“Calabria has always been humble. The paradox of Milanello is that…”
—
In the past you remembered a Balotelli anecdote, would you like to tell it? “There are several about Balotelli, but I would prefer to avoid going into detail, because I knew him and not even very well, in any case I was added every now and then for training with the first team. But I remember several anecdotes about the environment that you could breathe in Milanello. For example, when Stephan El Shaarawy stopped to take shots, when Gabriel came I have a specific anecdote, I only remember that when I was in the Primavera you breathed the air of the First Team, but you didn’t realize how much. that environment was far away, even though you are practically side by side. There is this paradox in which you feel you have arrived in a completely wrong way in terms of mentality.”
In the Primavera you shared the dressing room with Calabria, Cristante, Petagna and many others. Do you still keep in touch with someone or do relationships end once you leave Milan? “Great question. I played with Calabria for 9 years together, so I know him quite well. He’s great, he’s always been the underdog since coach Inzaghi arrived, who immediately gave him a chance due to his attitude. He has always been a very humble and hard-working boy, who ran more than anyone else. This attitude rewarded him in the long term.”
Do friendships exist in football? “As far as true friendship is concerned, for me it’s a little different. In football you play with other people for interests, the interest of the team binds you. I met my greatest friend at Milan and he is Riccardo Piscitelli. I have maintained relationships with 3/4 people, having still played for 18 years, but for the rest no”.
Milan, Jacopo Viola: “Inzaghi was obsessed. I left the Devil because …”
—
What is Pippo Inzaghi like as a coach? And what does it mean to have someone who made Milan’s history on the bench? “The first time we saw him we were at lunch in Pinzolo, because perhaps he wasn’t there on the first day of training camp. When I saw him in his coach’s suit it had a strange impact on me. And I remember that the Alessandro Mastalli also had the same reaction. You could certainly see that he was obsessed with all things and what he conveyed to me most was his mentality.”
What did he leave you?“My parents told me: ‘if you want to play football, you have to eat well and go to bed early at night’, all those things that are told to 16-year-olds. When Inzaghi arrived this multiplied by 800 and there you really understand what it means. The greatest gift he gave us was his mentality, also because he was very charismatic anyway.”
What went wrong with Milan? Why didn’t you make the leap? “I wasn’t a goalkeeper with a great physical structure and this penalized me throughout the youth sector. I perhaps had excellent qualities which in the end did not prove to be such for Milan’s technical parameters. They wanted someone tall, reactive, in short they had a stereotype in mind. Then in the last year of the Primavera I broke my cruciate and they signed Stefano Gori, who now plays for Monza, the following year the alternative was to stay there and be a reserve or I didn’t think twice and I went to Siena. In the end it turned out to be the right choice, because then Donnarumma arrived and he always played.”
Jacopo Viola: “Messias? I never thought I’d see him in the Champions League semi-final…”
—
You had a good run in the minor categories between Siena and Reggiana, but I would focus on Gozzano, where you met Messias. Would you have ever thought that a boy like that would go on to play for Milan and score in the Champions League against Atletico? “No, I would never have thought that. Very honestly, you see certain things and there were another couple of Gozzano players who could have played in Serie A. And I thought that about him straight away, from the first week that he was there. ‘I saw him play. But I really never thought he could play in a Champions League semi-final. When I saw the Milan-Inter derby on TV three years after he played with me at Gozzano I thought that football is truly incredible I was happy for him, but it’s crazy.”
Jacopo Viola: “I heard the Luxembourg coach when I was at Milan, but …”
—
Have you ever had contact with the Luxembourg national team? “The short answer is yes. We had contacts when I was still at Milan. When I was in the Primavera I received a call from the then coach, Luc Holtz. He had called me, but I understood zero English and the accent was heavy, so there wasn’t much communication between us, we chatted for five or ten minutes. Then I knew there was this interest in an internship, but I would still have to turn professional. This is because in Luxembourg, even if you were born there , you can’t have citizenship if there are no specific limits. You have to speak French, you have to have lived there for a certain number of years. I therefore had to acquire it for sporting merit, and to get it approved by the government it was necessary to turn professional.”
