Europe, Football and Refugees, a meeting in Rome Monday 13/2/2017
On Monday 13 February 2017, the FARE network in collaboration with Liberi Nantes and the Italian Union of Popular Sport (UISP), and with the patronage of the National Office against Racial Discrimination (UNAR), is organising a Round Table entitled: Europe, Football and Refugees – Rules and experiences of social inclusion through Play.
The Round Table will take place in Rome at the Multi-purpose Room of the Presidency of the Council of Ministers in in Via di Santa Maria 37/A. In addition to the organisers, the following bodies will take part: the Italian Football Federation (FIGC), Uefa, the Association for Legal Studies in Immigration (ASGI), the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR), the Italian Parliament and grassroots organisations from Italy and around Europe.
For Liberi Nantes this is a fundamental appointment, an important result of a journey which started back on 26 October 2007 when our association was born. From the 2008/2009 season, we decided to enrol in the Third Level Championship of the Lega Nazionale Dilettanti, discovering that a team formed entirely by Refugees and Asylum Seekers cannot be official enrolled because federation rules imposed – and still do – that restrictions and requests for documentation that an asylum seeker is almost never able to provide.
We accepted – and we continue to accept – the terms of the compromise proposed by the Lega Nazionale Dilettanti: to play, but without being assigned a league position.
Without classification. We have now lived with this terrible expression for 9 years and it is always the hardest thing to explain to our players: to struggle in the playing field with sportsmanship (we have won the Fair Play Cup four times out of nine); measure yourself against an opponent; win, lose; but to inevitably end the season with zero points.
Fortunately, in the meantime, many other teams like Liberi Nantes have been formed in Italy but we are still probably the only team which by choice gives up points on the table in favour of guaranteeing access to play for our players. They come first; the smiles of our lads as they run out on the pitch every Sunday come ahead of the prestige of a league position that we could be proud of. We have never said to any of them “today you can’t play”. First comes Play which is open to everyone, then prestige.
By a conscious choice for 9 years we have been an anomaly in the Italian football system, something different that waits hopeful to re-join the game; included with the same rules and on the same level as the others.
On Monday, we will tell our story and try to transmit the values and the beauty of our journey with the concrete hope that from such a prestigious round table proposals can emerge which will help remove the barriers to access to the world of amateur football.
This is what we were born for and why we will continue to fight until we reach the objective of a free and open Game.
