Riccardo Calafiori finished high school in June 2021 and went straight on to enrol in Economics and Management at Luiss Guido Carli University in Rome, choosing a path built for athletes who have to study around training and matches. The Arsenal and Italy defender had already turned a short Instagram video into a public announcement after his oral exam, making a school milestone part of the same story as his football rise.
That is why his name keeps surfacing now. Born in Rome on 19 May 2002, Calafiori joined Roma’s academy at 8 and later drew wider attention as one of the most promising young players in Europe, but his academic route shows a different kind of discipline. In 2019, placed him among the 60 best talents in the world born after 2002, and UEFA included him among the 50 most promising young footballers of 2021. Yet the university place he took that year was not a vanity add-on. It was a three-year degree, inside Luiss’s Top Athletes program, which is designed to help players earn a qualification through a Dual Career path while they keep up with elite sport.
Calafiori has been unusually frank about how hard that balance was. In an interview on Arsenal’s official website, he said it was “really hard” to juggle school, training and private life. He added that he once abandoned school for a year before returning to reach the grades he needed, and described himself at school as almost the opposite of the player he became on the pitch — a talent who did not want to improve. His parents, he said, often got angry because he was not studying enough, even though foreign languages were his favourite subjects.
That friction matters because it cuts against the easy version of the story. Calafiori was being promoted as a major football talent while, by his own account, he was drifting in class and missing lessons whenever first-team call-ups or training demanded it. He said he would have to skip school and catch up later, a routine that can break most teenagers long before it builds them. What makes his case stand out is not that he found a neat way around the problem, but that he kept going long enough to collect a diploma in June 2021 and then move into university on the same demanding track.
What remains unclear is the exact Rome high school he attended. What is clear is the direction he chose after finishing it: football first, but not football only. With Luiss’s Top Athletes program already in place and no further academic milestone confirmed, the next step in Calafiori’s education is less about a headline than the harder task he has already described — staying enrolled, staying current and keeping the books open while the fixtures keep coming.
