Season ended a few days ago and it’s already time to take stock, to take stock of the final report cards of a championship that Messina completed without worries, arithmetically gaining salvation with a round to spare, even if, in reality, the category has never been under discussion, with 39 points achieved with eight days to go. The deficit trend of the last two months, with 6 points collected in 9 games, however, has created some thoughts, closing the door to the playoffs for the biancoscudati, a threshold approached to just one point, but never exceeded. Therefore, the reward of finishing on the left side of the table was missed, which would have repaid the team group, but also the club, for the efforts made starting last July, when the hiring of the Giacomo Modica-Domenico Roma couple was made official who was entrusted with the construction of the squad capable of collecting 45 points, the best numerical result among the professionals of this Messina reborn in 2017, with a fourteenth place which equals that achieved, at 39 with 36 games counted, in 2021-22 by the team which saw Sasà Sullo on the bench, then Eziolino Capuano and finally Ezio Raciti.
COLD BLOOD – Let us therefore begin the evaluation game, starting from the property: a Pietro Sciotto a judgment must be given more than enough. The owner maintained coldness and conviction in his choices when, between October and November, with 6 defeats and only one point collected from 7 matches, any other president would have sacrificed the head of his coach and started the third consecutive revolution underway. ‘Opera. Instead, keeping the same leadership on the bench made it possible to build a cohesive group around the football ideas of the coach, who, in turn, was able to change the team’s attitude on the pitch, starting from the tactical arrangement, but above all by making people responsible some key men, from a charismatic point of view, present in the squad.
ARMED TRUCE – Pietro Sciotto’s relationship with part of the fans has never, in 7 years, gone beyond more or less long periods of truce, between one protest and another. Perhaps the armed peace of the season just ended was the most long-lasting, but the re-explosion of polemical chants and banners against the president in the final minutes of the match against Potenza, with salvation almost achieved, brings the frustration on the part of those biancoscudati supporters, with the strong voice of the organized clubs, always present in all the away games, who deserve higher ambitions and believe the current ownership is not adequate for this task. A position widely reiterated and known by all parties involved, now crystallized in their beliefs and it appears difficult to find a meeting point that can allow us to overcome this block.
STICKS AND CARROTS – Overall positive opinion for all those who covered the various roles in the organization chart, because commitment was never lacking, nor professionalism and the structural difficulties were faced and mitigated with a sense of responsibility. It is worth highlighting the continuous, and also numerically important, presence of thecommunication area, in all seasonal trips, invaluable in maintaining good relations with the national media, in the year in which Sky was Legapro’s partner, the management of local newspapers was perhaps too pragmatic, in some cases even abrupt, but here we would enter into considerations excessively personal for a “report card”.
MARIO, INFRONT AND SUPERMARKETS – The question mark remains linked to marketing and sponsors, a potentially essential item for the life of a third series company, entrusted to the external collaboration of a figure like Mario Bonsignorewith the participation, at a certain point in the season, of Front as a partner and the presence of an international brand on the Messina shirt. Entity whose contours have blurred as the months have passed, we do not know with what consequences or impacts on the financial and economic accounts of the company, while, close to Sciotto, more and more assiduously, it has been seen Immaculate Boninawhich has been linked to the ACR several times for more than a decade, without ever becoming a protagonist.
A separate chapter is that of the promotions for access to the stadium, with some “drugged” attendance numbers, but it is necessary to bring especially young people and families closer to Messina and every initiative can be useful, even if the sense of belonging or participation in the Biancoscudate events is built over time and not just with one-euro tickets as shopping vouchers in supermarkets.
BROKEN HOPES – Finally, a mention of the youth sector, which spent a year at higher standards at an organizational and structural level than what has been experienced in these parts in the past, but, next year, there will be a different solution, most likely a collaboration with the Asd Torregrotta, an elite football school, because the agreement signed between Pietro Sciotto and Antonio D’Arrigo last summer will be terminated. The three-year program drawn up by the management based on the experience gained since 2014 with the Camaro and wanting to test their skills in the professional field, did not work, from a financial point of view, due to a series of circumstances deriving from the outside (federal regulations and laws of the State also in the fiscal field, with a profound impact on Italian youth football) and the ownership of the ACR does not intend to take on the huge investments of a youth sector entirely in house, or even in partnership.
A missed opportunity, also considering some synergies, started through the youth sector, but remained in the embryonic phase, linked to the relationships with many top-level national football teams, to the collaboration initially planned with Claudio Lucchini, now close to Sampdoria, to the agreement with the Maltese Federation which only brought a few sponsorship contracts, without the ACR being able to really make use of these opportunities.
Young people are the future of any football club and we need to find the resources to invest in structures, training of technicians, aiming for multi-year planning. Easy to say, much less to put these words into practice, but it is an endemic problem in Italian football, at all levels.
