U.S. Città di Palermo played the 2009–10 season in Serie A, the sixth consecutive season for the Sicilian club in the Italian top flight since their return to the league in 2004.

On May 30, 2009, hours before the final Serie A 2008–09 league game against Sampdoria, Palermo head coach Davide Ballardini announced he was taking a 10-day pause in order to decide with his future with the club. Later that day, Palermo chairman Maurizio Zamparini announced Ballardini had asked to be relieved from his position due to his unwillingness to keep on serving as Palermo head coach. This led Zamparini to start searching for a new head coach: successively, on June 5, Palermo announced they had finished their search for a new boss by appointing outgoing Catania manager Walter Zenga. The choice was not appreciated by a large part of the Palermo fanbase, who rejected the idea of appointing the head coach who had just guided Sicilian rivals Catania in the previous season, also leading his side to an astonishing 4–0 win at Palermo, the biggest one for Catania against their rosanero rivals. Successively, Zamparini motivated the appointment of Zenga by saying he wanted a manager he regarded as fit to fulfil his own personal ambitions of a UEFA Champions League spot for the new season.

Since then, Zamparini started working on improving the current roster by a number of additions. Mirko Savini and Alberto Fontana's expiring contracts were not renewed, whereas Genoa applied an option to buy one half of Boško Janković rights, something that Sampdoria did not do on Andrea Raggi. The club was successively linked with Argentine players Nicolás Bertolo, Gabriel Paletta and Javier Pastore. Bertolo then announced on June 17 he had already agreed a permanent deal with Palermo which was set to be finalized later on July due to his ongoing involvement in the Clausura tournament. On June 25, Zamparini announced he had also completed the signing of Javier Pastore, dubbed by him as "the new Kaká", stating the move will being officially announced at the end of the Clausura tournament; this was however successively denied by the player's agent. On July 11, Palermo announced on its official website to have completed the signing of Pastore.

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