The appointment of Gennaro Gattuso to the technical commissioner of the Italian national team, which took place in a sultry, suffocating and somewhat neurotic June that accompanies us exhausted towards the holidays, is one of those decisions that seem to be made more for pleasure than to resolve.

But since in this historical period of our national sport it is worth everything, but also the opposite of everything, they attempted to sell us this choice as the best possible. Which in itself is already a label not particularly exciting. The best possible choice: but does not give you the idea of ​​a medicine that is not known whether it works or not? Of a Chinese pack that arrives at low cost to replace something that no longer works?

It seems the return to a primitive and identity idea of ​​our football that focuses on the real man, the wrestler, the face clean perhaps even a little on the margins and betrayed by the dynamics of modern football but which embodies the values ​​of fatigue, suffering and passion. A point of view that will also be poetic, but which is tragically anachronistic. Also because all the other national teams, especially those who work, are going somewhere else.

Lack of alternatives and choices

Gattuso’s choice at the helm of the Azzurri is obviously born from a project, but from a lack of real alternatives. It is not a weighted option, but a conditioned reflection: it is the reaction of a system that, pushed to the corner by Spalletti’s technical failure and by the inexorable absence from the World Cup, has caught the most reassuring and populist paper from the deck. A figure who, in the collective imagination, combines heart and jersey, but which in reality has shown all its limits every time it has been called to build something solid over time. However, something very far from those who had been the last choices (Mancini and Spalletti) as well as from any alternatives (Ranieri and Pioli) who rightly thought they had too much to do elsewhere to put on to peel such a potato.

A nomination of the emptiness

If football is the mirror of the company, then the appointment of Gattuso is the reflected image of a governance unable to plan. We have come from four years of pneumatic void. Gravina not only was not able to solve only one of the failures of our football: but he didn’t even realize he was probably the most serious problem. Indeed … has taken responsibility, in an arrogant and selfish way more than ambitious, not to abandon the charge: “Because the moment is serious”. An absolute void such that the same idea that Gravina was the only candidate in the last elections makes it clear that our football has not even had the strength to find a credible alternative in one of his worst moments ever. So the choice of the CT went as a result: not choosing the most suitable coach to guarantee a long and regenerative cycle, convincing it, paying it the necessary, entrusting him with a four -year program of total renovation of the blue supply chain. Maybe a foreigner, possibly insensitive to the mechanisms of our unfortunate, bankruptcy and short -sighted sports policy. We tried to fill the void in the shortest possible time.

After Spalletti, the sporting and media disaster of the last European, among many internal tensions, the Federation needed a name that could cover putting a hand of stucco on the cracks.

Gattuso, from this point of view, is, precisely, the best possible choice: a communicatively raw but effective man; Mediatically quite well -liked, ready to defend the locker room. In the hope of being completely denied, however, he does not seem to be the right man to face the most complicated task of the last fifteen years for Italian football.

A career as a technician who convinces little

Gattuso’s career as a coach has been dotted with opportunities, but poor in consolidation. He never really built something that lasted, nor left an evident imprint in the teams he led. After the first almost pioneering experiences with Sion, Palermo and Ofi Crete, he returned to Italy with Pisa and Milan, obtaining swinging results. He showed a certain tactical order, but also structural limits: effort in managing moments of crisis, difficulties in relations with the press, also reaching frequent tensions with managers.

In Naples, where he conquered an Italian Cup, the only coach trophy, his cycle ended between controversy and disappointments, with a qualification for the Champions League faded in a tragic last day that cost him the place. Abroad, neither in Valencia nor in Marseille he managed to complete the season, in both cases overwhelmed by negative results and an environment with which he never really had a team. Last, in order of time, his transition to the Hajduk Split, a very famous Croatian club but for years on the edge of the great European football. They had asked him for the title, at least a trophy. Here, despite the initial trust and the registration to the Europe Conference League, Gattuso has closed the championship in third place, far from the title and with swinging performances that have neither excited nor fans or critics. No national cup, eliminated in quarter-finals from the Rijeka (1-3 at home), no European cups, eliminated in the semifinal of the complicated qualifying round by the Slovaks of the Ruzomomerok (0-1 again at home). Contract resolved at the end of the season and Gattuso left the team exactly where he found it the year before, to the conference league qualifications. Rather he remembers the diaspora with Perisic who ended with the sale in January of the former Inter player. The PSV thanks.

