Gazzetta Sports Awards, Percassi and Scamacca: “Atalanta show”. Lippi legend

The football winners at the Gazzetta awards, from the Goddess revelation to the legend of the bench

Journalist

December 17 – 11.51pm – GENOA

In the magical night of the Journal Sports Awards 2024football also played an important role on the stage of the Genoese Palasport, with the awards given to Inter as team of the year, represented by president Beppe Marotta, but also to Legend of the Year Marcello Lippi, who led the Azzurri to 2006 World Cup and, finally, Atalanta (exploit of the year). Representing it are the CEO Luca Percassi, Gianluca Scamacca, now close to returning after the injury and, connected by Zingonia, the coach Gian Piero Gasperini, in training camp with the Nerazzurri today on the pitch in the Italian Cup with Cesena.

My house

The former Italian coach fondly remembered the years of his youth football growth right under the Lanterna: “I came to Genoa, to Sampdoria, at 15 years old, and I came back playing here for 9 years”. Then recalling the value, not only sporting, of his victorious group in Berlin, he mentioned the “nice surprise that my players gave me last year, organizing a dinner for me in Viareggio”. A group of winning men, as indeed had been the protagonists of his first Juventus cycle in the mid-nineties: “You happen to have three or four years in which the players do extraordinary things and that’s exactly what happened to Juve. I feel of having done important things, but because there were great professionals with me.”

The industrious Bergamo

Great applause also for the Nerazzurri club, rewarded for winning the Europa League on 22 May. Luca Percassi put it as a joke (“we have to keep working, we are close to salvation…”), while Scamacca recognized that “seen from the outside, my Atalanta is a spectacle, it has not lost its values, but it has evolved and made great steps forward. Gasperini is certainly the best coach I’ve had.” The Atalanta reality thinks like a grown-up. When Gian Piero Gasperini connects from Zingonia, he talks about how great the desire for success of the Bergamo players still is: “The Italian cup is a good goal, we have come close to it several times and we would like to win it”. While Percassi underlines the very solid relationship with his coach (“this year we have reaped the fruits of long work with success in Europe”), Gasp is now waiting for Scamacca (“I saw him climb the steps of the stage, he did them four times four…”) and when asked about the ranking that Bergamo gives as the first province in Italy for quality of life, he replies that “there are many types of excellence here, but Atalanta has also given its contribution of knowledge to the world, it’s easy to identify Bergamo with Atalanta.”



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