Roma – A training-sports path with the involvement of footballers, former footballers and technical staff made available by the Italian Footballers’ Association to encourage the socialization of young people detained in penal institutions for minors. This is what is foreseen in the Memorandum of Understanding signed today in Via Arenula by the Minister of Justice, Carlo Nordio, by the Minister for Sport and Youth, Andrea Abodi, and by the President of the AIC, Umberto Calcagno. The agreement is part of the “Sport for all – prisons” project, launched in May 2023 by the same Ministries in collaboration with Sport e Salute Spa with the aim of strengthening the carrying out of physical/sports and training activities aimed at adult and minor prisoners and to the operators of the Penitentiary Administration and of the Juvenile and Community Administration.
The agreement, which will be effective until the end of 2024 and will be renewable, provides that preliminary meetings with former footballers who will talk about their professional experience will take place in the structures identified by the Ministry of Justice; they will be followed by six weeks of training, held by technical staff selected by the AIC for two hours a week, and by a final football match. The memorandum of understanding provides for a program of sporting-educational actions which places football as an opportunity for discussion for socialization and reintegration. The sporting activities will involve both the children and the supervisory staff.
Three penal institutions for minors identified for this first phase, before a national development of the project: Casal del Marmo (Rome), Beccaria (Milan) and Fornelli (Bari). The program includes meetings with a former professional footballer in each structure; weekly training sessions held by a staff of former professional footballers involved in the AIC Junior Department; final match, among the minors participating in the project, prison officers, ex-footballers and local authorities. In the opinion of Minister Nordio “sport, like work, especially for the youngest, is an extraordinary opportunity to transform the time of punishment into an authentic path of recovery, according to the dictates of the Constitution. Thanks to this protocol, our kids will be accompanied by football champions, willing to do their part in the fundamental task of returning more aware free people to society, who will never return to crime”. “Free football is an emblematic title of this protocol – declares Minister Abodi – It is a project that has unequivocal constitutional characteristics. I hope the effects of this day are historic, that is, the more organized and systematic entry of football in its components because expresses its function not only in its educational form, but in the re-education of sport in all its forms. The concept of bringing normality back to a condition in which the right to normality must be recovered, because evidently not only has a norm been breached , but often a person was offended in the broadest sense of the term.” Finally, Calcagno underlines that “for the Footballers’ Association it is an honor to be part of this project and to be its operational arm. An important initiative that enhances the path we have undertaken for more than ten years, since we included former footballers involving them in social initiatives to bring young people closer to sport. This project will allow us to come into contact with kids who have made some mistakes and we hope to be able to transfer our ‘team-building skills’ to them through the re-educational aspect of football” .
2024-01-27 12:51:37
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