“Serie A dies in the silence of politics”. De Siervo’s cry of alarm

In view of the meeting on February 24th and the imminent assignment of TV rights for the A leaguethe CEO of the League Louis DeSiervo he says he is “concerned” about the conditions of the Italian football system. And he states, in an interview with Repubblica, that “the toughest TV rights tender ever awaits us”. The causes seem clear: “We have recorded the disaffection of Mediaset and the choice of Sky, in the last three years, to have a more marginal role (only three matches a day broadcast, ed)”. And the consequences as well: “The damage is approx one billion every three years”. The number one enemy of the growth of the football industry remains the well-known problem of piracy: in Italy, it still seems to be too simple to be able to see the championship by bypassing the costs of the platforms. “We have the dubious record of being the country with the highest piracy rate in the world,” regrets De Siervo.

In short, the figurative picture from the ad has bleak colors to say the least. The aggravating circumstance is that no one – no one who has the power to intervene, above all – seems to notice it: “All of this happened in the silence of politics and the authorities”. The solutions, in fact, would be: “The lack of green light to extension of the current contract for rights it could have been a negotiating tool”, which would have allowed “to face the market with the same weapons as the other leagues”. De Siervo hopes now the abolition of law Melandriwhich limits the duration of the television assignments to three years (whose extension to five was recently canceled in the Senate): “We are the only country in the world where a state law limits a private company to sell the rights as it sees fit.”

In such a context, the Covid it was only the last, and perhaps one of the most important, links in a chain that slowly crushed the already fragile Italian football market. “The pandemic has created losses of 1.2 billion”, says De Siervo. Again pointing to the guilty code of silence of politics: “He helped everyone but gave nothing to football”.

While Italy struggles along, other countries seem to have found the right recipe for combining taxation and entertainment. “The growth of the Premier League (the English league, ed) and the Champions League exposes the national championships to a serious injury because they risk seeing their revenue base compress”. A inhomogeneity of resources in which Serie A seems condemned to remain at the bottom of the big European competitions.