La città e il calcio dei bambini. Diventare calciatori in una scuola calcio di serie A

Organized sports contexts for children are primarily places and fields of leisure but also sites constituted through a series of recurring contradictions. On the one hand, sport is an expression of children’s fundamental right to play and have fun, but, on the other, sport clubs are often organized according to adults’ views, rather than those of children. Even if sports are promoted for children as a good way to meet children’s needs, these activities are often controlled in a way that seems to leave little room for the child’s space, subjectivity and free expression. Based on a long-term ethnographic and participant-observation study of an Italian football school club for children and referring to the new sociology of childhood approach this essay aims to explore urban space within a generational and intergenerational perspective. After a wide description of children’s spatialities in the city, it investigates adults’ (parents and trainers) and children’s representations of learning in a bodily and physical context, comparing them with their practices. Concluding remarks stresses the existence of two kinds of communities/cultures within the club, the adults and the children ones, which are not separate but often very distant and carrying two different types of knowledge.