Riccardo Calafiori Balances Luiss Top Athletes With June 2021 Diploma
Riccardo Calafiori completed his high school diploma in June 2021 and then enrolled at Luiss Guido Carli University in Rome, adding Economics and Management to a football career already carrying Arsenal and Italy duties. The move put his education on the same public timeline as his rise on the pitch.
He joined Luiss’s Top Athletes program, which is built to help national and international athletes earn a degree while keeping their sporting careers moving. For a defender born in Rome on 19 May 2002, it meant formal study did not stop when his profile rose with Roma, Arsenal and the Italian national team.
Calafiori and the Luiss path
Calafiori said the balance was not simple. “È stata davvero dura,” he said, and his own account makes clear why: one year he stopped school and later returned because he needed to reach the required grades. He also said that he sometimes went to school in the morning and had training if he was called up by the first team.
That meant missed classes, make-up work and a schedule that bent around football rather than the other way around. He said his parents were often angry because he did not try hard enough in his studies, a friction point that sat alongside the progress that eventually carried him to a diploma and then to university.
Roma, Arsenal, Italy
The schooling timeline tracked with a fast-moving playing career. Calafiori entered Roma’s academy at 8 years old, was included by in 2019 among the 60 best talents in the world born after 2002, and UEFA named him among the 50 most promising young footballers of 2021.
His background in Rome stayed central to the story. The university choice was Luiss Guido Carli University of Rome, and the course was a three-year degree in Economics and Management. The Top Athletes program added structure to a route that had already required him to leave school once and then come back to it.
June 2021 diploma
June 2021 marked the point where the school side of that dual path became visible. Calafiori announced the diploma in a short video on Instagram, then moved directly into university study while continuing as a defender for Arsenal and Italy.
For readers following his career, the practical detail is simple: he did not stop at the diploma, and he did not choose football over education. He kept both alive through a program designed for athletes, and his own words show the cost of that choice in missed lessons, training calls and the effort to recover the work later.
