The federal president speaks. Gabriele Gravinayesterday afternoon, directly from the national team retreat in Iserlohn, spoke together with the Undersecretary Claudio Barbaro for a FIGC-Ministry of the Environment and Energy Safety initiative. The number one of the FIGC met the media from the ‘Casa Azzurri’ press room and expressed himself as follows: “I want to reiterate the choice of a project that we are carrying forward, a project that requires patience and a lot of work. The climate is particularly serene. We must never forget that we are talking about a European football championship: there are matches and the results are also linked to the strength of the opponents, to many variables. We didn’t get excited after the victory against Albania, as I saw after that match the boys were happy and calm. And after the deserved defeat against Spain, they were disappointed but at the same time still calm.”
Gravina reiterated his full trust in both the project and the technical commissioner Luciano Spalletti: We must move forward decisively on the realization of our project: last August we chose the best coach on the market, he has a philosophy that we share and it is the only path we can follow. We must certainly take into account the distances from other realities, we cannot deny these. They are distances linked to experience: our large group made up mostly of players between over 23 and under 30 do not have the same experience as, for example, Croatia. We pay in terms of experience, selectable material, we pay for the gap in structures and all these things must make us understand that the history of a country is not enough to establish expectations. The latter are created through work and playing together. I said it already in 2021: the European Championship is not played only by those who play on the pitch, but by all the protagonists of the entire world.”
On the size of the national team, the president of the Football Federation has this thought: “We are a normal team, to become a special team we need everything that surrounds us. We must be calm, work and have the support of the fans. I understand the expectations on the part of all, ours are superior to those of many fans but we have to deal with reality. We will face Croatia with the awareness that we can compete with other teams knowing that there is a risk linked to the result. And we will only know this later the match”.