Serie A's Player of the Month Can't Get an Italy Call

Lega Serie A made it official on Thursday: Giacomo Calò is the league's Player of the Month for October. The Frosinone midfielder collected the award in the middle of an international break he is spending at home. Roberto Mancini named his Italy squad for France and Belgium last week, and Calò — 29 years old, uncapped, the form midfielder in the country on the numbers — was not in it. Both things are now on the record at the same time, which is what makes this a story rather than a snub somebody's agent invented. The Serie A front has been carrying Frosinone all autumn; Thursday it carried the contradiction too.

The run the award honours is easy to read, because it fits in four scorelines. Calò scored Frosinone's first goal in the 4-2 win over Sassuolo on October 16. He scored again in Bergamo on October 25, levelling at 3-3 three minutes after half-time in a game that finished 4-4 with Atalanta.

Four days later he converted a penalty in the 5-1 rout of Lecce, and on November 1 he curled in the second goal deep in stoppage time to finish a 2-0 win over Torino — four straight league games on the scoresheet, five goals in eleven appearances for the season. The October shortlist he beat is not a soft one: Como's Anastasios Douvikas, the Champions League's top scorer; Lazio's Gustav Isaksen; Atalanta's Nikola Krstović; Napoli's Scott McTominay; Inter's Marcus Thuram. He is the second winner of the season, after Roma's Donyell Malen took the August-September prize.

None of it is happening in a vacuum, either. Frosinone came up from Serie B in the summer and sit sixth after eleven rounds, on 20 points, with 24 goals scored. The Torino win was their fifth straight at home. Across the Sassuolo, Atalanta and Lecce games they scored thirteen times. Massimiliano Alvini's side play like a team that has decided the division's size is not its problem, and Calò — sitting in the middle of their midfield, taking the free kicks, arriving late for the finishes — is the player the run keeps running through. Football Italia's weekly ratings had him as the highest-rated Italian in the league in the eighth round, the only one at 7.5 or better that weekend, and the season ratings since have kept him at the top of the same lists.

His agent said the quiet part out loud last week. Vincenzo Pisacane told Tuttomercatoweb that Calò is, on his stats, the best midfielder in Italy right now, and that leaving him out made no sense to him. "If he'd been 34 or 35, I might have understood," Pisacane said, "but he's 29." Then the line that has followed the story since: "I hope yesterday's failure to call him up isn't the death of meritocracy." Pisacane also said his client is fully focused on Frosinone, which is what agents say, but in this case the fixture list backs him up — there was nothing else for Calò to focus on this week.

Mancini answered at Coverciano on Monday, and he did not pretend the name had not come up. "Calò is one of the players doing well," he said. "Frosinone have three or four players who are good. We can't call players who are already 29 or 30 right now. When we need them, we'll do it, but not because his agent tells us so."

The rest of the answer is the policy underneath it: this camp belongs to the young midfielders — Alessandro Romano, Issa Doumbia and Nicolò Pisilli were the names he pointed to — because Italy are trying to grow a group rather than borrow one. In the same press conference he admitted, about the deep playmaker role Calò's club form keeps advertising, that "right now we don't have a regista," and that the hope is somebody emerges in the coming months. The league's answer to that vacancy spent Thursday collecting a monthly award instead.

That is a defensible rebuild, and tonight it gets its examination. Italy host France at San Siro with top spot in the group still live, and Mancini's youth bet runs through the whole side — the matchday squad he named on Thursday left his three potential debutants in the stands and still leans young in attack. If it works, the Calò argument dies of its own accord, filed under the price of a plan. If the midfield looks thin against France and again in Belgium on Sunday, the Player of the Month watching from Frosinone becomes the easiest question in Italian football.

Calò's own next stage is a big one, and it needs no selection meeting. Frosinone return from the break on Sunday November 22 at Milan at San Siro — sixth against fourth, the promoted side's first trip to the ground this season. A month that began with an award argument can end with an audition in the stadium where Italy play tonight. Mancini will not be picking the team. On the evidence of October, he may end up watching the same midfielder everybody else is.