Gazzetta dello Sport have attempted to explain the decision to remove the captain’s armband from Mauro Icardi on Wednesday.
It cannot be said that the decision, however shocking, was a bolt from the blue. For two months relations between the management of Inter, the striker and the wife-agent Wanda had become tense despite there being a media report about a meeting on the subject of renewal at the end of January.
The figure of Wanda is central in this decision by Inter but Spalletti, in this afternoon’s press conference, never mentioned her. To put it in Spalletti’s language, Icardi’s wife has become a figure of “the things around the boy that embarrass the company and the team.”
Spalletti who in Parma had said it was necessary for a clarification from Marotta, “The directors have agreed to discuss the contract, now they have to define it.” This was perhaps then that “definition.”
What next for Icardi? It is possible he will receive a fine after the refusal to go to Vienna and they then must assess the presence of Maurito against Sampdoria for Saturday’s match.
The origin of this evil are undoubtedly the public outbursts from Wanda, who has spoken about Perisic’s personal problems, on the problems with the negotiations for the renewal and on the teammates not able to provide assists for her husband among other things.
The management, then, could not help but ask Icardi to distance himself from the last provocative phrases of his wife, the Gazzetta dello sport underlines, words from which Maurito would not dissociate and therefore the natural consequence was to remove the captaincy, because with that Icardi was no longer the representative of the dressing room.
Now Spalletti can be somewhat ‘freed’ of a huge problem to be managed inside the locker room, at least in the short term. While Marotta has in fact removed from the urgencies of the next few days the signature of the renewal of the contract.
In this sense the management comes out strengthened by each others actions, free to face the next challenges until the end of the season. Whatever happens next will be seen in the summer.
