😡 Gravina riles up athletes on social media: “Us amateurs?” Tamberi SHOW💥 | OneFootball

The words of FIGC president Gabriele Gravina, after Italy’s elimination from the World Cup playoffs, have sparked a wave of controversy, fueling debate among fans, insiders, and even Italian athletes.

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What caused the most debate of all was his reply to the key question: why does Italy manage to excel in so many disciplines but not in football? Gravina answered as follows: "Football is a professional sport, the others are amateur sports, let’s make comparisons on a fair basis. The others are state sports, like winter sports: apart from Arianna Fontana, they are all state employees"

A response — yet another one that evening — that unleashed a (legitimate) uproar.

😡 Italian athletes’ social media anger against Gravina

Comments and reactions to the FIGC president’s words immediately exploded on social media, with the entire Italian sporting movement feeling called into question after effectively being described as amateur.

Among the first to speak out were Francesca Lollobrigida, Pietro Sighel, and Simone Deromedis, all gold medalists at the Milan-Cortina 2026 Olympics.

They were joined by Gianmarco Tamberi, Olympic gold medalist at Tokyo 2020, who chose irony by posting an AI-generated image: eleven current iconic faces of Italian sport wearing the Azzurri shirt in place of the eleven footballers.

Simone Anzani and Carlotta Cambi also commented on the remarks — respectively a world champion and a European, world, and Olympic champion with Italy’s men’s and women’s national volleyball teams. The two were also among the torchbearers at San Siro during the opening ceremony of the Milan-Cortina Olympics, though they were not recognized by commentator and former Rai Sport director Paolo Petrecca.

Mattia Furlani and, above all, Irma Testa also went in hard. Both Olympic medalists and world champions in their respective disciplines, they pointed directly to the issue of budgets and resources.

Because that is exactly the point: people can debate for months about how to rebuild Italian football and bring it back to the top, but the feeling is that this national team is lacking, above all else, a sense of belonging. That hunger, that desire to sweat and honor the shirt that athletes in other disciplines continue to show every day, making us feel deeply moved despite clearly having far fewer infrastructures, resources, and privileges.

And this is where we need to stop and reflect: if the so-called “amateurs” are capable of giving us such powerful emotions, given the huge successes strung together in recent years, then perhaps the problem is not those being labeled, but those who have lost their essence. Long live the amateurs.

This article was translated into English by Artificial Intelligence. You can read the original version in 🇮🇹 here.