Hurricane Pirri no longer has a field to play on
Costanzo Chessa, president of the club founded 67 years ago: "The situation is absurd."Per restare aggiornato entra nel nostro canale Whatsapp
There are teams that compete against the standings, and others that, even more so, compete against survival. Hurricane Pirri belongs to the latter category in every sense: that of the championship that's about to begin and the far more demanding one of those who must figure out how to restart every summer.
The club, founded in 1959, is preparing to play its sixty-seventh consecutive championship in the Italian Football Federation (FIGC) : after Cagliari, it is the oldest club in the entire Cagliari hinterland. Sixty-seven years without a break, without a missed season, without a change of flag. A legacy of history and prestige that this year, however, risks being seriously jeopardized by a thousand difficulties. The first, and the most significant, has a simple name: there is no pitch .
No facility for playing, no facility for training. For a football team, it's like asking a factory to operate without a factory. Every training session becomes a negotiation, every home game a matter of hospitality, with costs, travel, and inconveniences falling on managers and players. All this in a neighborhood, Pirri, that has lived so much with football and now finds itself without a pitch to provide for its oldest team.
"I believe that by 2026, every sports club, which also serves an important social purpose, should be able to play sports," says President Costanzo Chessa . "It's absurd that Pirri doesn't have a soccer field."
Chessa founded the club in 1959, at the age of nineteen, with his brother Sebastiano and a group of friends. They chose the name, Uragano, to evoke strength and determination: two qualities that, sixty-seven years later, are more important in the office than on the pitch.
"We keep going because we believe in it, but continuing to carry on the Hurricane story is becoming increasingly difficult," adds the president. "There's not a single euro in circulation here, no one gets a cent: they pay out of their own pockets for registration fees, referees, and balls. What we're asking for isn't a favor, it's a minimum requirement: a field for the kids to play on."
This is the point Chessa insists on the most, and it's not just late-summer rhetoric. A grassroots club is a garrison: it brings together a group of kids two or three evenings a week, takes them out on Sundays, teaches them about schedules, rules, and defeats. "We're not just talking about soccer," the president emphasizes. "We're talking about kids staying together instead of going elsewhere. If a club like ours closes, you don't lose a team: you lose a piece of the neighborhood. And after sixty-seven years, it would be a defeat for everyone, not just us."
The appeal to the institutions is direct and uncontroversial: "We are ready to sit down at a table with anyone who can lend us a hand—the City Council, the Municipality, anyone with a space to offer. We're not asking for a stadium. We're asking for a regulation-sized pitch where we can train and play home games. With that, the Hurricane will continue to exist."
On the sporting front, the squad has been completely overhauled . New faces, a lowered average age, a group that still needs to be assembled. On the bench, however, nothing has changed: Alberto Chessa , son of president Costanzo, has been confirmed, another piece of the family continuity that has kept the club afloat for sixty-seven years. The stated objective is that of those who know their own balance sheet and don't tell fairy tales: to maintain the league without major worries , building as they go.
"Alberto knows the environment better than anyone and is well aware of the conditions we're working in," Chessa explains. "We've changed almost the entire team, so it'll take patience. But if you give the guys a place to train consistently, the results will come naturally."
In the history of Uragano, there are three Third Division championships and two Second Division championships, a promotion to the Promozione league that was almost achieved in the early 1980s, and a boy from Pirri, Salvatore Matrecano, who started from here to reach Foggia, Naples, Parma, and Nottingham Forest. A showcase, if there were a showcase.
Today, the Hurricanes' most important game is off the pitch, and it doesn't depend on how the transfer window pans out or how many goals the new striker scores. It depends on a response the neighborhood has long awaited.