Raffa Manieri Academy: promoting women’s football in Italy!

The goal of the Raffa Manieri Academy has always been clear: to give an opportunity to girls who want to play football together with boys, to create inclusive environments where diversity becomes an opportunity, to boost women’s football in Italy.

With the Raffa Manieri Academy we help clubs to create a women’s football sector based on our Mixed Team model, the methodology we have developed through years of experience and research. Our training programme also includes the preparation of coaches and support for parents, by organising periodic meetings for them where they can meet with experts in the field.

We organise Open Days, summer camps and collaborate with schools, where we can share testimonies or create more structured educational projects based on motor activities and awareness-raising on the development of team spirit and fair play.

I became technical manager of Arzilla Calcio, carrying on the work done with Francesco: I managed the coaches, the parents, the children. The Pink Arzilla girls were having a lot of success, so much so that the women’s Under-15s had just been born and the Under-17s would soon arrive. Touching so many aspects with my hands, I realised that I really could make a difference with the Academy. And to do so I could start from my career, from the experiences I had had as a player in Italy, Europe and around the world. And then I could draw heavily from Arzilla Calcio, where we had boys and girls playing together.

The Pink Arzilla girls were the pilot project of the Raffa Manieri Academy: the situations we faced every day allowed us to create a model, a methodology that could also be replicated in other clubs. It was not easy, but it was beautiful, stimulating, formative. We had nothing written down, no set rules: we solved problems as we saw fit, using our skills, interfacing with parents, coaches, boys and girls. We were growing too, we were allowed to make mistakes and learn from them.

We were lucky: the Santa Maria dell’Arzilla camp is surrounded by nature, there were no people coming to see, we could work in peace. The downside is that in a small town the mentality is narrow, it is more difficult to spread innovative ideas. We received criticism from the outside, we were afraid we couldn’t protect the girls. For example, there were parents of boys who wanted to take their children away because girls also played. Everything we experienced allowed us to create a protocol that was not so much about football but about social aspects.

The Mixed Team is the beating heart of the Raffa Manieri Academy. Let’s start with a premise: boys and girls have no problem playing together. It is adults who have prejudices and pass them on to their children, who then end up developing certain ideas. I can say this with certainty from my own experience: for a long time I was the only girl in an all-male team. For my teammates I was just ‘the Raffi’. They saw no difference between me and them. When I was very young, we even took showers all together.

The mixed gender formula has never been very popular in Italy. It is widespread in countries where the socio-cultural contexts are more advanced and favourable, like in Germany, where I saw with my own eyes how common it was to see boys and girls on the field together. The same happens in the rest of Europe, thanks to precise policies implemented by UEFA, in Oceania and in North and Central America.

We proposed it at Arzilla and then it became the core of the Raffa Manieri Academy. The Mixed Team represents added value from a technical and behavioural point of view for everyone, boys and girls alike. Technical because the girls get to grow more footballingly. Behavioural and social because we ensure that the figure of a girl, a woman, playing football is more and more accepted, right from a young age. It is an important path also and above all for the boys, who assimilate certain principles and get used to considering girls as a strength, on and off the pitch. For the clubs that implement the Mixed Team model there is also a structural advantage, as they have the possibility to manage everyone homogeneously at the technical level.

The Pink Arzilla are living proof of how the Mixed Team method works. Today at Arzilla it is normal to see boys and girls playing together, talking to their parents, joking with each other. Indeed, the best thing is to see them socialising, laughing, supporting each other.