Let's make one thing clear from the outset: Roberto Mancini is a high-level choice for the Italy job. At the moment, Pirlo and Thiago Motta are coaches who are vastly inferior to Mancini in terms of their CVs, experience, honours and what they have actually shown on the pitch. The choice of Mancini, however, tells us much more about the Italian mindset, at least when it comes to sport.
When everything seemed to have been decided, Malagò issued the final veto on Andrea Pirlo as the new national team coach, setting off a domino effect that led to Maldini and Leonardo's self-imposed exile. Even the last-minute proposal of Thiago Motta was not enough. The winds of innovation had begun to blow too insistently, cold and brisk, sweeping away the stale warmth of the comfort zone.
A few hours later, the name circulating most insistently was Roberto Mancini, accompanied by a few incredibly flattering articles whose timing was, to say the least, suspicious. Roberto Mancini did not arrive on the strength of recent achievements. He arrived because the others had said no, or had been ruled out by something.
Guardiola had turned the job down months earlier, and neither Maldini nor Leonardo had been able to change his mind. He wanted time for himself after leaving Manchester City. Pirlo had accepted, only to be discovered to have ties to a Russian betting agency and a family entanglement that nobody at the federation wanted to discuss openly. Within a few days, his name had become more of a political problem than a technical one.
The most likely reality is that nobody was convinced by his candidacy and that two easy excuses, conveniently served on a silver platter, were found to show him the door, or rather, to prevent him from even getting close to it.
And so we return to Mancini. A man Italy had already let go once, in August 2023, shortly before he signed with Saudi Arabia for twenty-five million net euros a year. His resignation came as a surprise, just days after he had also been entrusted with coordinating the youth national teams. What remained was the feeling of a rupture that had never truly healed, the European Championship won in 2021, a cycle that seemed destined to open but instead closed almost immediately.
In between, let us not forget, there was a World Cup that slipped away in a home play-off defeat to North Macedonia.
In Saudi Arabia, things went wrong almost immediately. Four friendlies, no wins. Then the World Cup qualifying campaign started well, with a four-nil victory over Pakistan, but the Asian Cup turned into yet another disappointment. Elimination on penalties against South Korea, with Mancini leaving the pitch before the decisive kick to protest against the referee.
The president of the Saudi federation called his behaviour indefensible. Inconsistent results in World Cup qualifying did the rest. His contract was terminated in October 2024.
Shortly afterwards came the admission few had expected. Mancini said he regretted his decision, that he would have handled his departure from the national team differently, that perhaps all it would have taken was a conversation with Gravina to avoid everything that happened afterwards.
It is a sentence worth keeping in mind. A man admitting that he let go too quickly of something he still cared about.
Then Qatar. From November 2025, in charge of Al Sadd, a smaller stage than the ones he was used to. Two trophies in just a few months nonetheless, a super cup and a league title. An almost personal derby against Simone Inzaghi's Al Hilal, won on penalties. Then, in June, the departure announced on social media. We are free again, he wrote. And it was immediately clear what for.
Meanwhile, in Italy, people were talking about something else. The new trio at the helm of the federation, president Malagò, technical director Maldini and adviser Leonardo, had spent the summer building the narrative of a technical revolution. A ten-year project, they said. A cascading structure running from the senior national team all the way down to youth football schools.
Words like methodology and identity were mentioned more often than any proper name. Guardiola was the symbol of that change. His refusal left a void that no other name could truly fill. Pirlo knew this well.
He had been chosen partly because of his past as a 2006 hero, for a name that evoked pleasant memories more than a solid coaching CV. His managerial career, in fact, had consisted of minor stops. Sampdoria, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates.
Then came the ties to Fonbet, the Russian betting agency close to the Kremlin, and the issue involving the two sons, Pirlo's and Maldini's, both close to the world of players' agencies in a grey area of a regulatory framework that should have prohibited it.
It took only a few hours for everything to collapse.
The Name That Raises No Questions
Mancini arrives as the almost obvious fallback option. Malagò knows him well, having already brought him into the national team in 2018. He is a name that requires nobody to defend a project, because he does not propose a new one.
There is a paradox worth noting. Mancini, too, has ties to Russia that are not exactly straightforward. He coached Zenit Saint Petersburg, a club owned by Gazprom, just three years after the annexation of Crimea. But the story did not carry the same media weight as Pirlo's.
Perhaps because it came later, when public opinion was already tired of arguing. Perhaps because people are quicker to turn a blind eye when the face is familiar.
Looking at the people who decide the fate of Italian football today, the feeling is always the same. Gravina, the outgoing president, is seventy-two. Malagò is sixty-seven. The president of the Italian Coaches' Association, Ulivieri, is eighty-five. Gianni Rivera had put himself forward for the national team job and will turn eighty-three in August.
It is not simply a question of age. It is a way of thinking about football that always looks backwards, towards 2006, towards the Nineties, towards a time that seems unrepeatable only because it has passed.
The supposed Baggio dossier that nobody has ever read. The myth of Coverciano as the cradle of lost knowledge. The constant references to Baggio, to Maldini, and now to Mancini.
They are variations on the same gesture. Going back, instead of building something that does not yet exist.
A Void Nobody Wants to Look At
The problem is not nostalgia itself. It becomes a problem when it takes the place of real work.
Italian football schools are too expensive for a growing part of the population. The Coverciano technical centre has turned in on itself, reserving courses almost exclusively for former professional footballers. Executives talk about young players in public speeches, but rarely touch the levers that could actually change anything.
Mancini returns with the confidence of someone who never stopped hoping for it. It is difficult to blame him, after all.
The system calling him back, however, is once again choosing the easiest path. Forgiving what has already happened, forgetting what was once said about him, rather than standing still in front of the void left by a project that still does not exist.