In the first five rounds of the Serie A season, only 28.2 per cent of the playing time went to Italians, with clubs including Milan, Juventus and Como dominated by foreign talent.

During this on-going crisis for the Italy squad, reflected in the Nations League opening day 2-0 defeat to Belgium, Il Fatto Quotidiano took a look at the statistics after 50 Serie A matches this season.

It found that 454 different players were used, and 71.9 per cent of them were not Italian.

That is an even higher figure than the average for last season, which reached 69.1 per cent foreign talent.

The worst offenders are Venezia, who currently sit rock bottom of the table after five defeats in five rounds, as 99.6 per cent of the players used were foreign.

Among the bigger clubs, Como are third worse with only 4.5 per cent of the players used being Italian, and this is after buying Moise Kean, Samuele Ricci and Mattia Liberali over the summer to hit UEFA parameters on homegrown talent.

Milan aren’t much better with 7.7 per cent, and Juventus are a step up on 15.2 per cent of their squad from the Peninsula.

The top two sides, Inter and Roma, have at least a core of Italian players, respectively 29.3 per cent and 29 per cent of their players on the field available for selection by Roberto Mancini.