Therefore, even in a less competitive context like the Croatian one, his football has not shone. The most alarming data? None of his recent positions has lasted more than one season. Not exactly the ideal identikit for those who should design the relaunch of an entire national one.

The rhetoric of true man

In these hours there was a lot of talk about the “reduced cost” contract (800 thousand euros per season) of its renunciation of millionaire requests, the desire to put itself at the service of the national team and the Football Federation. All commendable, on paper. But under this narrative there is also a dangerous misunderstanding: that is enough to guide a national team in technical, generational and identity crisis.

The 2025 football is hyper-behavior, complex, strategic. It is not enough to raise your voice in the locker room, propose hard mui to cameras and photographers to build a project. Ideas, study, cutting -edge technical staff, relational skills and ability to reinvent themselves are needed. It is necessary to elasticity and a remarkable ability to compare with the clubs that unfortunately in Italy are fathers, masters and see the national team as a great breakage of boxes.

Gattuso has often shown an energetic but monocordic football, intense but predictable. Then there is the problem of the rhythm: Gattuso could perhaps be the right coach for clubs in difficulty, one who arrives in a problematic and shoulder situation and snaps restarts the car. But a national team, with its times and the constant and continuous complicated relationship with the clubs and their agendas, is a completely different thing. A lot has been said of the 2006 boys group who will support him. Gattuso is the only one of these who does not have a past in Juventus. And it is true, Mancini was also surrounded by his companions and associates of Sampd’oro: Vialli, Evani, Salsano, Lombardo. But it was frankly something else.

An drift system

The problem, however, is not only Gattuso. The problem is the context that led him to the national team bench. The Federation is increasingly a politically unsustainable body and with a not credible program, led by a management that seems to have lost any contact with reality. Gravina, today more isolated than ever, has undergone political and media pressures, internal and external. The appointment of Gattuso is certainly not a technical choice: it is above all an electoral message, an attempt to appease fans and insiders with a popular figure, while under the surface everything continues to crumble.

In Italy years ago the technicians as he was called ‘aspirin’. Useful with high fever. The serious patient needs anything else. In England they have a more elaborate way of expressing such a choice and say … “To fix a broken leg with a band-aid” … cure a broken leg with a patch. Here … this makes the idea well.

The numbers speak for themselves: six technical commissioners in the last eleven years, two skilled World Championships, a European title that seems more and more a lucky exception that the rule and that have sold us as the triumph of our football system. Just as happened in 1982 in the World Cup won after the betting scandal and in 2006, when Italy won in Germany after Calciopoli. Which makes us understand once more than building hypothetical triumphs on the rubble seems to be the only thing that the management of Italian football has been able to do. Italy no longer has a guideline. He has no ideas, nor men capable of managing ideas.

The risks of fragile leadership

One of the most spiny themes is that of the locker room. Gattuso is loved by many, but also divisive. Not everyone estimates it, as some old frictions show it with its former players. The Italian national team, today more than ever, needs to be guided by a coach capable of mediating, motivating, creating culture. Gattuso will also be able to do it, but the story tells that his leadership does not always hold up at the distance.

His strength is intensity, but it is also its limit. When the situation becomes complicated, the emotional charge can turn into nervousness, into frustration. And in a national team that will face a world qualification with few certainties and a lot of pressure, this can become a boomerang.

What this choice tells us about Italy

The appointment of Gattuso is a clear signal: Italy has stopped looking for the long road and has identified a short path. Hoping not to slip. Instead of focusing on a technician with international experience, with tactical and design capacity, the FIGC preferred the strong man next door. What everyone knows, the one that embodies a romantic football idea that, however, today, is no longer enough. The face was chosen, not the method. The heart, not the head. Urgency, not vision.

An opportunity to rethink everything

Gattuso now has a great opportunity: to deny everyone, change skin, evolve, surprise. And we, including journalists, will have the duty to judge him for what he will do, not for what he has done. For our part, no prejudice. Only the feeling that, unfortunately (also for him), is a person not suitable for a very complicated task. And not the best possible solution.

Therefore, the suspicion remains: that this appointment is yet another missed opportunity to really change. Because as long as the Federation is a prisoner of its internal logic, pressure, emotional choices but above all of the offices, armchairs and politics, no coach – not even one with Rino’s determination – will be able to save the national team from herself and from a country that takes years to become attached and five minutes to get tired and moved away. You then want to recover the attention of people and the public.