World Cups - Italy 1990

Boasting an architectural heritage that stretched back millennia and saw groovy new stadia built for the 1990 World Cup in Bari and Turin - and stadia especially renovated in Cagliari, Florence, Milan, Naples, Palermo, Rome and Verona - Italy let its violent and disappointing World Cup play out between disappointing, random sets of box-nets.








And not even a fat man singing Puccini could hide Italy's missed opportunity to make its mark in the history of on-field architecture.

Mexico today

Mexico still has enormous free-hanging box nets -

and so successful was FIFA's masterplan that a quarter century later, so does everybody else.