After Gozzano you were left without a team and relied on social media. Can you tell us about your experiences in Norway and Georgia? “They were truly crazy and I got there through social media. With Riccardo Piscitelli I started making videos, every day. I had the aim of doing strange things, but also very intense goalkeeper training, to end up on 433. I I thought ‘If I’m good and I make well-made videos, out of 10 million views out of 433 there will be some prosecutor who writes to me in chat’. There were several. One was a guy at the beginning of his career and he put it all there day contacting team after team for me, I will always be grateful to him, and in the end he got me to Norway, to Oslo And the other to Georgia, with an agency that caught me.”
How did it go in Norway? “It went very well, in the sense that it was a wonderful experience, even though it was very cold. I was only there for two days, because the goalkeeping coach saw me in the locker room when I was 1.85m tall and already there in his eyes I was marked even before entering the pitch. And then there were bureaucratic problems that prevented my staying there.”
While in Georgia? “I risked signing there, I stayed there for a month and a half. I went to a team in a scary city, a horrible place. The club is called Dila Gori and it was also okay, but the surroundings were quite cold. So I went to Lokomotiv Tbilisi, which was an opposite club in terms of environment, with a diversified and more stimulating city. I was there for three days, there was also a goalkeeper who has now reached high levels, but I didn’t speak the language and the real problem was bureaucratic. They had to sign a goalkeeper in a short time and since I was a bureaucratic transfer, even if I was a free agent, it would have taken them too long. In the end nothing was done, but I was very happy because I got there with the my legs.”
“I’ll tell you how I ended up in the United States”
—
How did the transition to the United States happen? “Good question. I went to the United States because after Georgia and everything that happened previously I was free. And I told myself that I had to find a way to play football somewhere. However, I have few statistics, but I have a Youth sector in Milan behind me and other positive experiences. No one would have taken me at that time and I was 23 years old anyway, so I wasn’t top notch.”
“I asked myself how they were placed there at goalkeeping level and I saw that I could very well fit there, so I thought about going through college. I finished university here, where I did Telematics, I did everything quickly and fury and I was lucky, because every day that passed I risked not being able to go. In the end I went and stayed there for a year and a half.”
Did the experience in Georgia and this one in the USA make you more of a man? “Maybe I became a man earlier if the observation is more about personal growth. And it happens when you have big difficulties because you pass by a place like Milanello, where you feel like you’re on another planet and you’re just a stone’s throw away shot from the First Team, to Dila Gori, to be released. I remember climbing over the pitch wall to train without getting caught by the custodian. Those difficulties allowed me to take the step that ultimately led me to more informed decisions.”
Jacopo Viola: “I will always be grateful to Milan. I learned discipline”
—
Why did you choose to retire? And what do you do now? “I have always been a very disciplined boy, always focused on football, very determined, if there is something I want I pursue it to the end. I learned this at Milan and I will always be grateful for this experience. Then when I left in America, on a cultural level I saw how sport and football is perceived. At university level there is a more stimulating environment there than in Italy and I discovered things I didn’t know I was interested in in 2022, after I finished to play in college, an American Serie B team called me there and I asked myself what I really wanted and I thought it was time to hang up my shoes.
And what do you do now? “When I went to America, at the same time, I had the opportunity to earn money because an American company took me on an internship as a Social Media Strategist. After which they offered me a part-time job and there I understood how to work with social media, what to do and what not to do to attract attention. They immediately made a lot of views, I learned to do other things and started consulting with about twenty brands start-up. I would like to go to America to live.”
“Algorithm? The difference is always made by the value of the person”
—
What do you think about using the algorithm to search for players on the transfer market, like AC Milan? “It makes sense and it doesn’t make sense. If you have 10,000 players and you have to choose, the algorithm certainly does the skimming and gives you 100 that give you security. For me, the difference in those 100 is completely different. I had many experiences and I understood that the only thing that can make the difference is the head, as in the case of Calabria, Messias, Vicario and many others. The head and the context in which you grow up, the values you have as for companies: the group comes before the individual, if someone goes the other way, they must be sent away immediately.” READ ALSO: Transfer market, Milan returns to Brassier: there is a risk to avoid >>>
© ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
