Giovanni Malagò, new president at 67 years oldyou, elected with 68.5% of the votes, of the Italian Football Federation, a retro institution right down to its name with that diphthong “uo” ancient heritage in the game, is not the new one that is advancing, just as Giancarlo Abete would not have been: in the best tradition of Italian sports politics, the changes are characterized by movements on the chessboard, rather than revolutions.
Malagò emerges, on the sports field, the winner of the Milan Cortina 2026 Olympics: sporting successes even beyond expectations and no significant organizational problems beyond expectations, despite the unknowns linked to the first Olympics spread in history. Another question, the costs, the debts, the lag, the positive or negative repercussions, any investigations that may appear: all issues that will be measured, if anything, at a distance. The investigations into the 2009 Rome Swimming World Championships, at the time highly contested due to the costs and construction impacts, ended in acquittals in ordinary trials and in a dismissal order, in 2018, by the Court of Auditors, which smacked of reproach.
Giovanni Malagò experienced the Winter Olympics as president of the Milano Cortina Foundation, having not obtained the authorization – very much against Minister Abodi – for the third term as president of CONI and not even the extension he would have wanted to complete the Games, which he has never hidden that he feels are very much his own, after he had already spent all his efforts to nominate Rome in 2024. That candidacy was then stopped by the Municipality of Rome, when it was time to decide, led by Virginia Raggi. Cortina leaves Milan legitimately satisfied.
Now Malagò has the hot potato of the rebirth of Italian football in his hands: with the third failure to qualify for the World Cup, during an ongoing World Cup in which the wound is open, the potato rises and gets very hot. It is known that the man does not mind being at the center of attention, he “knows how to be”, as they say, his beautiful Aniene sports club on the Tiber is among the most prestigious in Rome, and is a well-known meeting place for important people, among whom Malagò has always been at ease: he makes no secret of the fact that, when his father ran a high-end dealership in Rome, he became a friend of Gianni Agnelli at the age of 24, at the cost of submitting to calls at dawn with whom the Lawyer shared the insomnia he suffered from, also inflicting it on others. It would have been Susanna Agnelli, the lawyer’s sister, who gave him the mispronunciation of the name “Megalò” which still haunts him.
One marriage, two daughters from Lucrezia Lante della Rovere, supervilla in Sabaudia, where she apparently loves to pamper guests. There are those who say that Malagò seems to have come out of a Vanzina film, but the opposite is true: by his own admission, many of the lines in the films were born in conversations with the Vanzina brothers, with whom he has always been friends. Regarding the scene inspired by him in Yuppies, with the entrepreneur who, in order to make a fool of himself with a woman, throws the keys of the luxury car to the valet who steals it from him, interpretations differ: the evil ones say that it really happened to him as the film tells it, Malagò says that he threw them to a real valet who would have hidden them in the car from which they would then have been stolen.
Malagò has a reputation for “pleasantness”, for the ability not to clash, for a political position capable of relating affably with adversaries, also by virtue of a good Roman bourgeoisie educationand in the name of a lesson that by his own admission he received from his father: «Call back whoever called, at the risk of having to deal with a nuisance, out of politeness but also because he could be a customer».
Yet capable of abandoning diplomacy when he believes the stakes are important: as president of Coni he has engaged in a long battle in the name of the autonomy of sport, but with an underlying issue of ownership in the management and distribution of public funds to the Federations, against the reform that created Sport e salute Spathe Italian state company, controlled by the Ministry of Economy and Finance, created in 2018 to manage the development of sport and the promotion of physical activity and born from the transformation of the former Coni Servizi. x
THE STAKES
Today the serious stakes are to get football back on its feet, bring the national team back to the World Cup, bring kids back to football now that it risks being overtaken in passion by tennis, in terms of results it already is. Important ideas and lessons can come from tennis and women’s volleyball.
But we need to put them on the table, in a world that has sinned for too long of inaction: since 2010 the same story has been repeated more or less, but there have been no significant changes. 2010 is the year in which tennis began its silent revolution until the recent explosion, as did volleyball. Neither one nor the other are professional team sports, as the outgoing Gravina said: the Bosman ruling does not bind them, but the other European national teams are subject to it, even those who are at the World Cup and who evidently had some idea to avoid disappearing.
We need to run because we are entering the race, and we urgently need a coach in search of European qualification. It is the first topic on the agenda and it is said that, with Malagò as president, Roberto Mancini is in pole position. Capacity is not in question, Saudi Arabia must be forgiven for that hasty farewell which left the match to Spalletti and then to Gattuso. But this is contingency, what matters is the long term. Volleyball and tennis teach that we must sow (ideas) today to reap tomorrow, the day after, in the years to come. And for that you need to choose the right collaborators: possibly with more of a future ahead than behind them. Both candidates had the youth sectors in the program, inevitably, but the reform of the championships also awaits the newly elected and favored president’s table. While we watch Yamal score for Spain and think about how we can grow from it too.
