Italian football is stepping down from its pedestal and opening itself to outside influences, José Mourinho’s line about those who know only football knowing nothing about football sitting easily on Giovanni Malagò, ambassador of Italian sport and now president of the Italian Football Federation after the long Gravina era.
More than anyone else, in his own way, he has come to embody Italian sport as it has taken shape over the past fifteen years, a name that keeps surfacing alongside a sequence of results that still feels slightly unreal when set out in order, power of course but rarely as confrontation, more a mesh of relations, dinners, phone calls in place of pressure, he does not flatten people, he absorbs them, and things end up settling around him until image and victory start to look like the same material.
The criticism never really moved on from one word, luck, repeated as if it explained anything, Napoleon preferred lucky generals, and Malagò was president of the Italian Olympic Committee when Italy took two Olympic golds that had not been expected to exist in that form, he did not win them, he was there, the men’s 100 metres, then the 4×100, and afterwards a silence that sits longer than the results themselves.
Italian football has spent years inside a familiar posture, superiority hardening into something close to omnipotence without noticing, not the right condition when everything begins to collapse inward, especially when what is needed is erosion rather than reaction, a lowering of tone, a willingness to accept that the centre has already shifted, and at some point it registered this, that the instruments were no longer sufficient, three missed World Cups doing more than damage, a kind of stripping away that leaves things exposed.
Malagò enters there almost sideways, his knowledge sitting elsewhere, sport first, politics threaded through it in layers, three Olympic Games plus a Winter Games as CONI president leaving behind a sediment football cannot replicate, Circolo Aniene turning into a reference point for swimming, Federica Pellegrini moving through it as if it were part of her own geography, La Divina as she is still called, Fabio Fognini in a Sky Sport replay of Flavia Pennetta’s 2015 US Open remembering asking Malagò to make New York possible, the sentence left unfinished on purpose, only he could.
Athletes are not stable material, sensitive in ways institutions rarely understand, authority either registers or it does not, there is no middle position, they trust him, not completely, enough, Italian football lacks many things and this is one of them, sport is politics but not the version that sits in offices, something looser, less declarative, Malagò may be the first federation president to ask footballers properly how it ended up here, without turning it into ceremony, while moving with the same ease elsewhere, Gianni Infantino, Sebastian Coe, figures that sit above the game without ever fully entering it.
Milano Cortina 2026 sits behind him and beside him at the same time, a project carried through political weather, fought for, kept alive across shifts in temperature, Olympic Games brought back to Italy though the word already sounds too clean for what it took, distributed formats becoming normal, World Cup already split, the next shared between Spain, Portugal and Morocco, geography loosening its old shape, Rome 2009 in swimming, volleyball in the capital the following year, the same logic returning in different forms.
He comes from the Giovanni Agnelli orbit, the Avvocato still present only as outline, Luca Cordero di Montezemolo nearby, as always, he does not impose himself, that would be too linear, he works by absorption, nothing theatrical about presence and yet he ends up in every frame anyway, recognition already secured so there is no need to repeat it, if football stabilises his role will already be inside it, written in without explanation, at most it will simply not be removed, he knows how to move through rooms, systems, people.
Italian football has needed exactly that even if it does not fully recognise it yet, charming yes, Angelo Binaghi sits on the opposite side of that word openly hostile insisting reform belongs to those who do not need approval, football has had enough of that posture, too many versions already absorbed, what it needed instead was someone who moves easily between institutions and terraces where the difference is mostly assumed, someone who reads people without insisting on clarity, had football been in better condition it would not have arrived here, instead it did, and the less it understands its own decision the more the change around it becomes visible.