Alessandro Spugna doesn’t forget the scudetto
The words of Alessandro Spugna
Alessandro Spugna, Roma women’s team coach, è spoke to Radio TV Serie A with RDS on the program hosted by Alessandro Alciato "Storie di serie A".
"The Scudetto è was beautiful, the enthusiasm was to the nth degree. After the first year as coach at Roma, we worked to succeed in this goal; the Italian Cup final we lost made us realize that we were really close to those who were the defending champions and we understood that we could try. È a goal that we strongly sought because é we had the knowledge that we could get to something truly incredible. È a great job was done at the club and staff level. È it went the way it was supposed to go.”
"As soon as I stopped playing, Silvano Benedetti, who was the youth sector manager of Torino, asked me to go to Torino to coach the youth team and I immediately accepted because I liked the idea of staying in soccer. Initially I took it as something of strong passion and then slowly è it became something more important. The moment I was offered to coach a professional first team I had to question myself. I coached the youth team of Torino for 12 years and it was an incredible training ground for life because I coached so many categories and dealt with kids of different ages. Working in a professional club è always a reason for great comparison with others. My move to Juventus è happened at a time when Juve had a very big project and when they proposed me to go and work for them, I accepted with the idea to improve myself again and to grow the teams. I worked for Juventus 6 years and they were very intense years. The current head of the women’s area, one day, asked me to coach the spring team that was beginning a journey at the national level; I decided in a matter of seconds to accept the proposal. Until then I had coached only men’s, and I was leading the U14. I saw it as an’opportunity and a new chance.”
“I am friends with Rita Guarino and so thanks to her I already had an idea of what women’s soccer was. The first day I was introduced to the spring team, I remember the surreal and total silence of the girls listening to what I had to say. The eagerness to learn and listen that the girls had è was the thing that immediately jumped out at me. I first coached in Serie A with Empoli; it was the lockdown period and I got a call from the sporting director of Empoli who told me that we had thought about me as the next coach for the first team. The’Empoli experience’was over because’the club’had found out that I had contacts with other clubs or rather L’Empoli was late in asking me for a renewal and at the same time requests started coming in from different clubs.”
“We have a duty to offer a better and better show to change the minds of those who evaluate women’s soccer differently from men’s soccer. Soccer can è be played by males as well as by females, as is the case in so many sports. Soccer è soccer. What I try to convey to female players are the same principles and concepts that I used to convey in men’s soccer. È clearly you need to have an eye with respect to what the girls can do on the field, at the physical level the difference is there’è but è normal that there is", he concluded.
