Riccardo Calafiorithe best of this ramshackle and terrible Italian national football team: his the last desperate percussion in the center of the pitch, a few seconds before the end of the match with the Croatia, capable of penetrating the opponent’s dense midfield, of resisting a defender’s charge and passing it to his freshest and most unmarked teammate, the twenty-nine-year-old playmaker Mattia Zaccagni, only put on the field by the torpid Spalletti almost at the end of the match. Perfect pass, shot by Zaccagni who shoots and scores the goal of life.
Calafiori’s inspired action, his providential assist, they are the most beautiful thing that came out by an unrealistic and wrong team, also for so-called ideological reasons, since our city (with a uselessly balding forehead, the unforgettable Fortebraccio would have written) preferred conservative optionseven beyond all logic, after the first two bad matches of this group dominated by Spain. Of course, the goal was very beautiful he saved For the moment shipping to Germany. But it was the final moment (luckily spot on) dictated by the feat of Calafiori, the best and most lucid of the Azzurri, a moment that it doesn’t arise by chance. Riccardo has been playing at this level for a year, well guided Bologna good and pragmatic Thiago Motta. Here in the national team he immediately found a place in the first team because someone got hurt before leaving. Otherwise… Yes, otherwise.
Calafiori’s technical and athletic gesture demonstrates that to the young people – he just turned 22 – must be given more trust and esteem, and it must not just be a coincidence, dictated by fortuitous circumstances; in Italy there are very young and already excellent players (I’m thinking of the extraordinary striker Francesco Camarda of Milan, which finds expression only in minor leagues and in the under-17 national team, which must be valorised and played with the best teams, and not left in a bain-marie: in Italy there are others from Calafiori, but the mafia of prosecutors prefers to focus elsewhere, directing “friendly” companies towards the most convenient (for their interests) areas of South America, Africa (the new Bengodi) and even Asia and Australia, without forgetting the United States or the Canada; all, obviously, aimed at importing players for cheap who are then placed at a high price at the same clubs that could do without it but are instead lazy with their youth teams: the concept – here is the underlying ideology, let’s call it that, that governs this petty universe – is that globalized football makes money immediately, while our young “they must mature”.
Strange that it only happens here. Not at Real, or Barcelona, or Bayern, or in the Premier League, or in France where Kylian Mbappewho is now 25 years old, when he was nine years younger he was already at Monaco, the antagonist of Marseille and PSG… The reality is that there are complicities, familisms (no one has ever conducted a serious investigation into the world of prosecutors), co-interests, spins that often hide accounting tricks (this was demonstrated by a recent judicial investigation): the result is that a “boiled” guy like By Lorenzowho played a very subdued championship, or one like Jorginho who is a reserve at Arsenal, due to his terrible state of form (and it has been seen), when alternatives as well valid, but courageous, could have been done.
What in fact Spain, Germany, Switzerland, France and England have dared where it has been adopted for some time a very different and profitable policy, because a valorized young person is destined to create interesting and long-lasting money movements; so much so that we have seen on the field, in this Euro24, even a 16 year old, as it happened in their respective leagues or during European Cups. I remember that Gianni Rivera he was taken by Alessandria, where he was already playing, to strengthen Milan when he was not yet sixteen.
Once upon a time, Serie A knew showcase young and very young people, some of them destined for fantastic careers, others, however, for honorable careers. There is no better training ground than training a promising young player on the pitch, not on the bench, taking a risk on her qualities.
With us the prevails prejudice that our young footballers are immature and that they have to “go and gain experience” in minor leagues, with the risk that you will stay there foreverOur Serie A has become increasingly more a car park for foreign footballersnow represent 70 percent of the workforce, very fluid because the market law then prevails which contemplates the inevitable but reclaimed need to sell the best ones to raise cash, only to then reuse part of the money obtained from their sales to buy other foreigners and not invest them in the young people of our country who, even at an international level, have been capable of winning European Championships and reaching the final in the World Cup. This is how we feed the Spanish, French and Northern European “cantere”. Short-sighted management, dictated by who knows what profit.
The result is that today half of Serie A companies are in American hands (which also have a lot of companies in series B and even in C, like Triestina). They almost always are “masters” who have neither experience nor memory nor culture of football, but of business. They came to cement and build new stadiums with the excuse of modernizing them, in truth to include in the “package”, hotels, shopping centers, sports centers for the wealthy and to enhance the extra-urban areas involved in the operations. Speculators who use football as leverage for other dealsre, taking advantage of the bad corporate and financial conduct of owners who were unable to accumulate only debts, and failed corporate conduct. Demonstrating to them an immaturity that they placed on the shoulders of young people.
