Tuesday, July 6, 2021 at 09:04• Mart Oude Nijeweeme

Everything seemed in pitchers a little over a month ago. Gennaro Gattuso would become Fiorentina’s new head coach. Until the club decided after 23 days not to continue with the Italian coach. The reason for the lightning-quick departure was the difference in insight in the transfer area between Gattuso and his agent Jorge Mendes on the one hand and the club management on the other. Negotiations with Tottenham Hotspur also yielded nothing. Gattuso now feels compelled to give his side of the story.

Tensions between Gattuso and the Fiorentina club management arose when former midfielder Nico Gonzalez (Barcelona) and Sérgio Oliveira (FC Porto), players represented by his own agent Mendes. The policymakers at Fiorentina did not agree. “I can’t say too much about it, but I can say that in the eight years that I have been a trainer I have never received an assist from Mendes,” Gattuso said. La Republica. “He has never forced a player on me. Not once. André Silva at AC Milan and Faouzi Ghoulam at Napoli were already there when I came.”

Nevertheless, Gattuso was shown the door after three weeks. Not much later, his name surfaced at Tottenham Hotspur, where he was one of the top candidates after the withdrawal of Paulo Fonseca. But there was no cooperation in North London either. Racist statements from the past would have been the basis for this. Chairman Daniel Levy decided to pull the plug on the negotiations after an uprising by Tottenham supporters on social media following previous comments by Gattuso about racism, women in football and homophobia.

“I am not racist, nor sexist, nor homophobic,” Gattuso continues his defense. “My old statements have been misrepresented. Why don’t you ask my former teammates and the players I coached about my relationship with them? Keyboard hate is very dangerous and very underrated. I am a public figure and I have the power to slander react, but not everyone can handle it. There are people who take their own lives on the basis of such accusations. It is a very serious problem. I would rather not waste too much time and energy on it.”