I'm going to say something that needs to be said: what happened with the Italian national team is a disgrace.

Italy - four-time World Cup champions - will miss their third consecutive World Cup after losing to Bosnia and Herzegovina in the playoff final. But here's the part that makes my blood boil: before the match, Italian players reportedly sought a €300,000 bonus to be shared among the squad for World Cup qualification - approximately €10,000 per player.

Let me repeat that. Before they'd earned anything, before they'd qualified for anything, they wanted to get paid.

Thankfully, Gennaro Gattuso - Rino to those who know him - had the sense and the spine to shut it down. According to reports from La Repubblica, Gattuso dissuaded the players from continuing negotiations with the FIGC, arguing that a bonus could be discussed after securing a World Cup spot.

"The sad ending proved Rino right," Repubblica wrote, "but sums up the mindset with which some Italian players got to the game that could have brought Italy back to the World Cup."

And that's exactly it - the mindset. This is everything wrong with modern football in one story. The entitlement. The lack of pride in the shirt. The idea that representing your country at the World Cup is a business transaction rather than the honor of a lifetime.

When I think about Italian football - the passion, the history, the Azzurri mystique - this isn't it. This is the antithesis of everything that made Italian football great.

Italy has now missed three straight World Cups. . For a nation that won it all in 2006, that's an unfathomable fall from grace. And while there are plenty of structural issues with Italian soccer, this bonus controversy tells you everything you need to know about where the problems start.