Do we like them?

Do we like Andrea Pirlo?

Our score: 6 out of 10. A clean record on people, but one big contested commercial deal and thin evidence of good works we could read.

Pirlo is the midfield maestro of Italy's 2006 World Cup win, the bloke who made passing look like poetry. After hanging up the boots he went into coaching, and Juventus gave him the top job in 2020. It ended after one season, which is a rough start for any gaffer.

Since then he has bounced around, and most recently he has been running United FC, a second-tier club in the UAE. The club finished fourth the year before and had topped the table by May 2026, needing a point to go up to the top flight. As a coaching comeback, that is a decent one.

Then came July. Reports said Italy's football federation was close to making him national coach, until it emerged that he had been a global ambassador for Fonbet, a big Russian betting company, since October 2025. Politicians including European Parliament vice-president Pina Picierno objected, and the federation backed away.

What really lit the fuse was a Fonbet event in Moscow in May alongside Marco Materazzi, on a day of heavy Russian strikes on Ukraine, which Ukrainian athletes pointed out. Pirlo said the deal was purely commercial and sporting, and that reading politics into it gave him convictions he had never expressed. Where you land depends on whether you see a footballer taking a sponsor's cheque or someone lending his face to Russian promotion mid-war.

His club stood by him publicly after the Italy job fell through, saying it was fully committed to his project. On the good-stuff side, he has a charity farewell match on record, but we couldn't open that coverage, so we can't say much more. That's honestly a thin list.