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«Honestly, it was a surprise, I didn’t expect to play right away» said Giulia Dragoni after Italy-Argentina, the first match of the women’s national team at the soccer World Cup underway in Australia and New Zealand. At the age of 17 yet to be completed, in that game Dragoni became the youngest player to play in a World Cup in the history of all the Italian national football teams. You were chosen as starter less than a month after your full debut in the senior national team, in the preparatory friendlies at the beginning of July, and you were also confirmed as starter in the second match against Sweden.
Dragoni has been talked about for some time in the Italian women’s football environment, because she proved to be precocious in any context, showed plays and numbers as an uncommon player and was part of all the national youth teams. More recently you had talked about it because at the end of January you had been signed by Barcelona, the reigning European women’s team as well as the one for which the winner of the last two Golden Balls, Alexia Putellas, plays. So far Dragoni has played with the youth team (scoring 4 goals in 10 games), but she has been signed until at least 2025 and in all likelihood she will end up in the first team soon.
Dragoni was born in 2006, she was born in Milan and began playing football for Franco Scarioni, an amateur club based in the Milanese suburb of Ortica. She then moved on to Pro Sesto, the Sesto San Giovanni club, and she was part of mixed teams (majority male) up to the age of 13. Despite this, already at the age of ten she stood out for the naturalness with which she played and for everything she could do with the ball at her feet, as can be seen clearly in the videos of her shot at the time by her father , still online.
For all these reasons, in 2020 Inter women – who play their matches in the Pro Sesto sports center – took her into their youth teams, aggregating her with teams of an average age above hers, another constant in her short career. At fourteen she was already playing with the adults and last season, still sixteen, she made her debut in the first team, where she made a total of four appearances in the league. In January you were finally signed by Barcelona, whose offer, not only sports but also training, was considered indispensable.
Being sixteen years old (like his national team number) he doesn’t have a specific role and still needs to specialize. You most often play in midfield, as a midfielder, but you are also employed in attack or in the frontline with equally effective results. She has already highly developed technical and physical skills, an ability to control the ball at speed that is still rare to see in Italian women’s football, where most of the active players have not had a linear and facilitated training path as it is the male one.
Precisely in this last aspect Dragoni seems to represent a new phase for Italian women’s football, as well as the other players of the new generation brought to the national team by the technical commissioner Milena Bertolini: for example the eighteen-year-old Chiara Beccari, also a starter at the World Cup. In short, Dragoni had a modern and therefore better training course than in the past, more structured and specialized, and also for this reason there are many curiosity and expectations about her.
– Read also: Ten young Italian footballers who stood out