ASD LA PAZ Antiracist Football Club

Our origins Our project was founded in June 2010 by boys and girls with one thing in common: a love of sport, politics and anti-racism. In collaboration with the Association Yabasta! Parma and thanks to the support of UISP Parma, we created a project designed to combat, through sport, racism and forms of discrimination widespread in our society and to promote encounters and relations between different cultures and people. Our vision Italy burns talent, laws on interpretation and granting citizenship are discriminatory, and sport adapts, entrenched in itself, frightened by the country's transformation in recent years. Football has lost its original role as a means of aggregation and sociality, increasingly centring its interests on the economic aspect. Millionaire contracts, football betting, the sale of television and image rights, stock market listings of football clubs, and the privatisation of stadiums and sports facilities are just some of the steps that have contributed to the transformation of Italy's most popular sport. To aggravate this scenario, racist and discriminatory attitudes on the part of the players and fans themselves. Objectives It can be said that the ‘La Paz’ project, when it was born in 2010, had a twofold objective: to promote a football made from the ‘bottom’, based on self-financing and popular shareholding, a far cry from what it has become today, i.e. a company that moves huge sums of money, that treats fans as clients and that seems destined for a certain elite of people that is becoming increasingly narrow. The other objective is, of course, to involve, through sport, everyone and to undo the discrimination of all kinds that unfortunately grips today's capitalist society, which tends, among other things, always to marginalise the weakest. The Project Our project is designed to develop within amateur football, an environment not exempt from racist phenomena that often result in young people becoming alienated from sport. It wants to promote the participation of everyone in sport and football, regardless of place and culture, with the aim of stimulating and growing a sports culture of integration and mutual respect. Racism and discrimination are often the product of a cultural context characterised by ideological closures and ignorance, the inability to confront and get to know ‘the other’. Through the project we would like instead to develop relations between different people who now share and live in the same social, geographical and institutional space, and build bridges between apparently irreconcilable cultures. Often it is the migrants themselves who erect walls between their own community and that of the natives: through sports we believe that even this form of closure and isolation can be broken down. The project aims to break down the barriers (social, cultural, political, religious) that divide people, and the intention is to build a football team that shares the values of anti-racism and anti-fascism. The team, being composed of different people from different parts of the world, represents an opportunity to concretely experiment integration projects in the Parma area. La Paz today We currently have four football teams (men's first 11-a-side, men's 7-a-side, women's 5-a-side and the La Paz under-17s), to which we add yoga and capoeira courses. Since September 2022, we have been managing a sports facility, which was previously abandoned and which, thanks to our work and that of our network of collaborators, we are revitalising through sports and socio-educational activities, especially for boys and girls of sporting and school drop-out age. The sports facility is located in our neighbourhood, Oltretorrente, a historically popular place that became famous in Italy for the strength of the women and men who fought the fascist incursion in 1922 with the ‘anti-fascist barricades’, the centenary of which we celebrate this year. The spirit that must distinguish us today must take inspiration from what those women and men expressed 100 years ago, resisting the new forms of authoritarianism through the means that society, culture, history and memory make available to us in our present. This can and must open up forms of reflection on how, even in the world of sport, there are fertile grounds for expressing anti-fascism, anti-sexism and rights.