“I was kicked out of the national team because I was pregnant”🇧🇷 These are the words of Alice Pignagnoli, the 34-year-old goalkeeper Lucchese, who wanted all of Italy to know how her company had behaved after telling an executive she was expecting a baby.
Born in Reggio Emilia, she has already played for women’s Reggiana, for AC Milan in Serie A and then for Torres (with the Scudetto and the Italian Super Cup in 2012), but she never thought she would go through a situation like the one that happened to her in recent years. weeks with the Tuscan club of Women’s C series. Alice is in her second pregnancy and in June 2020, when she was playing for Cesena, the club renewed her contract in the 7th month of pregnancy, writing a small page of history. Pignagnoli has words of endearment for the coach and his teammates, but is disappointed with his club’s behaviour.
The Emilia player talked to fanpage.it of history and reconstructed it all, with particular reference to the working situation in the minor leagues of women’s football.
The reaction when she told her executives she was pregnant?
“When I communicated this to managers, I expected a response like ‘you are an important part of our team, but we understand the situation because you have to experience something beautiful’, but the exact opposite happened. The CEO told me, ‘I’ll bet everything on you. Of course, the commitments made in the summer must be respected. However, I have already spoken to your agent about your contract. My lawyer told me that they didn’t want to pay me from now on, but I still hadn’t received a euro since August. They didn’t respect the pacts, they didn’t respect anything. But it wasn’t just for me, it was a team issue.”
What happened next.
“In the following weeks I kept in touch with my teammates and when I found out that they had taken the backlog and I had not, that was the first madness. I had played, but I hadn’t taken anything. They didn’t give me any response and then emails started coming in asking me to return the sports equipment as well as free up my sleeping place. Basically, they kept me from being around the team. This is the most serious part of economics, because no one can take these two months of hell away from me. The apotheosis was when they called me to let me know they were releasing me, but I have a one-year contract with them and it wasn’t possible. I called my lawyer and also the Footballers’ Association, because I couldn’t deal with such a situation alone. They wanted to scare me, but this morning my lawyer told me that maybe they regretted it. Probably due to the media case that arose, but if I hadn’t done all this I would have been stuck on the tram”.
It’s the second pregnancy, what happened with the first?
“What shocked me most is this, because in Cesena we wrote a beautiful story on this subject. I was let go, because that was the norm at the time, but the club supported me and renewed my contract: so, when I gave birth, I received my salary and it was a beautiful and different path. I went back to the field 100 days after giving birth and played my way, so I never expected something like this knowing what had happened before.”
What hurt you the most about this story?
“It made me think about how to guarantee the lack of protection for human beings and a minimum of dignity for workers. This system we have here, where companies do what they want and girls suffer, is not good. Now Serie A has turned professional, but the situation has only improved a little upstream, because everything else has remained the same. In Serie B you play like a professional, but they offer you to go ‘play for 400 euros a month’ and if you say no, they say it costs too much and they’ll even find someone willing to do it”.
Their contract expires in June: it will be difficult to continue with them without clarification.
“I think it will be very difficult if nothing happens. Then I go wherever I can for free: because I am a 34-year-old girl with two children and there are demands. But here we return to a rather broad discussion”.
Here exactly. Why in Italy sport has declined for women, but we could broaden the spectrum to the world of work in general, are we still experiencing these situations?
“I think this is a problem that 99% of working mothers have; because there are more protections at work than we are as athletes, but there were situations where women were degraded compared to what they used to do. It’s a problem with the work system and how women are seen, because in other countries there are laws that allow you to go about your life without getting pregnant.”
Is there a message you’d like to send to Lucchese executives?
“I’m even willing to forgive them, but they did things of incredible gravity to me. I hope they think of the harm and suffering they caused me. But what matters most to me is that a woman no longer has to go through what I went through, because it is unjustified and wrong.”
Source: Fan Page IT
I’m George Gonzalez, a professional journalist and author at The Nation View. With more than 5 years of experience in the field, I specialize in covering sports news for various print media outlets. My passion for writing has enabled me to craft stories that capture the attention of readers all over the world.
