OSA Calcio 1924

OSA stands for Oratorio Sant’Andrea, the parish yard on Via Trebbia, in Porta Romana, where this neighbourhood team was born in 1924. A hundred years on it is still in the same place with the same vocation: an amateur sports association that trains kids from the youngest age groups to the under-19s and keeps adult sides in the CSI and ACSI championships, the leagues of Milanese grassroots football. The colours are green and white hoops and the crest is a four-leaf clover, in the tradition of oratory clubs that borrowed from Glasgow the image of a team born of a parish.

There are no titles to tell, and that is the story: a century of Saturdays on the oratory pitch, a few hundred metres from Piazzale Lodi.

Here at Hoopster, OSA is the neighbourhood Celtic that Milan keeps behind a church.