“If wishes were horses, beggars would ride,” says Patrick Edomwaddoba, barely audible over the racket of the Tam Tam basketball team warming up for their fourth match of the season. The Pentecostal pastor watches proudly as the players take part in an exercise drill, neatly passing the ball between themselves in a tight lattice before raining a quick succession of shots towards the hoop. Originally from Nigeria, Edomwaddoba is on the sidelines to watch his two sons, Victor and King, compete against the league leaders in an eagerly anticipated encounter. But the outcome of the game seems of little importance when taking into account the struggles the team has been through in order to participate at all. If anyone understands the notion of having to work hard to be a part of something, it would be Edomwaddoba, who, together with the other parents of the team and the rest of the forgotten community of immigrants who live in the Caserta area of Campania, just north of Naples.

When a former Italian basketball champion, Massimo Antonelli, decided to start the team in the area, he had no idea that within a year they would inadvertently find themselves at the centre of a fierce political debate on what it means to be Italian. Until a month ago, the teenage players of the Tam Tam squad had been denied the right to compete against other teams in the regional league because their parents were immigrants and, as such, considered foreigners in the eyes of the law. In their endeavour to contest the decision to bar them a media storm erupted, disrupting practice and shining a light on Italian attitudes towards immigration and integration.

The Tam Tam team take on rivals Caserta. Below: Destiny, Tam Tam’s playmaker, and below right: Wisdon in action.

It was only last year when a handful of teenagers gathered on a cracked asphalt basketball court in the grounds of an abandoned holiday resort to start training for the first time. Founded in Castel Volturno, an area with 25,000 inhabitants of which 5,000 are registered migrants and many thousands more who are undocumented, the premise of the club is that it should be free to join. Antonelli has relied on support from his basketball peers to donate trainers and organise crowdfunding campaigns to sustain the team. This support helped turn an abandoned sports hall in the area into Tam Tam’s home court as well as purchase a team bus.



Coastline with abandoned houses.



Pineta Mare was a residential area built illegally in the 1960s by the Coppola brothers as the “Miami of the Med”, a place where aspiring middle-class Italians could buy a seaside home. A mass of buildings was erected swiftly along the coast. The resort lasted just long enough for the Camorra crime family and politicians to make a fortune. In 1975, it was seized by the state, leaving an abandoned labyrinth of concrete, twisted steel and a vast patch of asphalt where the Tam Tam basketball team would later make their first training ground.

A player’s mother cheers on the team.

To begin with, a mixed group showed up from different backgrounds but as the weeks went by players whose parents were born in Italy began to drop out, leaving just those whose parents were born in west Africa. Of those who remained, only two had previously been able to afford costly after-school sports activities. It took an hour to walk to training along the Domiziana dual carriageway, but if this was a deterrent for the “Italians”, the remaining players were not going to be put off. Soon, they were training three times a week and begging the coach for longer and longer sessions. As the winter nights closed in on the outdoor court, the players’ initial interest developed into diehard passion just as Antonelli had hoped. Little did they know the far-reaching consequences their sporting hunger would have.

The team inside a minivan used to travel to games owing to the lack of public transportation. Below: Faisal and Star listen to music. Below right: Wisdon chats on his phone.

As a team ready to compete in local tournaments emerged, Antonelli realised the challenge was not so much winning games but getting around the strict regulations imposed by the Italian Basketball Federation (FIP). The FIP was emphatic: only two foreign players per team. Consequently, when Antonelli tried to enrol his under-14s team in the league, his application was rejected. The young hopefuls were bruised by the exclusion, amplifying their marginalisation in a country still coming to terms with the changing sociodemographics caused by an increase in immigration over the last decade.

Team-mates Honesty and Star walk through the streets before training at the local sport palace.



