Galli, one of the finest defenders of AC Milan's great "Invincibili" side, published a lengthy response on his own blog after Maldini criticised the club's academy in a recent interview, questioning the wider state of Italian youth development.
"Technically we're a country that no longer produces talented players. Something isn't working at a systemic level," Maldini had said. "My children saw it in Milan's youth ranks: all anyone talks about is tactics; if a boy has talent, it's treated as a problem."
Galli, who ran Milan's youth sector between 2009 and 2018, felt the comments were directed squarely at him.
"I was Head of AC Milan's Youth Sector from 2009 to 2018. Those statements, therefore, concern me directly," he wrote. "In those years we built an approach far removed from the exhausting pursuit of results, based on the idea of proactive football that put every boy in a position to be the main protagonist of his own development — supporting his creativity, restoring to mistakes their role as a stepping stone rather than a fault."
He went on to directly reject the substance of Maldini's criticism.
"Nobody was ever prevented, from any player, from taking a man on in a dribble: quite the opposite," Galli wrote.
Galli also pointed out that Maldini's own executive career at Milan did not involve close day-to-day contact with the academy he was now criticising.
"I can't hold it against him that, in his years as an executive, he didn't follow the Youth Sector closely. They're different roles, different timeframes, different priorities, and I understand how much the first team absorbs every ounce of energy," he wrote.
"What I would observe, though, is that you can't speak about the development of young players without ever having gone through, from the inside, the daily work that development requires. I will certainly have made mistakes in those years," Galli concluded, "but I can't let a description so far removed from what that work actually was go unanswered without a word."
The exchange has reopened a long-running debate in Italian football over the balance between tactical instruction and individual creativity in youth academies, with both men speaking from direct experience of Milan's own development pathway during two very different eras at the club.