As manchester united begin preseason training this week, questions remain about the future of bricklayer wood green.
The charges of attempted rape, assault causing actual bodily harm and controlling and coercive behavior were dropped by the Crown Prosecution Service in February this year. A fledgling playing career suspended after disturbing, in the words of Greater Manchester Police, “images and videos on social media posted by a woman reporting incidents of physical violence” can, in theory, now resume.
United can reinstate the 21-year-old and make him available to manager Erik ten Hag, if they wish.
A full England international with 35 goals for the club, Greenwood would be an insider’s solution to a striker search hitherto frustrated by the scarcity and enormous cost of elite goalscorers in Europe, not to mention the club’s financial fair play ( FFP) commitments and an ownership situation that needs clarity.
A loan away from United has been raised as another possibility, with Italy repeatedly pointed out as a potential destination.
A league hasn’t always been the most scrupulous of leagues. His clubs have signed sons of dictators and rehabilitated players caught up in match-fixing scandals. Recently, however, the Italian top flight has become more self-aware, more sensitive to its image and more determined in the causes it promotes.
One of them is a collaboration with the Non-profit organization WeWorldthat seeks to raise awareness about violence against women.
Serie A has dedicated a day to the subject in each of the last six seasons. In February of this year, the players and the referees took to the field with a line of red paint on their cheeks, a symbol of such physical abuse. A video was also played on giant screens in stadiums across the country and was also broadcast by the league’s national broadcast partners. It featured Italian World Cup winners Alessandro Del Piero and Marco Materazzi and Olympians Elisa Di Francisca and Marta Pagnini calling for violence against women to be shown the color red, driving it out of society.
Serie A president Lorenzo Casini has declared his commitment to continue the work of his predecessor Paolo Dal Pino, who introduced the partnership with WeWorld. “It is critical that we continue to raise as much awareness as we can about this tragic issue, not just today, not just on the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, but every day,” Casini said.
The statistics are alarming and demand attention.
Serie A’s collaboration with WeWorld came to light in the winter of 2021, after a spike in violence against women during the Covid-19 lockdown. Calls to the 1522 helpline, a free 24/7 service to help women victims of violence, increased by 119 percent per day, according to ISTAT (National Institute of Statistics) reports. from Italy).
“We are now aware that one in three women experiences violence at least once in their lives,” explained Marco Chiesara, president of WeWorld. “From our last survey conducted with (market research company) IPSOS, ‘The Culture of Violence’, we now also know that 70 percent of the women surveyed experienced some form of violence (verbal, physical or sexual harassment) in work place; that 40 percent experienced it in a family or partner context and more than 50 percent on the street; 35 percent of respondents who initially stated that they had never experienced violence later said that they had experienced at least one form of bullying. Violence against women is a structural problem in our society. We’ve been saying this for years.”
Marches calling for an end to femicide, the murder of women, underscore outrage at reports like one published by Italy’s Interior Ministry around this time last year. It showed that femicides increased 16 percent over the previous data set. There were 125 between August 1, 2021 and July 31, 2022.
Football in Italy has not been indifferent.
NaplesScudetto-winning 2022-23 coach Luciano Spalletti often used his press conferences last season to highlight injustices and suffering.
He brought two roses and observed a minute’s silence. in memory of Mahsa Amini, who died last September after being detained by the police Iranthe morality police, which triggered the demonstrations in which Hadis Najafi was assassinated a day later. Poignantly, she asked fans who attended Napoli’s season finale game on June 4 to remember Giulia Tramontano, who was seven months pregnant when her boyfriend stabbed her to death the week before.
“They told me I was a big Napoli fan,” Spalletti said. “When a man kills a woman, he kills many lives, not just one of hers, because he kills her, her child, and all the other children he may have had. Killing a woman kills life. With her wickedness, she has erased a story that she deserved to live.
“From this brutally denied story, we would like you to have with you the image of a mother and child who go hand in hand to Maradona (the club’s stadium) to support Napoli. It’s an image we’ll never get to see. The celebration at tomorrow’s game will be a celebration of them. They will be there with each and every one of us. And to those who believe that they can solve things through violence, know that they are losers with no future. They have no future.”
Sensitivities in Italy remain high.
Second division Genoa, for example, came under scrutiny for not Midfielder Manolo Portanova suspended last December after a court sentenced him to six years for a group sexual assault.
As a first instance decision, Portanova, who told the newspaper Il Corriere della Sera prior to the hearing, “I did not force the girl or the others who were with me in the slightest”, has the right to appeal. Genoa, in a statement to the newspaper La Repubblica, said: “The conviction is a unique case in the world of Italian football. There are no precedents and we are studying how to proceed, assuming that this is the first degree of trial (there are three in the Italian judicial system) and the presumption of innocence applies until the final trial”.
Interestingly, Portanova has not played for Genoa since early December and when reports of a possible loan move to fellow Serie B player Bari surfaced in January, there was a backlash on social media.
Earlier in the season, the president of the Bari club, Luigi De Laurentiis, the son of Napoli owner Aurelio, had announced an initiative to mark the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women in November. For this, the boys and girls of the youth sector of the club have received training “with the aim of providing them with all the information and tools necessary to understand, recognize and combat the phenomenon of gender violence and discrimination, bullying and cyberbullying”. .
This is the current context in Italy, and its football clubs have never been more in tune with it.
(Top photo: Lindsey Parnaby/AFP via Getty Images)