Not just Milan and Inter, now Milan has the third team. Who dreams of Serie C and the glorious Arena as a stadium

MILAN – The helical concrete towers of San Siro and the grandstand made of innocent tubes of the Kennedy field are less than ten minutes away by car. The two sides of Milan football coexist in the western quadrant of the city. On one side, the lawn on which Milan and Inter will compete in the derby, ready to sew the second star on the shirts. On the other, the synthetic surface on which Alcione, an amateur sports club that is dominating group A of Serie D and is preparing to play next season in Serie C, has built its fortunes. “If we achieve promotion, for the first Once in history there will be three Milanese teams in professional football. Nerazzurri, Rossoneri and us. It has never happened,” says Giacomo Gagliani, 33-year-old from Milan, general director of the company.

The dream of playing at the Arena

Alcione won a tournament in which teams from Lombardy, Liguria and Piedmont competed. He won with Gozzano. He keeps Chisola at a distance. In the last matches of the season he will play with Bra, Borgo Sesia, Asti and Vado Ligure. “We are close to realizing our dream – says Gagliani – and if we make it, we want our home field to be the Arena”. It’s not that easy. Alcione has signed an agreement with Inter, which includes among other things the alternate use of the Arena Civica. Already today the Nerazzurri women’s team plays its home matches in Serie A in the stadium designed by Luigi Canonica, inaugurated in 1907. But it is also true that bringing the visiting fans right into the center of Milan, in the heart of Parco Sempione, where on weekends families with children walk, it’s not that simple.

The cold shower from a year ago

Alcione had already won the Serie D play-offs last year. When it came time to register for Serie C, there was a cold shower: without an adequate stadium, you cannot play among the professionals. The prefecture did not give the go-ahead for the use of the Arena, which is at the same time a monument of national interest protected by the Fine Arts and the only other stadium in the city that can host professional football matches besides San Siro. “My colleague at Sport, Riva, is already working to find the best solution for the wonderful Alcione crowd, also because in C many other Milanese will want to support her, and, perhaps, as already happens with women’s football, we can also cultivate the dream of a few matches at the Arena”, says Pierfrancesco Maran, councilor for neighborhoods of the Municipality of Milan. A possible solution is for another city pitch to be identified and set up as the main home stadium for Alcione, without risks to public order. The game is open.

The team and its neighborhood

At the Arena the maximum capacity is 9,510 people but Alcione’s intention would be to reduce it to 1,500, the minimum threshold imposed by the Serie C League, precisely to make the management of public order easier. The club’s declared intention would be to continue, even in the event of promotion, to allow fans to attend matches for free. Today families living in the area, relatives of the players, kids from the club’s youth teams go to the Kennedy field. On Instagram there is also an account, Curva Alcione, which publishes photos of footballers in orange shirts celebrating after goals. And thus, 72 years after its foundation, the dream of Ennio Di Ponzio is coming true, who in 1952 gave life to the club, an evolution of the Unione Sportiva Milanese of 1902, “to collect young people from the streets, bring them together or recreate them in healthy environments , and introduce them to useful sporting practice in the most beautiful game in the world: football”. Even today, the strength of the club is its youth sector.

Little players grow up

The pride of Alcione, which at the end of the 1960s was led by the future Inter president Ernesto Pellegrini, is having brought boys who grew up playing football between the San Carlo hospital and the Cave park to Serie A. Nicolò Rovella, now at Lazio, born in Segrate in 2001, played at Alcione between the ages of 13 and 16. The Milanese Lorenzo Dickmann, now at Brescia, born in 1996, wore the orange shirt in the 2009/10 season. And Andrea Caracciolo , born in 1981, also from Milan, spent two seasons in the Alcione youth team between 1996 and 1998, before being signed up by Brescia, Genoa and Sampdoria among others. But the first famous player to have grown up on the pitches of Milan West was Beppe Dossena, a Milanese born in 1958, Italian champion with the Blucerchiati.

The leading team

In the first team squad there are five players who grew up in the youth academy. The youngest is the Milanese Tommaso Caremoli, a left back born in 2005. The captain is Mario Piccinocchi, a former AC Milan Primavera player, who with Lugano reached the Europa League group stage, flying to Israel to challenge Hapoel Be’ er Sheva. Karim Laribi comes from Inter’s youth team, having come from Cesena and Bologna. The striker is Fabio Morselli, born in 1998. The team is coached by Giovanni Cusatis, Beppe Sannino’s deputy in Catania, Chievo, Carpi, Watford and the Greek championship. The two presidents of Alcione saw in him the right man not only for the promotion to C but also to plan the leap to B, for which they are already taking a run.

The two presidents

At the top of the club are Giulio Gallazzi, former athlete of the American football national team, and Marcello Montini. The first from Bologna, a finance man, has been at Alcione since 2018. The second from Milan, a logistics entrepreneur, had already been in the club a year before. Friends of each other, they have turned the sports center upside down, setting up two new eleven-a-side pitches, two more five-a-side pitches where the children play, the changing rooms with personal lockers for the first team, the gym and the prefabricated wooden house that houses the management. The sponsors helped a lot, two above all: Banca del Fucino, a Roman institute of the Igea group, and ZTE, a Chinese telephone company. The hope is that with the promotion others will arrive, given that Serie C costs on average 60 percent more compared to Serie D, without revenues increasing accordingly. “Playing at the Arena would give considerable visibility and sponsors would arrive – says Gagliani – Milan would have a team that plays in the centre”.

First time

Over the decades, many Milanese teams have attempted to make the big leap, without ever succeeding. Stories punctually told by the precious Calcio di Periphery web portal. Brera, with its evocative name, tried, but after playing in the second category last year they preferred to focus on football projects abroad, from Macedonia to Mongolia. Milano City, Milanese only in name, has had some problems in managing it, given that it is the evolution of Busto Garolfo’s Bustese. A story similar to that of the Milan club, which actually plays in the Municipality of Pero. Alcione, on the other hand, is truly Milanese. For councilor Maran, “it is fantastic to see a team that represented a dream for many children who started playing football dreaming of playing in important championships reach such high levels. It’s as if you collectively realize the dream of generations of children.”