- Guardiola Came Close to Taking Italy Job Before Pulling Out — Paolo Maldini
Pep Guardiola came remarkably close to becoming head coach of the Italian national team, with the former Manchester City manager sufficiently interested in the project to begin sketching potential line-ups before ultimately deciding against taking the position, according to Paolo Maldini.
Maldini, who was appointed technical director of the Italian Football Federation in July alongside former AC Milan colleague Leonardo as an adviser, said Guardiola had been his preferred candidate as Italy searched for a coach capable of leading a deeper technical rebuild of the national-team system. The approach became a concrete attempt when Maldini and Leonardo travelled to Barcelona to meet Guardiola and discuss the project in detail.
“He’s the coach who best embodies technical and attacking play,” Maldini said. “He’d expressed the idea of coaching a national team. We went to visit him in Barcelona, had lunch together, and talked for a whole day.”
What had initially appeared an ambitious possibility quickly became a serious negotiation. Contemporary reports in Italy said Maldini and Leonardo spent several days in Barcelona presenting Guardiola with their plans for the Azzurri, with the former Barcelona and Manchester City coach considering the proposal before eventually turning it down.
Maldini’s account suggests Guardiola’s interest went well beyond diplomatic courtesy. “He was very tempted. He came very close to accepting. He even started writing down lineups on paper,” Maldini said, providing perhaps the clearest indication of how seriously the Spaniard considered taking charge of Italy.
The revelation is significant because Guardiola would have represented a dramatic break in Italy’s traditional coaching trajectory. His reputation has been built around positional play, aggressive pressing, technical dominance and the systematic control of possession, making him an obvious candidate for a federation seeking a broader footballing transformation rather than merely a short-term change of manager.
The Italian project was also about more than appointing a famous coach. FIGC President Giovanni Malagò had tasked Maldini with overseeing the federation’s wider technical structure, including the senior team and the pathway through Italy’s youth national sides, with the project designed to run through the 2030 World Cup cycle.
Guardiola therefore would not simply have inherited an Italy team and been asked to win matches. The attraction appears to have centred on the possibility of influencing a broader footballing philosophy, something consistent with Maldini’s preference for a technically sophisticated and attacking identity.
Importantly, Maldini rejected suggestions that salary demands prevented the appointment. “Absolutely not. Money has never been an issue. Pep told us clearly: ‘Give me one euro less than the last coach was making, and I’m fine,’” he said.
That claim shifts the explanation away from finances and towards Guardiola’s personal readiness for another demanding project. Reports after his decision indicated that he wanted time away from coaching following a decade at Manchester City and was reluctant to move immediately into another long-term assignment.
For Italy, his rejection represented more than losing a high-profile candidate. Guardiola’s appointment could have provided a powerful organising principle for a national programme attempting to restore Italy’s status after repeated disappointments on the international stage.
The episode also shows how aggressively the federation was prepared to rethink its approach. Maldini and Leonardo did not begin by searching only among conventional Italian candidates; they approached a coach whose footballing philosophy has influenced clubs and coaches across Europe and attempted to build a national-team project around him.
That Guardiola considered the proposal seriously enough to discuss personnel and potential line-ups suggests the job retained considerable attraction despite the scale of Italy’s rebuilding challenge. It also indicates that managing a national team remains part of Guardiola’s thinking, even though the timing was ultimately wrong.
The failed pursuit eventually cleared the way for Roberto Mancini to return to the Italy job, according to Citi Sports. Maldini subsequently left his federation role, bringing an abrupt end to what had briefly looked like an ambitious attempt to redefine Italy’s footballing direction around a new technical structure.
The Guardiola story is therefore likely to remain one of Italian football’s more intriguing recent “what ifs”. It was not merely an informal conversation with an unattainable superstar coach; available accounts indicate there were meetings, a detailed sporting proposal and genuine consideration from Guardiola before he decided not to proceed.
For Maldini, the near agreement appears to reinforce his belief that Italy needed a coach capable of changing not simply results but the way the national team thought about football. Guardiola came close enough to imagine the team on paper, but not quite close enough to take the project onto the pitch.
