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FootBiz newsletter #156: Italian football at a fork in the road, PL sponsorship fears
PLUS: Why the CL quarter-finals are of disproportionate importance
Ed Malyon
April 07, 2026 • Estimated Reading Time: 8 minutes
As tends to happen when biblically, historically bad things occur in football (and to Italians, missing three World Cups on the spin would qualify as such) there is a mass exodus from the Italian football federation (FIGC) as president Gabriele Gravina, technical director Gianluigi Buffon and head coach Gennaro Gattuso all step down.
And the June 22 election to replace UEFA vice-president Gravina is already revealing more about Italian football's self-understanding than any post-mortem could. Three credible candidacies appear to be getting backing, and interestingly they seem to represent three fundamentally different theories of what Italian football's problem actually is.
Perceived as a safe pair of hands, Giovanni Malagò is the frontrunner and the preferred candidate of Serie A owners. The former president of the Italian olympic committee (CONI) fresh from overseeing the well-regarded Milan-Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics is seen as a reformer and moderniser: arguing that Italian football needs a figure with genuine institutional authority, political capital across government and sports bodies, and the kind of commercial acumen that can rebuild the FIGC's profile with broadcasters, sponsors and UEFA.
Napoli president Aurelio De Laurentiis, never one to understate his views, declared that "if Malagò took Italian football in hand, it would bounce back very quickly." It isn’t just De Laurentiis, either. Malagò has the backing of Serie A — a bloc that now controls 18% of votes in the FIGC electoral assembly under revised statutes, with Serie B adding a further 6%.
There is, however, a complication.
Sports Minister Andrea Abodi — who drove Gravina's resignation and has been publicly pushing for a "reconstruction" of Italian football from the top — reportedly has something of a difficult personal relationship with Malagò, and has been floating the possibility of a period of government commissioning of the FIGC before any election at all.
The Italian football federation statute does not technically allow commissioning purely for sporting failure, though one was imposed after the 2018 qualifying disaster in analogous circumstances. Whether Abodi pursues that route or backs a candidate of his own — the name of Paolo Maldini has circulated in political circles as his preferred symbolic figure — will shape the race considerably.
Of course, there are risks of violating FIFA’s article 2 about political intervention in footballing authorities, which has seen European federations suspended before so Abodi will need to tread carefully.
Counting on some grassroots support, Giancarlo Abete represents, depending on your perspective, either vast experience or the past returning to haunt Italian football.
Abete led the FIGC from 2007 to 2014, resigning after Italy's group-stage exit at Brazil 2014. As it turns out, this was the last World Cup Italy actually played in and looks a lot better with the passing of time. His current role as president of the Lega Nazionale Dilettanti, the amateur leagues organisation, gives him the single largest voting bloc in the FIGC assembly: 34%. That is a formidable structural position, and Gravina — who has not fully left the stage — is understood to be working to influence the succession, with Abete seen as his preferred continuity candidate. What "continuity" means in this context, given that Gravina's era has now delivered two consecutive World Cup absences, is a question his supporters have not yet answered satisfactorily.
Branding it anything approaching “continuity” could be a tough sell, though.
Albertini (left) is a former player favoured in the race to become FIGC president
Demetrio Albertini is the players' choice. The former Milan and Italy midfielder — who previously ran against Carlo Tavecchio for the FIGC presidency in 2014 and lost — has the backing of the Associazione Italiana Calciatori, which controls 20% of assembly votes. If Albertini also secured the coaches' association (AIAC, 10%), he would represent a meaningful technical constituency, though that may not be enough.
An intelligent thinker, Albertini is viewed as the candidate most likely to push hard on the structural reform question — principally mandatory quotas for Italian-trained players in Serie A, which the players' association has argued is essential to rebuilding the talent pipeline that has now failed to produce a World Cup-qualifying generation three times in succession. That argument is not without its critics: Italy's best players are already playing regularly at the top clubs, and the problem is arguably less about playing time than about the broader development infrastructure beneath Serie A. But Albertini is yet to fully nail his colours to the mast on an extensive policy platform.
The deeper problem all three candidates will have to confront is one that none of their candidacy announcements has yet addressed honestly. Italy's last four World Cups include one triumph (2006), one group-stage exit (2010), one group-stage exit (2014), and three consecutive non-qualifications (2018, 2022, 2026).
This is more than a run of bad luck.
It is a structural decline coinciding with (among other things) the period of maximum commercialisation of Italian football — the years in which Serie A clubs prioritised importing foreign talent, in which the FIGC allowed youth development infrastructure to decay while rivals modernised and expanded their own, and in which the federation itself became increasingly enmeshed in the political and commercial interests of the clubs it was meant to regulate.
Yes, more double hatting.
None of those have simple solutions. Mandating X number of Italians in the matchday squad or starting XI only exacerbates the problem of too many foreigners, as it places a greater premium on Italian players, which is partly why clubs like Como have been looking elsewhere. Big clubs will hoard, smaller clubs will ramp up the prices. Fixing the youth pipeline and getting the federation back to focusing on what it should (more like the FA) are pretty widely popular positions but difficult to enact while also showing tangible progress, which tends to be necessary in a political environment.
High-flying Como have been criticised for not playing Italians
The election takes place on 22 June — eleven days after the World Cup kicks off without Italy. Candidates have until 13 May to declare. Whoever wins inherits a federation that has just lost its president, its national team delegation chief and its head coach simultaneously, while the Italian broadcasting and commercial ecosystem absorbs losses estimated at over €50m from a tournament it is not participating in. All this investment needed and no financial heft to do it with.
The new president will begin their tenure as the rest of the world watches the first 48-team World Cup in North America from thousands of miles away.
Italy head coach Gennaro Gattuso bowed to the inevitable and resigned three days after his side made history by becoming the first former champions to fail to qualify for three consecutive World Cups. The favourites to replace Gattuso indicate that Italian coaching may be experiencing a similar crisis to their player production pipeline.
Gattuso’s resignation statement was more elegant that most of Italy’s recent performances.
“With pain in my heart, not having achieved the goal we had set ourselves, I consider my experience on the national team bench to be over," the former midfielder said.
Favourites Roberto Mancini and Antonio Conte have both done the job before, with the former failing to qualify for the 2022 World Cup, although his uninspiring side did somehow beat England on pens in the final of the delayed 2021 European Championship. Simone Inzaghi and Massimiliano Allegri are also linked to the post, with the Italians unlikely to consider a foreign candidate.
The best Italian candidate might already be coaching internationally, albeit with Brazil.
