Provincial football in crisis, Serie B and C lose 1.5 billion in 5 years

To get an idea of the crisis that Italian football is going through, one should not look so much at the (empty) bench of the National team, but at the financial agony that many teams are in, especially those that are defined as "provincial". A label that once aimed to exalt the depth of the Italian sports movement, while today more than anything else it highlights the absence of a catchment area and a brand suitable for generating adequate resources for the business of contemporary football.

The clubs that are placed in the lower-middle part of the football pyramid are in fact generally in the condition of not producing revenues proportionate to costs. In the last five seasons, Lega Pro has burned an average of 120 million per year. A loss for the 60 clubs that exceeds 2 million. The 20 Serie B clubs are running an average deficit of over 15 million per year. In the last five seasons recorded by the FIGC Calcio Report, also due to the pandemic, the cumulative red of the 80 clubs that frequent the two categories has been around 1.5 billion, contained only thanks to the contributions that come from Serie A.

With the decline of the national industrial system, historians have taken the place of the patrons, who filled these structural deficits in exchange for political or social “dividends”, by foreign investors and funds, called to deal with tournaments asphyxiated on the revenue front, or by sports entrepreneurs, if not by real adventurers, inclined to tighten the purse strings at the first difficulty. The consequences of this almost anthropological transformation of the properties, associated with unfavorable economic conditions and sterile reforms, are there for all to see: chain defaults, clubs cancelled due to administrative irregularities, compromised fairness of competitions, recourse to repechages and readmissions, ineffective formal and ex post controls on economic solidity and transfers of shares.

Thus, while we witness the usual rearguard battles to divide the revenue generated by the TVs that broadcast Serie A and the kick-off of the club World Cup in the USA, the 2024/25 Serie B has yet to conclude. Accomplice the penalization of Brescia (and its disappearance), Sampdoria and Salernitana still have to play the play-off (June 20-25). A solution contested by the Campanians, with appeals to the federal justice, who hope for the expansion of the next cadet championship to 21 teams.