Sinner and Brignone in Blue: Tamberi’s post against Gravina goes viral

The blue sport is lashing out at FIGC president Gabriele Gravina, who ended up in the storm after his words in a press conference following the Italian national team’s defeat in Zenica against Bosnia. “Football is a professional sport, the others are amateur,” is the phrase of the federal president, who pressed by journalists thus replied to those who made him account for the collapse of soccer compared to other Italian sports movements.

Gravina’s words provoked the prickly retort of many protagonists of the Italian sport, among them also Gianmarco Tamberi, who on Facebook posted an ironic photo showing him in the blue jersey together with other Italian sports stars such as Jannik Sinner, Kimi Antonelli, Marco Bezzecchi, Federica Brignone and Marcell Jacobs, with the caption “Amateurs on the ropes.” All champions who have brought prestige to Italy in recent years, and certainly not “amateurs.”

Among the most outraged was world long-jump champion Furlani (“spitting on other people’s work”), but former NBA star Bargnani also didn’t mince words: “I played in the NBA, the most professional sports league in the world, benchmark of any sport on the globe. I have never felt more of an athlete, more professional, than someone who does high jumping for the Golden Flames training 8 hours a day.”

“On the sporting performance of my colleagues I don’t pronounce myself, sport is unpredictable and episodes decide games, I know that well. I have also disappointed expectations in qualifying rounds with the national basketball team, and I know what it means to be inside a ‘meat grinder’. The highest expression of this ‘professionalism’ flaunted yesterday, the Serie A, ended 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?”