The DS of Lecce thus responds to the criticisms of the Primavera who won the championship with a “foreign” squad.
Pantaleo Ravenresponsible for the technical area of the Lecce, responded during his press conference to the criticisms of the preparation of the Primavera team that recently won the championship but with a squad characterized by a strong foreign imprint that left little room for young Italian players:
“There was, in my opinion, good faith and for some not. There was a wrong narrative for what we do and how we do it, that’s why certain topics shouldn’t be insensitive even at a national level. I found a lot it is unfair why clubs are asked not to have debts, but then a club that has done a job of financial rebalancing is criticized.Reforms are made at a national level because Lecce’s Primavera team is full of foreigners: if they think that we only have to participate with the mandatory resources he is forced to have, then he is wrong. Here there is a company and a manager who tries not to carry these things forward. We are children of this territory, when we go out Salento we want to highlight it for how we do things and how we don’t do them, but we don’t want to participate because we are forced to suffer: we want to play with the weapons of others. The problems of the national team do not depend on the Primavera of Lecce, the reform must be done for the first teams. We play it, we cannot buy Italians without the resources to do so, we cannot be forced to make choices; you can’t change the system by saying that Lecce win an Italian title with 11 foreign players. If I give the numbers, no one believes me and they think we pay in other ways: ours is a serious company, we pay with the accounts in order and in the sunlight. The amount of wages for the Primavera is 360,000 euros gross, these are the costs of my Primavera. Company cost: 517 thousand euros. These are the official numbers. 186 thousand euros for the cards plus 200 to redeem Dorgu. If I had found the best potential I had to find to enhance my territory around Italy, it would have cost me less also from an energy point of view: finding foreigners is even more difficult, you need to have knowledge, take planes. It means there’s aridity here, it’s not that Corvino likes foreigners. I’ve been doing this job for 40 years, I would have liked to find a parent who had spat at me saying ‘my son has arrived there’, he would have pleased me. This is the reason why this work has been done in these 2 years and 10 months. The first time the various Pellé, Rosati, Rullo, Esposito… there was appeal in our youth sector, together with managers and coaches that I had chosen. You didn’t even know where Primavera played, today after two years there are one thousand two thousand people: these are the satisfactions of Lecce”.