Andrea Bargnani throws gasoline on the fire by responding to Gravina
Andrea Bargnani, a former Italian basketball player with a long experience in the NBA, also took a stand with a post on LinkedIn after the words of FIGC president Gabriele Gravina regarding the elimination of the Azzurri from the World Playoffs: “I was impressed and I can’t help but say it. On the sporting result of my colleagues I do not pronounce myself, sport is unpredictable and episodes decide matches, I know that well. I also disappointed expectations in qualifying rounds with the national basketball team, and I know what it means to be inside a “meat grinder.”
Insults and threats towards Alessandro Bastoni and his wife
“The apex figure of our national sport has also justified the difficulties in soccer by saying that “soccer is a professional sport, the others are amateurish,” but the highest expression of this flaunted “professionalism” yesterday, Serie A, closed the 2025 financial year with a hole of more than half a billion euros (-531.241,500 euros to be exact) … so I would immediately ask: when, how and where does all this professionalism manifest itself?”
“I played in the NBA, the most professional sports league in the world, benchmarks of any sport on the Globe – stressed the Roman who was first overall pick in the 2006 draft – I have never felt more athlete, more professional, than someone who does high jumping for the Fiamme Oro training 8 hours a day. An unwritten rule of sports, one of the most basic, says that professionalism you don’t measure it by salary. You measure it by dedication, by sacrifice, by the fact that you don’t have a second job and you train your whole life to do what you are. So on this issue, making $10 million a season in the NBA or 2,000 in the Golden Flames with athletics does not change the level of professionalism. On the contrary, in my direct experience, knowing all my colleagues in the various sports, those who do athletics or skiing in most cases train many more hours than an NBA star (but many many), and this is a fact.”
“At the regulatory and legislative level there are clear distinctions between professionalism and amateurism, sure, but they are also daughters of strategies and/or policies…and that’s a whole other matter. Incidentally: our national volleyball team, reigning world champions for both men and women, would not be “professional” according to this logic. To call them amateurs requires a “courage” that I do not have. The problem is not last night’s result. The problem in some cases is who leads our sports, and with what depth/know-how,” concluded the former Toronto Raptors.
