Italian League Lags Behind?

 A lot has been said about Serie A’s decline over the past cou­ple of years. Crit­ics have claimed the Eng­lish Pre­mier­ship and Spain’s La Liga have become Europe’s best leagues leav­ing Serie A to chal­lenge the Bun­desliga for third spot.  

Sadly, Serie A has wit­nessed a sharp decline in the past few years that can­not be attrib­uted to the lack of finan­cial means alone. The qual­ity of the teams ply­ing their trade in any league is influ­enced by fund­ing, and, thus, monetary resources prac­ti­cally deter­mine the level of play in var­i­ous leagues. 

Real Madrid is a lead­ing exam­ple of how much money can do for a team in terms of the enthu­si­asm it can cre­ate through media atten­tion, ticket and mer­chan­dise sales as well as income gen­er­ated from the big names play­ing for the team. How­ever, the orig­i­nal Los Galac­ti­cos served as a model of how exces­sive money can have unde­sir­able con­se­quences too such as over­crowd­ing of stars on one ros­ter and fail­ure to trans­late the cap­ture of big names into suc­cess on the pitch. With many of the world’s super­stars, Los Blan­cos still only man­aged one tro­phy in Europe along with the La Liga title on one occa­sion despite hav­ing the likes of Zidane, Figo and Ronaldo on the ros­ter. A club needs money to invest in out­stand­ing play­ers, but that alone can­not guar­an­tee success. This season’s La Liga and Eng­lish Pre­mier­ship will demon­strate whether finan­cial mus­cle can buy suc­cess with Real Madrid and Man City lead­ing the lav­ish spend­ing. The expe­ri­ence of the coach along with the strength of com­peti­tors, the atmos­phere inside the sta­dium dur­ing home games and the sched­ule in Europe will all deter­mine how suc­cess­ful these clubs will be. 

Going back to com­par­ing Serie A to La Liga and the Eng­lish Pre­mier­ship, it is impor­tant to point out that teams in both Eng­land and Spain have out­paced the Ital­ian clubs when it comes to spend­ing and prof­its due to the pres­ence of bil­lion­aire own­ers & spon­sors (such as Abramovich of Chelsea and Al Fahim of Man. City) and the con­sis­tent pres­ence of fans dur­ing home games. Serie A has wit­nessed a decline in the past few years due to the lack of the finan­cial sup­port seen in other elite leagues and the poor aver­age atten­dance dur­ing Serie A games in com­par­i­son with other major Euro­pean leagues. The con­di­tion of the Ital­ian sta­dia does not help either with many of them in dire need of ren­o­va­tion when com­pared with England’s and Spain’s newer and friend­lier are­nas. Also, most of the clubs in Serie A do not actu­ally own the fields they play on (with the excep­tion of Juve which will open its own sta­dium in a few years and recently both Inter and Roma lay­ing the foun­da­tion for such ownership). 

Serie A’s strug­gles were also mag­ni­fied by Cal­ciopoli (match-fixing scan­dal in 2006) which resulted in Juven­tus get­ting demoted and the club los­ing its main stars to Inter (Vieira, Ibrahi­movic) or Spain (Can­navaro, Thu­ram, Zam­brotta, Emer­son). Milan was also pun­ished as a result of this scan­dal so the club’s for­tunes also dete­ri­o­rated both on and off the field. Cer­tainly the loss of Milan’s Kaka and Inter’s Ibrahi­movic this year will serve as fur­ther notice to the decreas­ing spend­ing power of Ital­ian teams. The sale of such stars will likely trans­late into fewer tick­ets sold for both Milan and Inter. Big names sell sea­son tick­ets, demand more media atten­tion, require addi­tional spend­ing to buy their mar­ket­ing rights, impose higher pric­ing for TV rights and so forth.

 Serie A’s fall from the sum­mit of Euro­pean foot­ball might have been even worse had it not been for Italy’s tri­umph dur­ing WC 2006 in Ger­many. The fourth star on the Azzurri’s shirt means much more than being World Cham­pi­ons. It restored Ital­ian pride along with the belief in Ital­ian play­ers and rein­forced Serie A’s abil­ity to sur­vive despite the scan­dal. While it might appear that Serie A lost with Kaka’s depar­ture, both Inter and Juven­tus did fairly well in the mar­ket to acquire the likes of Eto’o & Diego Mil­ito as well as Diego and Can­navaro respectively. 

Young­sters such as Giovinco, San­ton, Motta, Crisc­ito and Cig­a­rini have all shown flashes of bril­liance con­firm­ing that Italy has a bright future. These play­ers sim­ply require the right guid­ance, proper coach­ing, suf­fi­cient play­ing time and of course the faith of their train­ers and clubs. Time will tell if the likes of Giovinco will be allowed to flour­ish since the Ital­ian league’s intense envi­ron­ment has restricted tal­ented play­ers over the years while the Eng­lish clubs have become renowned for snatch­ing young Ital­ian talent. 

Serie A can re-emerge as the top league only if issues of sta­dium own­er­ship, fan riot­ing and related vio­lence, as well as the growth of young Ital­ian tal­ent are all prop­erly dealt with to help pro­mote a healthier, better funded and more promi­nent league. The lack of finan­cial means can be addressed once some of the other press­ing mat­ters are fixed. It might be that La Liga has Barcelona and Real Madrid (and to a lesser extent Sevilla and Atletico Madrid) while the Eng­lish Pre­mier­ship has Liv­er­pool, Man Utd, Chelsea and Arse­nal, yet it is in Serie A dur­ing the past few years that we have wit­nessed teams besides Juve, Inter, Milan and Roma fin­ish in the top four to make it to the Euro­pean Cham­pi­ons League. This is a glar­ing tes­ta­ment that if all cru­cial fac­tors are addressed then healthy com­pe­ti­tion can flour­ish in Serie A.

Tagged as: Azzurri, EPL, Inter, Italian League, Juventus, La Liga, milan, Real Madrid, Roma, Serie A