Juventus penalized, protest starts among football subscribers on TV

The weight of TV rights

Which, it must be said, rests decisively on TV and radio rights for its economic sustainability. The latest FIGC report reports a weight of 47% (2020-21 championship, therefore before the start of the new three-year period) on the total revenues that come from audiovisual rights. And that weight is important has also been clearly understood by the momentum in the fight against audiovisual piracy which has also led to fines against users of pirated Iptvs. It is no coincidence that Serie A CEO Luigi De Siervo in an interview with Only 24 Hours he wanted to point out that the future of Italian football depends on the fight against audiovisual piracy and the extension of the validity of TV rights to five years.

The Dazn-Sky dualism

As for Serie A, for the three-year period 2021-24, the clubs were guaranteed 840 million a year by Dazn who “bid” knowing that he had a partnership with Tim that guaranteed around 400 million a year before reaching a agreement last summer to break the “exclusive” bond between the set top boxes of the Dazn app on Timvision. As for Sky, Comcast’s home pay TV aimed to do battle with 87.5 million euros a year for Serie A (compared to 783 million a year for Serie A in 2018-21 in which, however, it had the availability of all matches in the top league).

Fans and subscribers

But how many Italian fans are there? According to a survey by StageUp and Ipsos, Juventus (2021-22 season) is in the lead by far, confirming their historic leadership with 8.1 million fans in Italy, practically double the number of Milanese fans given that they follow Milan at 4.2 million, Inter at 3.9, Napoli at 2.6 and Roma at 1.8. The Big Five alone occupy 84% of the Serie A fan market in our country. And Juventus alone accounts for a third.

As for the number of football subscribers on TV, the figures in Italy are not officially known given that both Dazn and Sky, which have foreign properties and are consolidated within the parent company (as in the case of Sky) do not communicate. Di Dazn from the Annual Review (the one that reported an overall red, and not only in Italy, of 2.2 billion euros for 2021) it was only understood that there are 15 million subscribers globally. As for Sky, the presentation of year-end data from the American giant Comcast, which controls it, is expected on Thursday 26 January. For the third quarter of the year there was talk, again at a global level, of 23 million subscribers.

Juventus dominating the top ten ratings

To want to go into a little more detail, perhaps the data that Digitalia – the reality of Publitalia (Mediaset Group) that collects advertising for Serie A on Dazn – provides every week helps.