Manager was set to walk away over political controversy.
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Sunderland manager Paolo Di Canio has revealed that he had offered his resignation to the club in the wake of controversies surrounding his personal politics, according to the Daily Mirror.
The club rejected the idea, but the Italian fears that it may be ready to explode again should they suffer relegation.
Di Canio believes that the firestorm was started by former labour minister David Miliband, who resigned from the club upon the manager’s instalment, but Di Canio spoke out over the misconceptions over his political allegiances.
“I am a man of the right, but I am not a racist,” he said.
“If I represent a problem, I will go away. The answer was, ‘You stay here, you have our trust’.”
The former Swindon boss’ beliefs have been known ever since he made an apparent Nazi salute during a Rome derby whilst he was still a player and he is also known to have a large tattoo of former dictator Benito Mussolini on his back.
But Di Canio insisted that he is not a racist and that even though he thought the reaction was over the top, he would not stay where he was not wanted.
“I thought certain remarks were excessive and it got whipped up into a political event.”
“The exploitation was clear because the Labour MP David Miliband had let it be known a month before that he would be going to the United States, but his resignation got linked to my arrival and it became an issue about him.”
“Here in England they make this equation – fascism equals bombing during the Second World War, equals Nazism.”
“I never approved of the way that fascism degenerated. I supported the politics in the initial phase, but I have distanced myself onwards from the racial laws.”
“I have never been a racist and my life speaks for me. I am a man of the right, but I am
not a racist.”