"He phoned me and Leonardo to say: from today, the coach is up to me. From today, the rules change." That was the moment Paolo Maldini knew it was over. Seventeen days into a role he'd waited a lifetime for, he handed in his resignation on a contract that hadn't even officially started.
In a lengthy interview with Corriere della Sera, Maldini has laid out exactly what happened inside the FIGC — and the picture it paints of president Giovanni Malagò isn't flattering.
Guardiola was writing formations. Then he wasn't.
The headline that will travel furthest: Pep Guardiola came genuinely close to taking the Italy job. Maldini and Leonardo flew to Barcelona, had lunch with him, talked football for an entire day. Guardiola started sketching formations on pieces of paper. He studied squads from the U17s upward.
What stopped it? "Exhaustion," Maldini says. A decade in the Premier League, back surgery, a need to decompress. Not money — Maldini flatly denies the reported €20m salary demand. "Pep told us clearly: give me one euro less than the previous coach and I'm fine."
Carlo Ancelotti was the first call. Polite, brief, final — Brazil had reaffirmed their faith in him, and he wished Italy luck. So Maldini moved to Andrea Pirlo, alongside two other names: Daniele De Rossi and Fabio Grosso. All three were world champions. All three were ruled out because Malagò claimed existing agreements with clubs — everyone except Lazio — made it impossible to approach Serie A coaches during pre-season.
That left Pirlo. And then Malagò pulled the plug on Pirlo too, citing his associations with a Russian betting company, before delivering the line that ended everything: the coach selection was now his decision, not Maldini's.
The promise that didn't hold
Maldini had taken the role on one specific condition. "The first thing I asked was: who chooses the coach?" Malagò's answer: "The coach is up to you and I will endorse that." That agreement lasted until it became inconvenient.
What Maldini had envisioned was genuinely ambitious — not just a new head coach, but a complete overhaul of Italian football from the ground up. He invoked Johan Cruyff's influence on Spanish football as the model: years of resistance followed by a generation of world-class talent. His timeline of eight to ten years was the part that drew the most criticism, but it was grounded in how long similar rebuilds took in Switzerland, England, and France.
- Maldini would have become President of Club Italia, overseeing 19 teams across youth football, women's football, futsal, and beach soccer
- The project prioritised technical development — one-on-ones, attacking mentality — over tactical systems
- Roberto Mancini and Antonio Conte were considered but rejected in favour of a younger coach who would commit to the long-term vision
Instead, Claudio Ranieri got the job. Maldini respects him — "his story speaks for itself" — but worries the appointment signals a return to short-termism. "I fear that a lot of importance will be given to the national team and less to the rebuilding of Italian football." Italy face Belgium, Turkey, and France in the Nations League within weeks. That pressure will dominate everything, and the deeper structural work will drift.
For anyone pricing up Italy's Nations League campaign or their long-term tournament prospects, that concern matters. A squad built around a reactive, results-first approach is a different proposition to one being rebuilt with identity and youth in mind. The odds reflect the former. Whether that's justified depends entirely on what Ranieri has actually been asked to do.
"It's a shame," Maldini said. "A real shame."
Hard to argue with that.
