Suning Youth Development Centre bearing fruit

MILAN – Every youth academy aims to combine the joint objectives of producing successful teams and helping young players make the step up to the professional game. And in recent years, Inter has proudly enjoyed great success on both those fronts, most recently with Gianmario Corti’s Berretti beating Torino 2-1 to claim the Italian title and Stefano Vecchi’s Primavera side being crowned champions of Italy with a win over Fiorentina in the championship final.

Yet more important than all this success is the sense of belonging it produces. Success at the youth academy brings everyone at F.C. Internazionale together, all our Brothers of the World. This mantra, immortalised way back in 1908, is still as relevant now as it was then.

The Inter youth academy trains at the Suning Youth Development Centre in memory of Giacinto Facchetti. And it is as if the great man is watching over the players, spurring them on, guiding them. Facchetti has shown the path for our current crop of youngsters to follow: that of a young man who cut his teeth in the Nerazzurri youth ranks before winning everything football had to offer in the black and blue of the first team. It’s no coincidence that the Primavera championship trophy is named after this giant of Italian football.

That trophy was hoisted aloft just a few days ago by Stefano Vecchi, the Primavera coach who himself came through the academy as a youngster and has now been in charge of the Primavera squad for three years. The U19s have been training in Appiano Gentile for some time now, in order to build relations with the first team. The Primavera play at the Stadio Breda in Sesto San Giovanni and, under Vecchi, won the 2015 Viareggio Cup, 2015/16 Coppa Italia and the 2016/17 Primavera championship. It was Vecchi’s first Scudetto; an eighth for Inter Primavera.

With his humility and hard work, Vecchi has built a team with a clear identity for whom the group comes before anything else. The Primavera were compact and effective all season and showed great concentration throughout the Final Eight stage, approaching the finals with a real first-team mentality. They beat Fiorentina 2-1 in the final, with the goals coming from the Belgian Zinho Vanheusden and Italian Andrea Pinamonti, both of whom were born in 1999 and have impressed despite being young for the age group. Both youngsters have been developed at Inter, under the watchful eye of Giacinto Facchetti and the careful hand of the team led by Roberto Samaden. The U15 and U17 finals will take place in the coming days, with Inter certainly in with a chance of claiming victory.

The Primavera squad is packed with young players with potential. Many of them will take their first steps in the professional game next season, with some surely set for promotion to the Inter first team.

Situated in Milan’s Via Camillo Sbarbaro, Interello – now known as the Suning Youth Development Centre in memory of Giacinto Facchetti – is the place where we prepare for the future success of our players.  It is there that their development begins, that their dreams are born. They wear blue and black, the colours of the sky and the night, as Inter’s founding fathers once wrote.

They wear them with pride up and down Italy and around the world. That pride – that sense of belonging – is worth more than any trophy.

That’s what Interello is all about.

Carlo Pizzigoni