Italian football does not do quiet rebuilds. Every reset arrives trailing wreckage – a resignation, a betting controversy, a technical director who lasts barely a fortnight before the whole construction collapses and the federation reaches, inevitably, for the familiar. The pattern is not new. It is, by now, almost ceremonial.
On Tuesday, FIGC president Giovanni Malagò confirmed that Roberto Mancini has been reappointed as head coach of the Italian national team. Alongside him, Claudio Ranieri steps in as the new technical director, filling the void left when Paolo Maldini and his adviser Leonardo departed just days into their roles. The announcement ends one of the more chaotic managerial searches in recent Italian football memory – and that is saying something.
The Appointment: A Decision Made By Elimination
The context that produced Mancini’s return matters as much as the return itself. Gennaro Gattuso had departed in April following Italy’s latest failure to qualify for the World Cup, as the full weight of that playoff elimination settled on a federation already in crisis.
Both Pep Guardiola and Carlo Ancelotti declined the role. Then Andrea Pirlo emerged as favourite – chosen by Maldini and Leonardo, agreed upon, essentially announced – before his role as global ambassador for Russian bookmaker Fonbet prompted political objections and institutional cold feet.
Pirlo defended himself, stating in an Instagram post that he had always carried out his activity in full respect of the laws of the countries he worked in and the contracts he signed, and rejecting any suggestion that the collaboration carried political meaning. It was not enough. Malagò withdrew his approval, Pirlo stood aside, and Maldini and Leonardo followed by what Malagò described as mutual consent.
Malagò was direct at his press conference, in quotes reported by Tutto Mercato Web: there was a candidate who had been defined and agreed upon, chosen by Maldini and Leonardo, but after what emerged about Pirlo regarding the partnership with the Russian betting agency, he was unable to give final approval.
Time was running out, he said, and he felt Roberto Mancini should become coach, for a whole host of reasons. He added that the shared vision on Mancini had not been present with Maldini – which explains, with unusual candour, why the technical director’s tenure was so brief.
The exhaustive and ultimately embarrassing coaching search had produced a result almost by default. That is not a minor detail. It is the entire story.
The Mancini Record: What He Built, How He Left
Mancini‘s first spell as Italy coach ran from 2018 to 2023, arriving in the immediate aftermath of Italy’s failure to qualify for the 2018 World Cup, having lost to Sweden in a qualifying playoff.
What he achieved in between is real and should not be diminished: the Azzurri won Euro 2020, defeating England at Wembley in a penalty shootout, and produced football of genuine invention across a campaign that restored Italian pride after years of structural rot. Between 2018 and 2021, Mancini also coached Italy to a world-record 37-match unbeaten run.
The departure is the harder chapter. Italy missed the 2022 World Cup – a failure that would have ended most international coaching tenures on the spot. Mancini nevertheless kept his position before surprisingly resigning in August 2023, subsequently taking charge of Saudi Arabia’s national team.
He left Saudi Arabia in 2024 and was most recently coach at Al-Sadd in Qatar, departing last month. The speed and manner of his exit from the Azzurri – and the Saudi move that followed – left a residue of institutional grievance that Malagò acknowledged at Tuesday’s press conference, noting Mancini’s recent apologies and stating that all the necessary assessments had been made.
Whether those assessments are sufficient is a question Italian supporters will answer slowly, and through results rather than press conferences.
The Vow: What Mancini Has Promised
Mancini and Ranieri are due to outline their vision at a press conference on Wednesday. The specific terms of the rebuild – the tactical identity, the squad priorities, the timeline – remain to be stated publicly. What is already clear is the scale of the task: Italy have now failed to qualify for a third successive World Cup, a failure of such accumulated weight that it has reshaped how the rest of European football regards the Azzurri.
As Italian football’s own legends have made clear in their diagnosis of the national team’s structural problems, no single appointment resolves the deeper dysfunction. The academy pipeline, the dual-national question, the reliance on an ageing core – these are systemic conditions, not coaching problems. Mancini can address selection and tactics. He cannot, alone, rewire the infrastructure that produced three consecutive World Cup absences.
Italy next play in September and October, when they will face Belgium, Turkey and France in the UEFA Nations League – a group containing three teams that were present at the most recent World Cup. Malagò noted that the new coach will have only two training sessions to prepare for the first game, underlining the scale of the immediate challenge.
What the Reappointment Reveals About Italian Football
There is a particular kind of institutional exhaustion that produces a reappointment. It is not the same as genuine conviction. When Malagò says he felt Mancini should become coach for a whole host of reasons, the unspoken context is that every other option had either declined, collapsed, or been rendered politically untenable. Mancini was not the first choice. He was the last viable one.
That is not a disqualification. It is, however, a diagnosis. Italian football has a habit – documented, recurring, almost constitutional – of identifying the problem clearly and then solving it with the instrument already on the shelf. Giorgio Chiellini had been touted as a likely successor to Maldini in the technical structure.
Ranieri, at 74, has been here before – he turned down the Italy job previously and has now been drawn back into the federation’s orbit by the sheer absence of alternatives.
The Pirlo episode deserves to be read in full, not merely as a footnote. A World Cup winner, a player of genuine intelligence and tactical curiosity, was essentially eliminated from consideration because of a commercial relationship that nobody in the federation had scrutinised before the announcement process began. The oversight is not incidental – it reflects the FIGC’s institutional speed and rigour in a moment that demanded both.
The Verdict: Qualified Hope, Structural Doubt
Mancini is not a consolation prize in terms of coaching credentials. He won a European Championship with Italy.
He built something coherent from debris once before, and there is genuine reason to believe he understands the psychological repair work that the Azzurri require after years of public failure. The Euros triumph was not an accident – it was the product of a clear identity, imposed with conviction over several years.
But the conditions surrounding his return are less auspicious than those of his first appointment. The federation’s governance has been publicly destabilised in the space of a single week.
The technical director beside him is a veteran pragmatist appointed under emergency conditions rather than long-term planning. And the Italian football system that Mancini must draw from remains, structurally, the same one that produced three consecutive World Cup absences.
Whether Mancini – and the rebuilt FIGC structure around him – can manufacture genuine, lasting renewal from those conditions, or whether this reappointment becomes simply the next familiar chapter in a very long story of institutional repetition, remains, as ever, the only question that matters.
