“From utopia to a reality that grows every day”
Silvia Dema believed in this dream long before it became reality.
When she joined the project back in 2014, Juventus One didn’t even exist yet. But she already saw what it could become: a real team where people with disabilities could express themselves through sport and feel part of something bigger.
“At first it seemed like utopia,” she recalls. “Now it’s a reality that grows every week, because we never stopped dreaming of something better.”
With a degree in Educational Sciences and a background as a football player, Silvia has always seen football and education as two sides of the same coin.
As a coach and now a team manager, she works on employment inclusion for people with mental health challenges and leads the youth division of the project, supporting both the players and their families.
Her goal is simple and powerful: to offer trust, create opportunities, and help young people keep their dreams alive.
For Silvia, inclusion doesn’t stop at the edge of the pitch — it extends to schools, workplaces, and everyday life.
Every training session, every meeting, every conversation is a step toward the dream she once thought unreachable.
Today, Juventus One is a solid reality also thanks to her — to her perseverance, her heart, and her belief that everyone deserves their own place, their own team, and their own dream to chase.
“I don’t see them as patients, I see them as athletes”
Gianluca Gallina is the technical heart of Juventus One.
A coach and educator, he has shaped a new way of living football for athletes with disabilities — not as therapy, but as a true sport made of effort, discipline and passion.
“I don’t see them as patients, I see them as athletes,” he says.
It’s the foundation of the method he created: every player must feel like a footballer, with the same expectations and the same pride that come with wearing a team’s jersey.
For Gianluca, the pitch is the place where differences turn into strength.
At first, it wasn’t easy. “They told me: just let them have fun.”
But he knew that real growth comes from hard work and the will to improve.
That’s why Juventus One became a real team — where disability isn’t a limit, but simply a condition from which to start.
Today, Gallina also runs a day center for adults with disabilities, promoting the same idea of inclusion: not building walls, but opening doors to the world outside.
On and off the field, his football teaches something simple and powerful: inclusion isn’t a gesture — it’s daily training.
“Football has always given me a role”
Mehdi Younes sees the football pitch as a meeting place, not a line of separation.
Within Juventus One, he brought a bold idea: to coach and play alongside his team, breaking traditional roles and creating a true sense of unity.
Today he’s both a coach and a certified athlete for the A Team — a guide, a companion, and an example of how disability takes nothing away. It only adds perspective, depth, and humanity.
Born to a Lebanese father and an Italian mother, Mehdi knows what inclusion truly means.
He grew up feeling different, and sport became his language — a way to find belonging, dignity, and a voice.
“Football has always given me a role,” he says. That sense of purpose led him to study and work in sport abroad: five years in Australia, learning that every team, before being technical, must first be human.
“If there’s no group, you go nowhere,” he often reminds his players.
Back in Italy, he found in Juventus One a project that mirrored his values: sport as shared ground, the person before the label, the strength of a group above any difference.
When he decided to step on the field as a certified athlete, supporting the team as a player-coach, he embodied the project’s essence — inclusion made real.
Today, while continuing his work as a music therapist, Mehdi finds another kind of harmony here: the rhythm of eleven people moving as one, with respect and trust.
Because for him, and for Juventus One, everyone who steps onto the pitch is an athlete — nothing more, nothing less.
