Italian-style final of an affair that has kept sport in check for months: Malagò will be the one to move the Football Federation towards new elections between December and January. The positions of Buonfiglio and Abodi.
However you want to spin it, and all the protagonists of the papocchio will try to get it on their side, the surreal story of the decline of Giovanni Malagò and the administration of the FIGC, entrusted to the hands of Commissioner Malagò to be passed on to new elections where he presents himself as a candidate (preferably the only one) and is re-elected president of the FIGC itself, has a winner and many losers.
The winner by technical knockout is Malagò, by far the best Italian sports political leader of this historical period. Placed in the middle by CONI and not a friend, euphemism, of the current Government – but even with those before it hadn’t gone very well – he emerged from the stalemate by checkmating himself and guaranteeing his past, present and future. Having established that in the Council, perhaps even in the National Council, he had more weight than the number one of the Coni, Luciano Buonfiglio, and when the suspicion arose that he could win the battle for votes or at least have good arguments to then use before ordinary justice, Malagò treated from a position of strength a pax that confirms him at the center of everything.
He will be the commissioner of the Football Federation with full powers and with a mandate: to organize a new Elective Assembly no later than 31 January 2027 in which to present himself, if possible, with a FIGC membership card like other 1,497,532 Italians (FIGC Football Report data relating to the year 2025). Card to be torn up one minute after the election to avoid conflicts of interest. He will do it much sooner, as he announced when he left the Roman Palace where he sealed his victory by first meeting Buonfiglio to sign the compromise and then participating in the Council which approved the agreement unanimously in less than a quarter of an hour (the subsequent Council was a formality): “By 7 December we could call elections and it seems to me that the first useful date for holding them could be 14 December”.
He granted the honor of arms to Buonfiglio: “I agreed with Buonfiglio’s proposal, it seems to me to be a common sense proposal.” So the CONI president told it in his own way: “For me, Malagò was the victim of a malfunction and so why did he have to pay? So I said: ‘let’s put the federation under commissioner and appoint him commissioner’. Why him? Because he has a perfect CV, we are resuming the journey with the national football team and thus giving him the opportunity to lead it in these ninety days”.
Certainly the solution to the crisis which risked paralyzing Italian football for months, but had also called into question the governance and stability of Coni, will not have made those who were aiming straight for Malagò’s expulsion from the building jump for joy. “I don’t let anyone influence me, the important thing was to make the rules and autonomy of the sporting world prevail – insisted Buonfiglio -. We have once again strengthened the concept that the rules must be respected, that the assembly was considered a solid expression of vote and that the president of CONI took the responsibility of appointing a commissioner, so that the autonomy and functionality of Italian sport was reduced within it”.
“It’s all ridiculous” thundered Renato Miele, the third wheel between Malagò and Abete who unleashed chaos with appeals even though he himself lacked the main requirement to run for president of the FIGC: not a membership card, but that at least half of any of the components accredit him. The truth is that at the moment of the final test Malagò found his world around him compact, including the Lega Serie A with which he will have to patch things up because the relationships are no longer those of June after the disagreements over the choice of coach and the timing of dumping Infantino in view of the March vote.
No one was willing to support the attempt to get rid of the man who for ten years governed Italian sport with profit and results. The wall held and Malagò overturned the outcome of the affair as has happened a thousand other times in his career. It comes out stronger. Him. The Italian system a little less so, having offered the world a surreal controversy for two months in which the others understood only one thing: that somehow they would get out of it. A path was chosen halfway between the manifesto of Leopardism (“If we want everything to remain as it is, everything must change”) and Machiavelli’s Prince (“The end justifies the means”). Game over. At least for a while.
