There is a piece of truth. Sports science, for years, has explained that the so-called deliberate play – free play, self-organised by children, without adults and without patterns – is a fundamental component in the development of talent. Jean Côté and colleagues, studying the paths of elite athletes in various sports, have shown that those who reach the top, as children, have accumulated many hours of unstructured play in addition to training: invented games, rules negotiated between peers, chaotic contexts in which to decide every second.

In other words: the “home match” is not just romance, it is a cognitive laboratory. Street, courtyard, oratory – with doors marked by backpacks or sweaters – forced children to adapt to irregular spaces, to make quick decisions in unpredictable situations, to learn on their own to manage fouls, arguments, numerical imbalances. It’s an environment that forces you to continually read what’s happening, rather than execute what was explained five minutes earlier by the coach.

The most recent literature distinguishes between structured activities, i.e. training sessions and official matches, and unstructured activities, such as games with friends in the street, in the park, in the garden behind the house. The latter expose children to greater variability, novelty and autonomy. These are contexts where technique gets dirty, but the brain learns to stay within a continuous flow of decisions.

It is no coincidence that in the FIGC materials for basic activities they try to “replicate” street football within training, with shortened matches, themed games, chaotic situations where the coach disappears and the children decide. It is an implicit admission: the road had something good, and that something is also needed today.

The problem of closing the discussion at the first explanation that sounds good

So far the “pro”. But if we stop here, the thesis begins to creak. The first crack is in the numbers. According to the latest edition of ReportCalcio, FIGC members are almost one and a half million; there are over a million footballers alone, the vast majority of whom are young. Football alone represents a huge share of all members of Italian sports federations.

Translated: Italian children and young people still play football, of course. They do it less at home and more in organized contexts – football schools, rented synthetic pitches, tournaments, school projects – but football continues to be the lingua franca of Italian childhood. The container has changed, the contents have not disappeared.

The second crack is comparative. The reduction of public spaces, free play, open courtyards is not just an Italian phenomenon. It’s Europe, it’s an urban world: more traffic, more parental fears, more structured time, more screens. Yet Spain, France, England and Germany continue to produce talent and results, despite having experienced the same decline of “street football” that we describe. The difference there lies in the system that takes care of the child footballer: the quality of the youth sectors, the coordination between the federation and the club, the training of coaches, the structural investments. Not in the number of condominium gates transformed into doors.

What the research really says: the mix, not the myth

There is another crucial point that is often ignored. Some works by Mark Williams, Nicola Hodges and others have warned against the somewhat lazy storytelling of “if there is no more street football, no more champions will be born”. The thesis that emerges is different: the optimal path for developing talent is not just free play, but an intelligent mix of unstructured play and quality structured play.

Free play is fundamental in the “sampling” phases, when the child explores different sports, plays in a thousand ways, invents rules and scenarios. But over time that heritage must be brought into organized contexts that know how to develop it, not suffocate it. The point, then, is not to idealize the street as an unrepeatable golden age, but to ask ourselves whether our youth sectors know how to integrate that freedom, that variability, that decision-making responsibility into their daily work. The risk is that the child who arrives at the camp, already poor in free play, finds an environment where he is only asked to perform.

The real bottleneck: not who starts, but who arrives

There is a fact that tells better than a thousand anecdotes because the explanation “there are no courtyards” is only part of the picture: the transition between the youth sector and professional football.

For years, comparative analyzes of the top 5 European leagues have shown how Serie A is at the bottom of the table in terms of playing time granted to under 21s, especially local players. In many cases, the percentage of minutes played by Italian under 21s fluctuates within a minimum range of the total, far below France, Germany, Spain or England. That’s where the pipeline gets stuck: not at the entrance to the football school, but at the door of Serie A and Serie B.

The road, at this point, has little to do with it. It has to do with clubs that struggle to plan, coaches who cannot afford to get two results wrong to launch a nineteen-year-old, a ranking culture that weighs more than that of the project, a system governance that has accepted for years a model based on creative capital gains, card exchanges and very short-term solutions. If young people, when they reach the frontier of professionalism, almost always find a closed door, it is difficult to blame the empty courtyard under the house.

What is the point then of talking (well) about street football

This doesn’t mean we should dismiss the topic as sports bar nostalgia. It means using it better.

Talking about the street makes sense when it helps us, for example, to rethink urban spaces. If we want children to play more, it’s not enough to sigh about the “good old days”: we need parks, open pitches, accessible schoolyards, municipal projects that put free play back at the centre. It’s urban planning, not just sport. It is a political and administrative choice, even before a technical one.

It also makes sense when it pushes us to redesign workouts. Bringing into the sessions what the street naturally provided means imagining more themed games, odd numbers, fluid roles, fewer queues for Chinese players, more decisions made in a few metres. Research has been saying it for years: gaming as a training tool is not a quirk, it is a competitive advantage. The idea that we grow only by repeating isolated technical gestures, without context, is much more reassuring for adults than effective for children.

Finally, talking about the road is useful if it helps us broaden the perimeter of access. The “privatization of football” – paid pitches, expensive football schools, emptied oratories – risks transforming the most popular sport into a product for those who can afford it. Defending free, informal, spontaneous spaces also means defending the democratic character of football, the fact that anyone, in theory, can start kicking a ball without having to go to an ATM.

Where the courtyard excuse comes in handy

The risk, however, is another: using the disappearance of street football as the perfect alibi. If video games, overprotective parents, parked cars are to blame, we can avoid talking about dilapidated stadiums, coach training, governance, and a culture of zero risk on young people.

Nostalgia has a great advantage: it does not call for reforms. It only asks to remember. In this sense, the phrase “children no longer play in the streets” is a reassuring frame for those at the top: it shifts attention from the system to family habits, from the presidents’ table to the choices of parents, from whoever is in control to whoever accompanies their children to the camp. It is a narrative that absolves those who decide and burdens those who suffer the context with responsibility.

An uncomfortable but more honest summary

Let’s put it this way: the reduction of free play is a real problem, because it takes away an important piece of technical, cognitive and social training from children, and it would be short-sighted to minimize it. At the same time, it alone is not enough to explain the crisis in Italian football: there are countries in which street football has disappeared as much as it has in our country, and which continue to produce talent and results precisely because they have built better systems.

Demanding a freer, more creative, spontaneous football makes sense, but wasting months repeating the slogan of the lost courtyard to avoid talking about those who do not invest in stadiums, youth sectors, coaches, governance, merit, makes much less sense. The great temptation, in the Italian football debate, is always the same: to look for the definitive explanation that relieves us of the obligation to get to work on the construction site. The empty courtyard is one of them.

The paradox is that, if we took seriously what we lost along the way – freedom, responsibility, ability to make do – we would have to apply it not to children, but to our way of thinking about the system. Fewer alibis, more courage. Less melancholy, more structural choices. When children find a space, they think about playing on their own. It’s the rest of Italian football that, for too long, has stopped taking itself seriously.