The International Telematic University UNINETTUNO and the Lazio Sport Association announce the birth of a collaboration, a national exclusivity for the S.S. Lazio, of the first “Post-Career Training School of S.S. Lazio – Youth Sector and Women’s Team”. This project is meant to give an answer to the problem met by all those who practice sport at a competitive level: namely that of facing the critical phase following their pulling back, once they have finished their career. Actually, only in a few cases, the former athletes succeed in joining their team’s managerial staff; on the contrary, several among them lose themselves and become only old stars.
The relevant data are cause of concern, both at national and European level: less than 45% the young people succeed in becoming professional football players. In Italy, at present, the women’s sector is not recognized at a professional level. Taking as an example, at European level, the Premier League (the most famous and richest championship in the world) over 40% of the former football players go bankruptcy in the first 5 years since the end of their agonistic career (source: BBC). An important fact at international level is that of the British football schools: according to a 2017 survey on approximately 1.5 million boys and girls, only 180 succeed in becoming professional players; basically 0.012% (Source: PFA - Professional Footballers' Association).
The questions that the partners of this project ask themselves, even though from completely different backgrounds, are univocal: which generation of sportsmen do we want to create? Is it enough to score a goal on the field or is it essential to score a goal in life? The International Telematic University UNINETTUNO and the Youth Sector of the S.S. Lazio take the field to meet the need of starting a training, educational and cultural process at the benefit of the younger generations. They both wish to support the families and these young athletes enabling them to reconcile these two worlds: sport and education.
Banca Igea joins this project as well allocating some study grants. The UNINETTUNO University, in particular, wishes to support the professionalization of the women football players of the women’s team of the S.S. Lazio to allow them to follow the new Master’s Course in “Applied Sports Performance” on a distance mode; this course is aimed at training athletes and coaches of the Third Millennium. This Master’s Course is realized in cooperation with professionals such as Adrian Lamb (Head of High Performance Coach of many teams of the English Premier League and founder of the Pilars of Performance) and Michael Clegg (former football player of Manchester United, a trainee of Sir Alex Ferguson, and presently athletic trainer of the first team of Manchester United and founder of the coaching society, Seed of Speed).
“The birth of this project is in line with the mission that our University has been always carrying on: democratizing the access to knowledge by bringing it into everybody’s home. Actually, UNINETTUNO’s teaching and learning model allows going to the university with no more space and time limits. Anybody, with a simple smartphone, can access the learning environments of our Internet-based didactic cyberspace and study thanks to digitized video lessons that are linked to books, essays, exercises, virtual laboratories, interactive classrooms 24 hours a day. The flexibility assured by our model allows to study and work at the same time or, as in this case, to carry on one’s own sport activity and acquire professional skills that will enable the young football players to complete their studies and create their own post-career future, valorizing the talents that the sport activities developed in them and that will certainly make them excel also in their future professional world. The added value of a project carried on with UNINETTUNO is also allowing young football players to join an international community made up of over 20 thousand students coming from 167 different countries across the world and teachers coming from the best universities in the world. UNINETTUNO has always been committed to make the different cultures of the world speak to each other as the football world has always being doing.” Maria Amata Garito, Rector of UNINETTUNO.
“Along its path of growth not only in sport terms as well as in social and ethical terms, the S.S. Lazio makes a further new and significant step ahead. The post-career educational project for the boys and girls of the youth sectors, realized in cooperation with the International Telematic University UNINETTUNO and with the support of Banca Igea, represents an innovative initiative aimed at assuring to the young football boys players and the young women football players a suitable training for professional paths to be taken in case of failure in their sport activity. Football and cultural background must not be alternative to each other, but closely connected in order to assure a future to our boys and girls.”, Claudio Lotito, President of S.S. Lazio.