To understand how our champions are born, we first need to look at the path they must travel. And in Italy, this path has two enormous obstacles: the first is a monologue that fills every space and leaves no room for other voices. The second is a silence made of cracks, rust, and closed doors. A bit too poetic, these images?
Let’s talk about the football empire and the forgotten gyms. The software and hardware of a system that seems designed to celebrate a single king, leaving others to fight for scraps.
The Football Empire and the Monomania of Soccer
In Italy, football isn’t just a sport. It’s a religion, a universal language, a piece of our national identity. Its roots are so deep they extend back to the Renaissance, with games like Florentine calcio. This tradition has transformed into a true cultural and media monomania.
Sports newspapers dedicate almost all their pages to football, and incidentally, they are now the only daily newspapers with a respectable circulation. In other words, they represent a huge slice of the national press. On television, the space for football overshadows everything else, creating a multi-billion dollar TV rights market that is unparalleled. Platforms like DAZN or Amazon Prime have built their business models precisely on this, fueling a vicious cycle: the media invests insane amounts in football because it guarantees viewership, and this total coverage strengthens public interest, which in turn justifies the investments. It’s a self-sustaining empire, a giant whose mere presence overshadows everything else.
The “Hateful” Secondary Sports
And in the shadows, there are also them: the “minor sports.” We now use this expression without thinking, but it’s a word that relegates the disciplines it refers to a subordinate role. It’s not a classification; it’s a condemnation. We are still talking about sports with millions of practitioners and world champions who are relegated to a subordinate role.
The data is merciless. Globally, women’s sports receive about 5% of media coverage, which drops to 4% outside of events like the Olympics, despite women making up 40% of those who participate in sports. Even during the Games, when attention should be highest, male athletes receive more visibility (57% vs. 43%) and are interviewed more.
The problem isn’t that football is popular. The problem is that the media system does almost nothing to promote a richer and more varied sports culture. It doesn’t just reflect public tastes; it shapes them. By concentrating all narrative and economic resources on a single discipline, it deprives others of the chance to tell their stories, create their heroes, and build a fan base.
And so, “secondary sports” are trapped in a cruel paradox: to gain visibility, they must win at the highest levels, but to win, they need the resources that only visibility can guarantee.
Intermittent Heroes
In this scenario, our champions become intermittent heroes. Their existence, for the general public, is not marked by the daily toil of training, but by the blinding flashes of victories that manage to break through the wall of silence.
Jannik Sinner, before becoming world number 1, was a name only for enthusiasts. Athletes like Gianmarco Tamberi, Nadia Battocletti, Bebe Vio, are forced to achieve the greatest feat just to earn the space that a mid-level footballer takes for granted.
It’s insane pressure. It’s like running, jumping, or swimming not just against an opponent, but against indifference. Every training session in the rain, every trip paid for by the family, becomes an act of silent resistance. It’s the vindication of their worth in a system that only notices you when you step onto the highest podium. The career of these athletes isn’t a movie; it’s a series of spectacular trailers. And their biggest challenge is to keep shining even when no one is watching.
Training Among the Cracks
If the deafening noise of football is the first obstacle, the second is a silence that hurts even more. It’s the silence of dilapidated gyms, worn-out athletics tracks, and swimming pools with broken tiles. It’s the state of our sports infrastructure, the hardware on which our athletes should build their dreams.
And that hardware, in Italy, is old, dilapidated, and unfairly distributed.
An Obsolete Heritage
In Italy, there are about 77,000 sports facilities. That seems like a lot, but 44% of these were built between the 1970s and 1980s, and today they show all the signs of age. 8% are even unusable: thousands of spaces taken away from sport and the community.
The problem is that almost 70% of these structures are publicly owned, and the percentage rises to 90% for the larger ones. This means their fate is tied to municipal budgets, often squeezed by a thousand other priorities. Maintenance becomes a heroic undertaking, and the result is a slow and inexorable decay. There are about 3,000 athletics tracks, many of which require very expensive renovations to be approved, and about 6,000 public swimming pools that are often energy black holes with unsustainable running costs.
The Structural Divide
This picture also hides a deep fracture: that between the Centre-North and the South. A report by Svimez and Uisp showed a direct and alarming correlation: where there are fewer facilities, people are more sedentary. In the South, the sedentary rate reaches 52.2%, compared to 30% in the Centre-North.
This isn’t just a number; it’s a barrier. It means denying entire generations the opportunity to approach sports. It means that a talent born in Calabria or Sicily has to work twice as hard, and is often forced to migrate to continue dreaming.
The PNRR: Band-Aid or Cure?
In this scenario, the PNRR funds appeared like a godsend. In 2023, sport activated almost one billion euros in projects, with a 69% increase in investments compared to 2021. An injection of oxygen that allowed many facilities to be redeveloped, modernized, and brought up to standard.
But is it an effective cure? The risk is that, once European funds run out, we’ll return to square one. Because the real problem isn’t just building or renovating, but managing. Most public facilities suffer from a “build and abandon” model: they are inaugurated with great fanfare and then, without a sustainable management plan, begin a slow decline.
The PNRR intervenes on capital but doesn’t change the model. Without a reform that incentivizes professional management and public-private partnerships, in ten years we’ll be back here talking about obsolete structures.
And so, the initial question becomes even more pressing. With distracted media attention and crumbling infrastructure, how on earth do our athletes win so much? How do they manage to emerge from this context? Perhaps the answer isn’t in the system. Perhaps the answer is precisely in the cracks.