who has won six Olympic freestyle skiing medals for China, has ducked questions about her own citizenship status given that China forbids dual nationality, and there does not appear to be a public record of Gu renouncing her U.S. passport.
Part of Team Italy’s charm is its affectation of Italian culture: donning an Armani jacket and slamming espresso shots after each home run, blasting Bocelli for game wins and winding down in the locker room with wine. After Team Italy’s upset of Team USA on Tuesday, the Italian sports bible Gazzetta dello Sport praised the “bizarre and cheerful team that is conquering the world. Made up of Italian-Americans, it should be said.” In remarks before Parliament this week, Prime Minister Meloni herself gave a shoutout to the baseball squadra for beating the Americans at home.
The emphasis on Italian pride has been led by Venezuelan-Italian manager and former Yankee catcher Francisco Cervelli, who since his appointment as Team Italy manager last year has been driving around the country in search of home-grown baseball talent. The Azzurri’s upset of Team USA was “one of the best days in my life,” Cervelli said in the postgame press conference.
(This story has been updated in the eighth and tenth paragraphs with additional quotes.)
