Italy's Sports Minister Andrea Abodi publicly demanded FIGC president Gabriele Gravina resign on 31 March and called for Italian football to be rebuilt from the ground up. Senator Claudio Lotito, president of Lazio and a member of Giorgia Meloni's ruling coalition, simultaneously filed a formal Senate petition for Gravina's removal. Lega Calcio called the elimination 'an unacceptable disgrace.' Gravina refused. A board meeting next week will decide whether he remains.
Lotito is not a back-bench voice; he is a member of the ruling coalition and one of Serie A's most powerful club presidents, which means the demand for Gravina's removal carries direct governmental weight. Abodi's call was not a press conference flourish but a ministerial instruction from the department responsible for sport funding. Together, they represent a level of institutional pressure on an Italian football chief that has no recent precedent.
Gabriele Marcotti of ESPN reported that manager Gennaro Gattuso had fewer than 15 training sessions with the squad across ten months , a detail that reframes the conversation entirely. Italy's crisis is not about personnel; it is about a system that gives the national team almost no collective preparation. Whoever runs FIGC next week faces the same structural problem that Gravina cannot resolve by staying.
