Home
› Youth Department:‹ Back
Youth Department
The Vismara Sporting Centre
The “Peppino Vismara” Sporting Centre is located in the southern part of Milan, near the Gratosoglio area and it’s one of the most important places dedicated to the football activities in Milan. The centre is surrounded by a green area of 230,000 m² and it was built in memory of Giuseppe Vismara, the founding father of the Credito Artigiano. Solidarity, respect and loyalty are the values that the centre is trying to promote using sporting and recreational activities as moments of aggregation. All the training sessions of our Youth Sector take place here with the only exception of the Primavera team. The structures include:
• Fields. There are seven fields. Three regulation fields are synthetic (two of them were built by A.C. Milan with new materials provided by the Limonta company, a leader in this sector), a central field has an athletic track around it; there is also a regulation field and two 7 a-side synthetic fields.
• Covered Stand. It was built in 1982 and includes: terraces which hosts up to 1,200 people, dressing rooms (ground floor and first floor), warehouses, two physiotherapy rooms and a medical room. The stand was built in order to allow for further enlargements.
• Central Building. In the central building there is a Main Office, a Congress Room with 300 seats, a Conference Room with 50 seats, a Bar, a refectory and a Chapel. In the same area there is also a big multifunctional gym (basketball, volleyball, indoor football) with 1,000 detachable seats, an indoor pool for the rehabilitation and hydrotherapy.
The Vismara: not only a sporting centre
The Vismara Centre doesn’t include only sport facilities but also recreational and meeting places that promote a cultural, social and human formation. The philosophy of the Vismara Foundation resides in the willingness to train and educate players and individuals, by developing both technical and moral components in children. Since the 90’s the “Opera Don Calabria” has been in charge of the managing of the Centre. This congregation was founded by Don Giovanni Calabria in the 50’s with the aim of:
- creating training schools
- promoting activities for disabled
- ensuring an answer to the addiction problem
- proceeding with the religious activity
In the 1991 the congregation’s activity was moved entirely to the Vismara Centre and it’s now divided into four areas:
• EDUCATIONAL AREA: there is a building where the congregation hosts children (disabled and not disabled) placed in fosterage by the Juvenile Court of Milan in order to prevent problematical situations with their families. Some of these children reside permanently in the Assisted Living Facility, other children stay only during the day. In this area there are 25 teachers that promote activities to cambat the juvenile unease.
• HEALTH AREA: the main aim is the rehabilitation of the children, aged between 0 and 18 years, in the linguistic (speech therapy) and the physiotherapic areas (physiotherapy, psicomotricity, music therapy, cognitive therapy – Fuerstein method).
• STRUCTURES AREA: it refers to the Sporting Centre and all the buildings that can be let to third parties or can be used by Neighbouring Clients (Italian Sporting Centre, parishes) or by the teams of the centre (basketball, football). In the Centre there are also some aggregation activities such as conventions, courses, manifestations and parties.
• EDUCATIONAL/PASTORAL AREA: it refers to the moments of reflections and the education founded on the Christian spirit that’s at the base of all the Congregation activities.
The Milanello Sporting Centre
Completely restructured and renovated thanks to Silvio Berlusconi, Milanello is one of the most important sporting centres in Europe. It’s surrounded by a green oasis of 160,000 m² that includes a large pine forest and a lake, Milanello is situated on a hill at an attitude of 300 metres, near Varese and only 50 km from Milan, between Carnago, Cassano Magnano and Cairate. The imaginary borderline between the areas divides the dressing room of Milanello in half.
Milanello has six regulation fields, a synthetic pitch (35m. x 30), another covered pitch (42m. x 24), there’s also an external field called “the cage” due to the fact that the playing field is surrounded by a 2.30 m. wall where there’s a 2,50 m. high fence. Inside “the cage” they play without stopping, the ball is always moving in order to increase the speed of the game.
Inside the wood there is a 1,200 m. long path at different altimetries and during the season it’s used for the players’ training (jogging and cycling) and for the rehabilitation of the injured players.
The main structure of the centre is made up of a building with two floors (and the basement) where there are the offices, the players’ rooms, the fireplace room, the tv room, the billiard room, the bar, the kitchen, the two dining rooms, the press room, the meeting room, the laundry room and the medical centre.
In the basement there is a conference room where the coach prepares the players for the next matches. A.C. Milan makes great use of this space for press conferences and meetings with its partners. On the same floor there are warehouses, kitchen’s cold stores, gardeners’ storages and the garages where vehicles and the team bus can park.
The centre has 46 rooms for a total of 56 sleeping accommodations. Every room is equipped with bathroom/shower units, air conditioning, tv with satellite and humidifier. There’s a satellite system with three satellite dishes in order to watch the matches. Every match of the Serie A can be seen at the same time and the players or the technical staff can watch any game they want in their own rooms.
A separate building which has two dressing rooms (one for the First Team and the other one for the Primavera team) a gym with the most advanced fitness training equipment provided by Technogym, a flagship for A.C. Milan.
The gym is the area which is updated most frequently; during the 2000/2001 season the indoor training’s space was doubled. An avant-garde gym offers the possibility to plan and analyze the datas of the training for every single player. The team has 70 exercise machines for the muscular and cardiovascular power, 3 exercise machines for the rehabilitation and evaluation of all the articulations (REV 9000) and 100 Technogym System (TGS), the “keys” to plan personal training, evaluate the training results and chose the rehabilitation protocols. Every sporting machine has the Power Control, a system to verify the strength used by the technical staff in order to optimize all the trainings.
Even during the temporary transfers, thanks to the technology provided by Technogym the technical staff is capable of checking the tests’ results and planning the training for the following days on the base of the strain and the injuries suffered by every player throughout the match.
These activities are possible thanks to the Trainer Point, a little console that programme and download the data in every moment, even during flights.