Coach quotes: Italy

Massimo Migliorini, Italy coach:

It's very important for these girls to play against this calibre of opponents.

I stopped playing and was at college in the USA, where I started coaching [girls] and then moved back to Italy with Internazionale and then the under-16 national team for two years.

There are more girls playing now, and Italy have more coaches and more professional structures. This came from when we forced male professional clubs to have a girls' under-12s and then under-14s. Since the clubs were already setting these up, many have gone even further and created higher age groups.

The problem facing girls' football in Italy before was the mentality of people. If a daughter would go to her father and say 'dad, can I play football', he would have said 'no, we'll take you to play something else, like volleyball'. Those who did play would train in a park, playing for some local boys; team, but now we have top clubs and if that daughter were to ask to play for Juventus, Fiorentina or Inter, the father would now be delighted and take them there straight away.

Serie A and Serie B are going to be organising the leagues from next year [rather than both being run by the Italian Amateur Football Association] and so Serie B will be renewed. Girls see that they can now aim to play for the likes of Juve, Fiorentina, Brescia etc. professionally.

Maybe our championships are currently too low a level – we can see here we're not used to this rhythm, and you can see that. All regional clubs play a season together, so you get the likes of Inter winning 18-0 each game they play in Lombardy. Then the winner of each region plays in an end-of-season tournament, but that means they only get a quarter-final, semi-final and final which may be competitive games.

National goalkeeper coaches are important. We arrange it so they have 40 minutes working with a goalkeeper coach and then the rest of the session they train with the team. During the first part, they work on technical things and then when we talk about possession of the ball, starting from the back and our defensive line, we do this with the goalkeeper. We decide with goalkeeper coach how to arrange defending set pieces. Each team now has a goalkeeper coach. Now they are working more with goalkeeper coaches and improving.