Sixteen Days: How the Pirlo Veto Blew Up Italy's Rebuild Before It Started

Paolo Maldini lasted 16 days. Brought in to rebuild an Italy side that has now missed three World Cups in a row, he and his adviser Leonardo resigned on Monday after federation president Giovanni Malagò vetoed their chosen head coach. Italian football's attempt to fix itself collapsed before it had appointed a single manager.

When Paolo Maldini took the technical director's job at the Italian federation on 11 July, it was presented as the serious answer to a serious problem. Italy had failed to reach a third consecutive World Cup. Gennaro Gattuso had gone. The national game was being described, without much argument, as being at its lowest ebb in close to forty years. Maldini brought Leonardo with him as a special adviser, and the pair were handed the most urgent task on the desk: find the next head coach.

Sixteen days later they were both gone, and Italy still does not have one.

How Italy got here

The crisis Maldini inherited had been building for years. Italy's latest failure came in the play-off final in Zenica on 31 March, when Moise Kean's early goal was cancelled out by Haris Tabaković 11 minutes from time. The Azzurri had played more than half the match with ten men after Alessandro Bastoni's first-half red card, and they lost the shoot-out 4-1 to Bosnia and Herzegovina. It followed play-off exits against Sweden for 2018 and North Macedonia for 2022; a four-time world champion has not appeared at a World Cup since 2014.

The fallout was swift. Federation president Gabriele Gravina and delegation chief Gianluigi Buffon stepped down, and Gattuso — who had replaced the sacked Luciano Spalletti the previous summer — followed a day later, saying his time in the job was over. In June, Giovanni Malagò, the former head of the Italian Olympic Committee (CONI) and the man who led the organising committee for this year's Milan-Cortina Winter Olympics, was elected to succeed Gravina with more than 68 per cent of the vote.

Maldini was his statement hire. The former Milan captain, who had served as the club's technical director between 2019 and 2023, was given oversight of the senior side and the entire youth pathway, and he and Leonardo signed four-year deals designed to run through to the 2030 World Cup. Malagò said Maldini had "always" been his first choice, describing him and Leonardo as "two sides of the same coin."

The shortlist that kept shrinking

The search did not go well from the start. Pep Guardiola was sounded out and said no. Carlo Ancelotti, the other obvious name for a federation hoping to buy instant credibility, also declined. Two of the most decorated coaches in the game had looked at the Italy job — historically one of the most prestigious posts in football — and passed.

That is worth sitting with for a moment. The vacancy is not short of romance, but it now comes attached to a squad that cannot qualify for tournaments and a governing body in visible disarray. The elite are choosing to wait it out.

With the marquee options closed off, Maldini turned to Andrea Pirlo — a World Cup winner as a player, a coach whose managerial record is far patchier, but someone who fit the idea of a reset built around people who understand the shirt.

His coaching CV explains the doubts. Handed the Juventus job in 2020 with virtually no experience, Pirlo won the Coppa Italia and the Supercoppa but finished only fourth in Serie A and was dismissed after one season. Spells at Fatih Karagümrük in Turkey and at Sampdoria in Serie B followed, the latter ending with the sack after little more than a year, and the 47-year-old has since been coaching in Dubai.

The Fonbet problem

Pirlo's candidacy ran into an obstacle that had nothing to do with tactics. He serves as a global brand ambassador for Fonbet, a Russian betting company — and Italy operates a ban on gambling advertising. What began as an awkward look quickly became a question of whether the appointment was even legally workable, and the reaction across Italian football and the domestic media was fierce.

Pirlo became Fonbet's global ambassador in October 2025, but the scrutiny intensified in May, when he and former Italy team-mate Marco Materazzi attended promotional events in Moscow while Ukraine was reporting a heavy wave of Russian strikes. Pina Picierno, a vice-president of the European Parliament, said Pirlo had "lent his stature to normalising Putin's regime", and called his potential appointment "a grave mistake."

Federation president Giovanni Malagò, himself newly installed, moved to block the appointment. Maldini and Leonardo pushed back. Malagò did not move. Reported by Sky Sport Italia on Monday, the outcome was the resignation of both men — a technical director and his adviser walking away rather than accept a veto on the single decision they had been hired to make.

Pirlo, told on Sunday night that he was no longer the candidate, responded on Instagram. He insisted he had always worked within the law of whichever country he was in, and rejected the idea that his commercial deal carried any political message.

Who was actually right?

The uncomfortable part of this story is that both sides have a defensible case.

Malagò was being asked to install a national team coach with a live commercial relationship to a Russian bookmaker, in a country that bans gambling advertising, at a moment when the federation can least afford another scandal. Blocking it is not obviously unreasonable. If anything, the question is why the conflict was not identified and settled before Pirlo's name reached the point of public discussion.

Maldini's position is just as understandable. He was recruited to exercise judgement over exactly this kind of decision. Having watched two elite candidates decline the job, he landed on a third, and was overruled by a president who had appointed him a fortnight earlier. A technical director who cannot choose the coach is a technical director in name only.

What the episode really exposes is that nobody agreed in advance who held the authority. That is a governance failure, and it happened at the exact moment the federation was advertising itself as reformed.

Where Italy goes from here

The immediate position is bleak: no head coach, no technical director, no adviser, and a president whose first significant intervention cost him two of his own appointments. Roberto Mancini, Antonio Conte and Thiago Motta have been floated as alternatives, but none is in concrete talks and the reporting on all three remains speculative. Mancini at least offers familiarity: he led Italy between 2018 and 2023 and won Euro 2020 along the way. Ancelotti, meanwhile, remains under contract with Brazil.

The deeper problem is one of attraction. Italy needs a coach of genuine standing to restore belief, but the past three weeks have advertised a federation where the lines of authority are unclear and internal disputes become public within days. That is not a pitch that helps recruit the kind of name Malagò now badly needs.

Italian football has emerged from worse. But it has rarely looked this disorganised while trying to.