Today, May 1st, is the universal day that celebrates the day of workers. Today will be the first time in Italy that sports workers can also be considered as such. The entry into force last July of the sports work reform law has, in fact and finally, determined the existence of hundreds of thousands of men and women who have dedicated their entire existence to sport and who were ghosts without any protection legislative, insurance, social security. This new reform, whose process began more than five years ago, has certainly brought to light the dignity of this role, but it is also creating – like all the right things, but applied badly – considerable problems especially for small companies, those that they deal with social sport and who found themselves having to manage a bureaucratic and economic impact to which they were not accustomed. It is clear that the entry into force of the law is a point of no return because, as happens in all European countries, sport can become a serious and coherent thing with the recent constitutional reform which, from 20 September 2023, ensures that sporting activity in all its forms is recognized by the Republic for its “educational, social value and promotion of psychophysical well-being”, as stated in the new paragraph of article 33. We need common work to make it solid and sustainable this model, so that those organizations that play sport for all do not suffer the consequences, thanks to volunteering and a certain amount of stubbornness, regulating performance-oriented sport and protecting sport which often replaces the State in inclusion projects, civic sense, quality of life. I couldn’t have a better opportunity to celebrate, today, a sporting fairytale that was able to keep these two souls together: last weekend the men’s volleyball club of Grottazzolina, a municipality in the Marche region in the province of Fermo, crowned a run-up that began fifty years ago , obtaining its first historic promotion to the A1 series (today it is called the “Super League” and all experts consider it the NBA of world volleyball). Grottazzolina officially has 3,218 inhabitants, including newborns and centenarians. On average, a thousand of them are present at the sports hall and, in the last away match in Siena which was decisive for promotion, 600 set out to cheer. It’s a game, I know, but respecting the proportions, it’s as if half a million Milanese regularly attended the Meazza stadium or half a million Romans set out to follow their team for an away final. The love story between Grottazzolina and volleyball is a fairy tale that has intimately connected and inseparable roots: already at the end of the last century the team twice came very close to promotion to the top flight, stopping only in the last match. Then came difficult years, the restart from Serie C, extensive work on the youth sector which today has over 250 kids. In the United States they would have already made a film about it and if I think of sport as a “total social fact”, I undoubtedly think of volleyball in Grottazzolina. © all rights reserved
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