Next round in the saga surrounding Italy’s new national coach

Pirlo

Chaos in Italy: Andrea Pirlo will not become national team manager, while his backer Paolo Maldini is threatening to resign.

Andrea Pirlo believed he had done nothing wrong, quite the opposite. "Last night," the 2006 world champion wrote on Instagram on Monday morning "with great bitterness", "I learned that I am no longer a candidate for the post of head coach of the Italian national team." But the former darling of the Italians could not understand the reasoning. What the media and the public have accused him of for days was, in his eyes, completely beside the point.

After Pep Guardiola and Carlo Ancelotti turned it down, Pirlo looked certain to land the job, not least because Italian football icon Paolo Maldini, now the FIGC's technical director, had picked him as the preferred candidate to lead the rebuild. But Pirlo's links to Russian betting provider Fonbet have now led federation president Giovanni Malago to decide he is no longer tenable, as Gazzetta dello Sport reports.

Adding to the already considerable chaos is Maldini's threat to walk away from his post immediately if Pirlo does not become coach of the Squadra Azzurra. Less than a month after his appointment, the federation would then be without a technical director, and Malago would be facing the next mammoth task of his still young tenure.

That only makes Pirlo's fierce incomprehension over the accusations levelled at him more awkward. To ascribe a "political significance" to his work with Fonbet? This means "attributing convictions to me that I have never expressed and that are not mine", the 47-year-old former international fumed. Even so, he has no future at the federation.

Pirlo is currently under contract with top-flight club United FC in Dubai, while also serving as a global brand ambassador for Fonbet. He stressed that the professional collaboration was "exclusively commercial and sporting in nature", but after reviewing the contract documents, the federation leadership around Malago have evidently reached a different conclusion.

Now the next act begins in the FIGC's search for a new national coach. Gazzetta dello Sport mockingly called it a "coup de theatre", a startling about-turn after Maldini's declared choice of Pirlo, while neither the media nor the country's politicians held back with criticism in the fallen football nation, which has missed three World Cup finals in a row.

Only a few days ago, big names such as Guardiola and Ancelotti were still doing the rounds. Now the federation are left with nothing, and Pirlo has already moved on too. "I would like to thank Maldini and Leonardo for the appreciation and trust they showed me," he said: "My love for Italy does not depend on a job title. It is part of my story, my identity, and it will always stay with me."

So the next chapter of the Italian drama will unfold without him in a leading role. For now, the focus is on Maldini and Malago, with the federation president determined to persuade his director to stay.