When art meets football, A.S. Velasca

"Soon or later, Milan will have a third team". It is the promise of A.S. Velasca, the Milan-based team that everyone is talking about in the last years. We interview them, to talk about what it means, in 2017, to play sport in the original meaning of the term. 

Hi guys, would you like to tell us what is AS Velasca and what it represents?

Our company, as we like to underline since we’re born, is everything but a football team. Few months ago, one of our supporter, a collector, spoke about us in term of “we were not a club, nor a piece of art, we were all this together”. Velasca could be considered as a two dimension project, one artistic and the other related to sport. A project that achieve in combine this two dimension, that both contributed to define our identity. The football magazine “These Football Times” spoke about us as a “total piece of art”.

 

Someone define you “the most artistic football club in the world”. In your team there are coaches, AG, associates. This seems to be a huge project: where AS Velasca would arrive?

Where our capacities, our creativity, our instinct, our passion and genius will bring us. We’ve this ambitious, maybe foolish, to achieve in making sports in a disillusioned but organized way, without limitation or calculations. But we want specify that ambition is not presumption: we don’t want to “improve” anything, we just try to achieve the best we can.

Professional football teams look for speed, talent and physical power in their members. What are you looking for?

First of all we want to understand “where they are”, done with that, the rest come alone. Obviously we cannot stand without the minimal technical background and our final target is to have in team members who can combine good moral qualities and skills. We want to be a re-edition of the total football theorized by Cruyff in the 70s. A total piece of art.

We’re fascinated by your kit, where there are both the logos of Nike and adidas. Where this design comes from?

Our kits change every season. In this way the jersey become a canvas and our seasonal “main artist” has the freedom to create. For our seasonal debut in the football world we’ve choose the French artist Regis Seneque. This year instead we’ve ask to Zevs. In some way this jersey close the gap with his first work in Berlin in 2005, the Nike swoosh.

Your January bulletin says: “From Milan to Istanbul, from berlin to Edinburg, from Amsterdam to London, Portland, Paris, Copenhagen”. How is possible that so different people come together?

Everything started thanks to a reportage that FIFA made about us in February 2016. This reportage was hired on 150 countries and the diffusion was very huge. A lot of things started here.

Your goal is to become the third club of Milan, after FC Internazionale and AC Milan. Is that an answer to the Chinese money?

I don’t think is an answer, also because we are here before the Chinese. I’d like to intend out team as an alternative to believe in the sport they love, apart from everything, and just considering fun and passion.