Maldini and Leonardo walk away: when a country prefers nostalgia to ideas
The resignation of the two executives, swept away by the row over the Pirlo choice, ends a weeks-long dream in the worst way. And it tells of an Italy that, at the crossroads between innovating and retreating to the old guard, once again chooses the past.
By Marco Tirinato — Italian Next Gen
A few days ago we wrote, on these very pages, that the arrival of Paolo Maldini and Leonardo at the FIGC was the best of premises: two men of the pitch, two ideas of football, called by Malagò to rebuild a movement on its knees. We also warned that the risk, in Italy, is always the same — that two great names end up trapped inside a structure that does not change. We never wanted to be proven right so soon, and so bitterly.
Chronicle of a surrender
Maldini and Leonardo have resigned. Swept away not by a sporting failure — they were not even given the time to try — but by a political and media storm. The choice of Andrea Pirlo for the Azzurri bench was attacked ferociously, over the former midfielder's professional ties to Russian circles, formed during his coaching experiences abroad. From there, the discredit machine: suspicion, insinuation, sensational headlines. Within days, the two executives went from saviours to defendants.
And so they packed their bags. With them goes a technical project that never even saw the light. What remains is the void — and the burning sense that the system expelled the antibodies instead of the disease.
The predictable return of the old guard
Because it is what came next that says everything. With Maldini's ideas shelved, Italy did what it does best: it looked backwards. The names circulating to fill the void are the usual ones, the reassuring faces of nostalgia — a Ranieri recalled as a luxury firefighter, a Mancini revived in search of a second (or third) spring. Utterly respectable men, of course, with careers no one wants to diminish. But it is the logic that hurts: faced with the choice between the new idea and the reassurance of the familiar, Italian football chose, once again, the familiar.
It is not a problem of people. It is a problem of culture. It is the same conditioned reflex that led us to miss three World Cups in a row: when things go badly, instead of changing the method we change the face on the bench, preferably the most familiar one. We reshuffle the same cards hoping for a different hand.
Decline is not a defeat: it is a habit
And here we want to raise our voice, because this story is bigger than Maldini, than Pirlo, than Malagò. The decline of Italian football is not made of individual defeats — those happen to everyone. It is made of a systematic inability to innovate. Of a country that, every time someone tries to bring a different idea, finds a way to reject it: with bureaucracy, with suspicion, with nostalgia turned into policy.
Look around. Spain has just won its tenth Under-19 Euro, a record built on twenty years of method and brave choices. Germany rebuilds its youth systems every time it stops winning. Portugal, a country of ten million, produces champions on a conveyor belt because it invested in facilities and coaching while we told ourselves we were still the best. And us? We argue about who to put on the bench, as if that were the problem.
Maldini had a vision: put talent at the centre, rejuvenate, build. It could have been the right one or the wrong one — we will never know, because they did not let him try. And this is the saddest part: not losing a bet, but refusing to bet at all. Preferring, as always, the comfort of regret to the unknown of courage.
Why we keep watching the kids
There is a reason this site exists, and this story makes it even clearer. While at the top yet another boardroom reckoning plays out, at the bottom — on the pitches of Serie C, in the Primavera sides, in the academies abroad where our eighteen-year-olds go to find the space they cannot find here — a generation keeps growing that deserves more. It deserves adults with the courage to bet on it.
Italian football will not die from a penalty shootout in Zenica, nor from the resignation of two executives. It risks fading, slowly, from this habit of always choosing the past. The road to 2030 still exists — but it does not run through the reassuring names recalled to calm the storm. It runs through ideas, method, and the courage to let those who have them work. And above all it runs through them, the kids, whom we will keep telling about anyway — even when, at the top, they have stopped believing.
Forza Azzurri, and forza ragazzi. Let's not leave them alone. 🇮🇹