How Italian Football's Membership Row Ended With the Man at the Center of It Taking Charge of the FixItalian football has produced some strange chapters, but this one may be a new high. On October 6, the CONI executive board voted to place the Italian Football Federation (FIGC) under special administration because its president, Giovanni Malagò, was not a registered FIGC member when he stood for election. Then, in the same breath, it named Giovanni Malagò as the commissioner.The vote took only minutes and was unanimous, 15 out of 15, according to Sky Sport's live coverage. The CONI National Council ratified the decision just as unanimously. Il Fatto Quotidiano summed it up with a line Italian readers will recognize: Malagò "leaves through the door and comes back in through the window." He lapses as president and returns as commissioner, with elections due by January 31, 2027. A Problem of Paperwork The dispute itself is simple to state. Article 29 of the FIGC statute says candidates must be in good standing with their membership when they submit their candidacy. Malagò, elected on June 22 with 68.58% of the vote, was not a registered member at that point, even though the federation's own offices had judged him eligible to run. CONI's chief sports prosecutor, Ugo Taucer, concluded that valid membership is a requirement for candidacy and that the FIGC had not applied the fundamental principles it had formally adopted. CONI president Luciano Buonfiglio then commissioned four legal opinions, including one from Franco Scoca, which backed that reading. The federation answered with five opinions of its own, including from Sabino Cassese and Bernardo Mattarella, arguing that membership was not an essential requirement and that any challenge had come too late. The result was a weeks-long battle of dueling legal experts, with a possible takeover of the FIGC hanging over it. The Compromise Serie A itself weighed in, calling a commissioner "entirely inappropriate" because it could plunge football into chaos at a delicate moment. Names floated in the days before the vote included Adriano Galliani as a possible caretaker. In the end, the solution came from a meeting between Buonfiglio and Malagò shortly before the board convened, with CIP president Giunio De Sanctis present as guarantor of the deal. The logic is easy to follow. The federation is formally commissioned, which satisfies the rule that CONI said had been broken. The man who triggered the problem is trusted to manage the transition, which spares football an outsider. Every party gets something to defend. Malagò, thanking the board for its trust, framed the outcome as a vindication of the rules. "The focus," as one outlet paraphrased it, "is respect for the rules, which has been confirmed by the commissioning of the FIGC." What Makes It Absurd The absurdity is in the sequence. A violation serious enough to justify suspending a federation's elected leadership is resolved by handing that same person the leadership in a different form. Il Sussidiario called the decision "unanimous and paradoxical," and few observers disagreed. Three questions follow. First, if membership truly was a "granitic" requirement, as CONI described its own reasoning, it is not obvious why the person who lacked it is the right person to manage the consequences. Second, if the federation's lawyers were right that the issue was moot, it is not obvious why a commissioner was needed at all. Third, the reporting I found does not explain how decisions Malagò took as president, including the football-technical appointments announced after his election, are treated going forward. Timing and Cost The timing adds to the irony. This all unfolded just as the national team, now under Roberto Mancini, was beginning to recover on the pitch, with a 4-1 win over Turkey last week. The federation took over after Gabriele Gravina resigned following Italy's failure to qualify for the 2026 World Cup, a crisis that was supposed to usher in stability. Instead, Italian football will spend the next few months with a commissioner who is also, by definition, a candidate-in-waiting for an election he cannot be certain of entering. Whether the January vote restores order or revives the dispute is the question left for the winter. For now, the most that can be said for the compromise is that it was fast, unanimous and, on any reading of the facts, unusual. Ph: cristiano barni / Shutterstock.com