Gennaro Gattuso's Italy lost to Bosnia on penalties and missed the 2026 World Cup. For most of European football, that's a story about a nation in decline. For Real Madrid supporters with a taste for the supernatural, it's something else entirely.
Here's the pattern. In 2017, Italy were knocked out of World Cup qualifying by Sweden. That same season, Zidane's Madrid won an unprecedented third consecutive Champions League, beating Liverpool in the final. In 2022, North Macedonia's Trajkovski scored in the 92nd minute to eliminate the Azzurri in the play-offs. Ancelotti's Madrid responded by winning their 14th European Cup, again against Liverpool, on the back of those now-legendary Bernabeu comebacks. Two eliminations. Two Champions Leagues. And now a third.
The bracket that would test anyone's belief in destiny
Superstition is one thing. The actual draw is another, and Madrid's path is not kind. After eliminating Manchester City, Arbeloa's side face Bayern Munich in the quarter-finals — a side described by their own camp as so committed to winning that Kane "would play even in a wheelchair." That's the level of determination Madrid are walking into.
Beyond Bayern, PSG or Liverpool wait in a potential semi-final. The current European champions or the reigning Premier League winners. Neither is a gimme. Anyone pricing Madrid as dead certs at this stage of the competition hasn't been watching the bracket closely enough.
What Madrid do have, and what no odds model fully captures, is a relationship with this competition that borders on the irrational. They have turned certain elimination into titles so often that the Bernabeu crowd now treats a deficit as a delay rather than a verdict.
What the Italy hex actually tells us
Stripped of the romance, what this pattern really reflects is longevity. Madrid have been good enough, consistently enough, to be in contention every time the Azzurri stumble — three qualifying cycles across nine years. That's not prophecy. That's infrastructure.
Still, Italy have now missed back-to-back-to-back World Cups if this pattern holds for the full run. A nation that won the tournament in 2006 and reached the final in 1994 has now become a cautionary tale about tactical stagnation and a broken domestic system failing to produce elite players at scale.
For Madrid, the mission is simpler: win the thing they've won more than anyone else. Whether Italy's pain is a cosmic nudge or pure coincidence, Bayern Munich won't care either way.
