Time soothes pain and makes us forget uncomfortable defeats to the benefit of those who are undeservedly attached to their seats. The disappearance of two teams from the women’s Serie A with a quick wipeout such as Bologna and Oxygen Roma, and the self-downgrading of Eirene Ragusa, in addition to the mess of the candidacy for the Serie A with a double jump of Alghero aborted in terms of law, economic feasibility and structural operations, evident even before we became aware of this plan which enjoyed the silent support of federal president Petrucci, would have cost anyone reconfirmed as president of Lega Basket Femminile, a national sports association that has a budget that does not reach 700,000.00 euros. Instead, the voters of the A1 and A2 series are fine with being passengers in the back seat while Thelma and Louise race towards the abyss. They are happy with a lame Serie A with 11 teams and one in turn watching the others on Sunday, everyone is happy. AND, as Michele Spiezia of storiesport.it recalled, Even the A2 is not joking, as a team has been admitted to the championship which in the Campania B series last year had lost 22 games out of 22 and which now finds itself playing in the A2 series instead of the C series which it had “earned” in the field.”
As if that wasn’t enough, they boasted in a Tafazzi style about the agreement between FIP and Rai for the broadcast of EuroLeague Women matches on RaiSport. The fact that they did not communicate anything about the audience figures is a silence that says a lot about the success of the initiative which did not even bring a single euro to the coffers of Lega and FIP (if they had collected it they would be bragging about it). Some defensor fidei will now rebel by saying “but weren’t you the ones who saw the absence of television as one of the most important causes of the decline of the feminine?” It’s true, but as always happens, giving advice to people, let’s say, incapable of putting it into practice is a waste of time. Once advice has been accepted, it should become operational through competent people. Instead we are dealing with an apparatus that is “all talk and badge”, and there is nothing underneath the t-shirt and shorts. Yet it would be quite simple to relaunch women’s basketball by investing a small part of the FIP’s treasure in a sporting world like the women’s one where volleyball players are seven times more numerous than basketball players. Seven times.
The data well collected by Spiezia tell us that “at the time of writing (end of October 2024) six regional committees out of 19 (Abruzzo, Basilicata, Calabria, Liguria, Molise, Puglia) have not activated even one for the 2024-25 sports season women’s championship, neither senior nor youth, thus eliminating the offer of women’s basketball to territories with over nine million inhabitants.” This statement from almost thirty days ago did not send shivers down anyone’s spine just as it did not cause anyone else who may have felt called into question to become angry, given that it was neither contested nor commented on. Sodini and Datome tour the regional committees with the program “Every region counts” and Capobianco with the program “Let’s go back to the base”, the audience is extremely limited and self-referential, the narration tainted by generic and extremely electoral contents. Between now and December 21st we need a very different spirit, a very different initiative, to even remove the doubt that at the end of the championship the women’s A1 teams will be equal again but only because they will go down to ten and not go up to twelve.
