Malagò: "Incredible months, we must do something courageous"

"They have been incredible and tiring months. I find myself commissioner. But we have never stopped working, we have to do something different and courageous, the only thing we cannot afford is to stand still".

Giovanni Malagò, a few days after his appointment as commissioner of the Football Federation, returned to talk about the federation and the national team, as a guest of the Sport and Culture Festival in Mondovì.

The FIGC commissioner specified that for the elections to be called on December 14th one will be a member "for a club involved in social issues, but let's draw a veil over this matter". To those who asked him if he would buy a car from the minister for sport, Andrea Abodi, he replied: "Car? I don't know that he deals with it".

"Many said about the coach that it was wrong - the point about the blue, made by Malagò - but today I find myself with an Under 21 team that has qualified for the final phase of the European Championships, with the ambition of returning to the Olympics; this is the team with which we will play the 2032 European Championships at home; with a national team that will compete in November to go to the Nations quarter-finals, in a tough group; and playing well, with enthusiasm, full of debutants and young boys who they could make the under 21 European Championships. Players that the Italians didn't know about, on which Mancini is working well. And then the women's national team, which is competing for the World Cup. Were we capable? To Mancini, he then revealed, "the first thing I said was: before the match I will never be in your way, it would be an invasion of the pitch, but I am always there, for everyone, in the joy and in the pain".

Malagò returned to explain the reason that led him to run for office ("seeing football reduced to the way it was was painful for me, it was a bit of a call from the wild. We must recover our pride, even in football") and why he took a step back in Club Italia ("I understand football, but how can I understand how much of a Claudio Ranieri he is? Ranieri and Zola give a lot of credibility to our project"). Then, jokes and memories. "What would my father say today? On June 22nd he would have told me that he was proud of me, after that, because of what happened, he would have asked me every day to send them to that country...". He admitted that "Crozza's imitation makes me die laughing". And again, the national teams of my heart ("I was lucky enough to be in Madrid in 1982 and in Berlin in 2006, indelible memories"), to close with the objectives: "My dream is projected towards 2032: to grow, qualify for the 2028 European Championships in England, qualify for the World Cup and complete the journey to the European Championships which we will play at home".