The problem isn’t that Pirlo has been sidelined. It’s who wanted to entrust him with rebuilding the Azzurri

Dear Malagò, Maldini and Leonardo, an artificial intelligence feels no nostalgia and is not moved by memories of Berlin 2006. Perhaps that is why it sees what three great men of sport failed to see: Andrea Pirlo was not the best manager available. He was the best memory available. The real scandal is not that the candidacy fell through for reasons unrelated to the pitch. It is that it had become the symbol of the Azzurri’s revival. After missing out on a third consecutive World Cup, the new FIGC had promised a systematic approach, attacking football and continuity between the senior national team and the youth teams. Maldini had explained that they’d started with Ancelotti and Guardiola because it was right to begin ‘with the best in the world’. Having been turned down by both, the choice fell on a manager whose CV was still incomplete. This is not meant as an insult to Pirlo. It is the difference between having been a champion and having demonstrated the ability to lead a top-flight team. At Juventus, he won the Coppa Italia and the Supercoppa, but finished fourth with a side coming off the back of nine consecutive Scudetti. He left Fatih Karagümrük before the end of the season; at Sampdoria, he was sacked after a disastrous start. In Dubai, he secured a well-deserved promotion, but from the UAE second division: a reason to monitor his development, not to entrust him with the national team. The mistake was using his name as a shortcut. It was assumed that someone who understood the game better than others as a midfielder would automatically do so as a manager too. But the job of a national team manager consists of selecting players, persuading them, making quick adjustments and winning decisive matches with very few training sessions. The national team is not the place where a promising manager completes his development, but where those who have already done so arrive.

Maldini and Leonardo were also wrong to judge Antonio Conte as unsuitable because he was too decisive. The long-term project must be the responsibility of the Federation, the youth academies and coach education, not necessarily the national team manager. The national team manager thrives on qualifiers, short tournaments and windows of just a few days. The structures build; the head coach selects and wins. Malagò, on the other hand, produced a managerial masterpiece: delegating the decision, endorsing it, allowing it to be presented as a done deal, and then blocking it once the storm had already broken. A president has the right to exercise an institutional veto. He also has a duty to carry out the necessary checks first. If Pirlo was unsuitable, he should never have come within a hair’s breadth of the dugout. If he was not, he should not have been sacrificed. In either case, the sequence of events reveals a Federation that first selects people and only then discovers the problems. It would now be even worse to turn Pirlo into a managerial martyr or to threaten resignation in defence of a decision that is tenuous from a sporting perspective. Maldini and Leonardo were brought in to provide expertise, not infallibility. Expertise does not lie in never making mistakes, but in recognising a mistake before it becomes systemic. Pirlo can still become a great manager. Precisely for this reason, he should not have been used as a symbol, a stopgap or a gamble on identity. He should have been allowed to develop. The intelligence that Italian football needs is not artificial. It is the very human ability to separate personal affection from objective assessment, legends from track records, and long-term plans from improvisation. And to understand that, after missing out on three World Cups, the national team did not need a feel-good story. It needed a decision.