Pirlo withdraws from Italy coaching role amid Russian betting firm controversy

Andrea Pirlo stepped away from the Italian national team job on Monday morning, ending what had seemed like a done deal just days earlier. The 47-year-old former midfielder—who played for Juventus, AC Milan, and Inter before his decorated international career—posted on Instagram that he was no longer a candidate for the role, a withdrawal that came after a weekend of political uproar and institutional collapse at the Italian Football Federation.

The controversy centered on Pirlo's work as a global ambassador for Fonbet, a Russian betting company, a position he had taken on last October. Italian politicians, including Carlo Calenda of the centrist Azione party, had begun questioning whether someone with active ties to Russia should lead the national team in the years following the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. The criticism intensified when details emerged about Pirlo's appearances at Fonbet-sponsored events in Moscow, including a gathering at Luzhniki Stadium where he signed autographs alongside former teammate Marco Materazzi. The same event featured performances by Shaman, a nationalist pop star who has publicly supported the Russian invasion.

Pirlo's statement attempted to reframe his involvement as purely commercial and sporting in nature, insisting he had never expressed political beliefs aligned with Russia or the Kremlin. "To assign a political meaning to that collaboration means ascribing to me beliefs which I have never expressed," he wrote. But the damage to his candidacy had already been done. Pina Picierno, a vice-president of the European Parliament, had already declared that Italian football needed an "ethical and managerial revolution," and that Pirlo's appointment moved in the opposite direction entirely.

The fallout extended far beyond Pirlo himself. Within hours of the weekend controversy, two of the federation's most senior figures announced their resignations. Paolo Maldini, who had been appointed technical director just over two weeks earlier, stepped down alongside Leonardo, a former Brazilian international and AC Milan teammate who had been tasked with rebuilding the squad. Together, they had been responsible for finding Italy's next head coach—a search that had already proven difficult. The federation had approached both Pep Guardiola and Carlo Ancelotti in recent weeks, only to be turned down by both.

The timing of these departures underscored the depth of crisis at the Italian Football Federation. Italy had now failed to qualify for the World Cup three consecutive times, a humiliation that had already forced out previous coach Gennaro Gattuso after a penalty shootout loss to Bosnia-Herzegovina in April. The federation had attempted to reset by bringing in Maldini and Leonardo to oversee a reconstruction, but the Pirlo controversy had instead accelerated the institutional breakdown.

Ukrainian skeleton slider Vladyslav Heraskevych, who had been disqualified from the Winter Olympics for a helmet depicting fallen athletes, offered a pointed critique of Pirlo's judgment. He noted that the Moscow event had taken place on the same day as a major Russian attack on Ukraine, and that Pirlo had appeared alongside Russian footballer Artem Dzyuba, who had posted on social media about being "proud to be Russian." "It's sad to see childhood legends turn into moral bankrupts," Heraskevych said. Even the Russian ambassador to Rome, Aleksey Paramonov, weighed in—though in Pirlo's defense, calling it "saddening" that the former player was being "ostracized" in his own country.

With Pirlo now out of the picture and Maldini and Leonardo gone, the Italian Football Federation faces the task of finding a new head coach from a shrinking pool of candidates. Antonio Conte and Roberto Mancini—who led Italy to victory at Euro 2020 before his own World Cup qualification failure and subsequent move to Saudi Arabia—remain under consideration. The federation's credibility, already damaged by three World Cup misses, has taken another blow.