Nobody offside: kicking out racism and prejudice
Liberi Nantes is one of the six stories told in the web programme Nessuno In Fuorigioco [Nobody Offside], which is based on an idea of Guido Montana and Aniello Luciano.
Six true stories of integration from the world of football in which great commitment of the people involved, both individual and collective, provides a positive contrast with the social difficulties and problems of marginalisation.
Mattia Bagnato tells the story:
There are those who have worked for years to help the migrants who have landed in Italy, who use football as an instrument of integration, knocking down the logic of barriers with a football. It is a world of associations told in the web programme produced by Mondofutbol.com.
One day a journalist asked the German theologian Dorothee Solle: “How would you explain happiness to a child?” She replied: “I wouldn’t explain it. I would give the child a ball to play with”. The kind of happiness the theologian referred to, you can see in the ebony-coloured faces immortalised in the web programme Nessuno in fuorigioco. An authentic and contagious joy of living.
It can cancel the suffering and violence of war, and make you feel like a child again. This is the power of football. Hidden, but not too much, in the puddles of a pitch on the outskirts of town, or in the unbreakable commitment of the volunteers of Liberi Nantes, of Aletico Brigante or of Atletico Diritti, and so on. There are dozens of teams born from the desire for integration and solidarity.
Simple football teams, on the face of it. Instead they are huge social projects, which overcome barriers and scale walls. Like the No Borders Cup, a three-team charitable event organised at Pietrelcina by Atletico Brigante on 3 January. A way of confirming, if it were still necessary, that we are all brothers and sisters on this earth. That the melting pot of races is a source of wealth and that the colour of one’s skin, or religion or nationality, are merely details that don’t make you a better or worse person.
It is the heart which makes the difference and these young people really have a big heart. So big, that they will shovel away the snow which is blocking the roads or the mud after the latest landslide. The barricades erected to stop them getting of the bus or the racist abuse which gets thrown at them matter little.
“We are the future of Italy”, says Henry, the young Burkinabe coach of the Young Italy team.
After a gruelling crossing which lasted months, they have landed in Italy and here they want to stay.
To integrate and give their contribution to a country which is getting older and older. During the journey they lost friends and relatives, swallowed by the darkness of the abyss. They play football to forget, a tearful Abdul tells us. To get the images of those bodies swallowed up by the sea out of their heads. But it’s impossible to do so. As in the worst nightmares, the images of those tragic moments return at night to torment them. There is nothing left to do but learn to live with those dreams. Hoping that whoever follows you will not die in the attempt to find happiness.
Nessuno in fuorigioco is also, and especially, a story of hope. Of young migrants removed from their marginalisation and taken from the clutches of crime. But it’s also a ploy to “clean up” the image of a sport which has too often been hostage to the violent, to unscrupulous money-makers, returning it to the dimension it deserves. That of being a bridge between cultures and different worlds. We are all equal on a football pitch is what we read at the opening of the web report: “To live anywhere in the world today and be against equality because of race or color is like living in Alaska and being against snow.”
In this way, it can happen that races which for centuries have been fighting, find themselves team mates, ready to “fight” together to score a goal. This is the case of Lions Caserta, which has four teams, including a women’s team, and a dozen nationalities. From Asia to Africa, passing through Latin America.
The journey these teams have undertaken, however, is a lot longer than one could imagine. It embraces myriad social contexts and multiple problems. Atletico Diritti is an unequivocal example.
A multi-sports club born from the Association Progetto Antigone with the patronage of the University of Roma Tre. For a few years, it has manged to involve students, detained migrants and formerly detained migrants. An exceptional model of integration, according to Susanna Marietti, the president of the club. “A team which has opened itself up to many experiences and many different lives lived”.
“Knowledge is what overcomes stereotypes, and knowledge overcomes prejudices”, Susanna Marietti concludes. To see this, you only have to go to Parma, to the “home” of ASD Scanderberg.
Here, two dialects of the Albanian language – Gegë and Toskë – are spoken.
The mind races to those huge boats full of people that we have seen on the news since the middle of the 1990s. Those people have since gone a long way. With reserve, coming up against the kind of commonplaces that see them only as thieves or pickpockets. Today, if the Albanian community seems to be perfectly integrated, this is also due to people like Gigi Arpino, team captain, who has always fought to make knowledge dictate the rules of play.
Football unites rather than divides. All the time, we hear a lot about empty stadiums, fan ID cards, and stadium ownership. It’s all time wasted when around us there is a universe made up of social commitment, of the struggle against racism and prejudice. A largely unknown world, in which the opposition of ‘them and us’ dissolves to make way for inclusiveness. Men and women who have set sail from distant lands, at the mercy of a system which never ceases to remind them that there is no room for them, have found their corner of paradise. A space where they can start to dream again of a better future.