Unlike the UK, the right to citizenship at birth – known legally as jus solis (the right of soil) – is still unapproved in Italy, denying children born of immigrant parents automatic citizenship. As it stands, only upon reaching 18 is it possible to make the long, fastidious and costly application for permanent citizenship and only if the applicant has never left the country for any length of time and has always had “residency” at a fixed address. However, the plight of the Tam Tam team has given face to those that suffer under the legislation and forced the issue back to the top of the political agenda. The debate is intensifying, as the Democratic party (PD) of the prime minister, Paolo Gentiloni, had hoped to push through the change in legislation by the end of the year but did not have enough support to win a majority. Luigi Manconi, a DP senator who has accused Italy of “raising children to be half citizens”, has been on hunger strike over lacklustre support in the lead-up to Christmas. Meanwhile, the Northern League leader, Matteo Salvini, has been up and down the country promoting his anti-immigration party’s stance that “kids must prove Italy is their nation only when they become adults”.

Worshippers attend Sunday Pentecostal mass in Castel Volturno. The local African community often gathers on Sundays in places of worship because of a lack of other venues to come together.



Honesty, who is 13 years old, with his family. He and his siblings will have to apply for citizenship when they are 18 because of the ‘temporary’ status of their mother, Osas Fedina.

Edomwaddoba has been in Italy for 22 years, jumping through the hoops necessary to obtain official citizenship. This means that his sons Victor and King will face a less difficult time applying for citizenship when they reach 18. However, many children are not so lucky. They inherit their parents’ “temporary” status, which results in an interminable struggle with the Italian state and constant, time-consuming visits to the immigration office to renew their costly residency permits – all while being treated like foreigners. The process is “a never-ending cycle of paperwork, uncertainty and isolation”, says Edomwaddoba despairingly. His players on the other hand just don’t like people thinking they are different. Matthew says it is “totally unjust” that he and others are not considered Italian, while Wisdom says: “If my friends see me as Italian, that means I am Italian.”

The coach gives Tam Tam players a team talk during a game against Caserta.



Aside from the Tam Tam basketball team, Castel Volturno is known for two things; a massacre of eight west Africans by the Casalese mafia in 2008 and a vast complex of illegally built apartment blocks and holiday villas, which now lie partially abandoned. The failed holiday resort, known as Villagio Copolla, has served as one of the main attractions in the region for destitute immigrants searching for somewhere to live. The presence of the mafia has meant work can be found in the shadows, while drug trafficking and sex work thrive along the notorious Strada Domiziana. Moreover, since the 1970s nearby tomato farms have provided informal cash-in-hand work. Underpaid and overworked, these immigrant workers are known to prop up Italy’s agro-economy. In an area where parents struggle to make ends meet and with no other opportunities for young people to distract themselves aside from the local Caritas community centre, the Tam Tam team has emerged as an important project for younger members of Castel Volturno’s immigrant community.

One of the Tam Tam coaches, Andrea, helps the players with their shooting.

In October Antonelli took the team’s plight to the authorities, using his sporting reputation to attract media attention which in turn applied the necessary pressure for the issue to be debated in parliament. He pushed Italy’s International Olympic Committee (Coni) to make a legal exemption so the team could play this season. By mid-November the players were on the court in match kit. However, the key to the triumph lies hidden within the dense Legge di Bilancio (public finance law).

On 21 December parliament passed a small but significant bill entitled Save Tam Tam basketball team, changing sporting regulations so that all children born in Italy to “foreign parents” will be allowed to compete officially from 1 January. Some may reach the top of sport, perhaps like the Italian football international Mario Balotelli, who was born in Italy to Ghanaian parents but was only able to obtain full citizenship at 18. He too has had his “Italian-ness” questioned by the media even when he was the lead striker for Italy. The new legislation is one decisive move that may go towards a more inclusive society, but with the more far-reaching reforms to jus soli still yet to be approved, the government of Gentiloni still has a long way to go in making the estimated 1 million “new Italian” children, as the media have called them, feel at home.

Star, 14, gets some dribbling practice in as he takes care of his two brothers, Alyha and Fatima (below, right) while their mother is out shopping at the supermarket.



Ask Tam Tam player Kessy why he loves basketball so much and the 13-year-old says it makes him forget everything and feel free. Such sentiments point to sport’s capacity to heal and to build confidence, empowering young people as they prepare for adult life. However, the Northern League continues to exploit the growing immigration crisis in Italy by blocking legislative changes that would help safeguard the next generation. The party has sought to conflate and muddle the differences between immigrants who have just arrived and those born in the country. For the latter, this poses an impending challenge: they live and feel just as Italian as their peers but are not treated so by law or by society.