The Fall of Serie A: How Italian Football Lost Its Financial Throne
MILAN — World Affairs / Sports | The Navarro Report
For a generation of fans, Serie A was not just Italy’s league. It was the world’s league. Three decades later, Italy’s top flight generated roughly €2.9 billion in the 2023-24 season, less than half of what the English Premier League pulled in over the same period. The gap between the two leagues is no longer a matter of prestige. It is a straightforward, and widening, matter of money.
The golden era began in earnest in the late 1980s. AC Milan, under Arrigo Sacchi and later Fabio Capello, built a high-pressing style around Marco van Basten, Ruud Gullit and Franco Baresi that won back-to-back European Cups in 1989 and 1990. Diego Maradona led Napoli to Serie A titles in 1987 and 1990, while Juventus fielded Michel Platini, and later Zinedine Zidane and a young Roberto Baggio. By the end of the 1990s, Italian clubs had assembled, by common consensus, the strongest collection of talent anywhere in the sport. Between the 1989-90 and 1998-99 seasons, Italian teams reached 25 major European finals and won 13 trophies, a run that included four all-Italian UEFA Cup finals. Italian clubs broke the world transfer record nine times between 1984 and 2000, interrupted only twice by La Liga and once by the Premier League.
The unraveling began, symbolically, in 2006. Calciopoli, the match-fixing scandal that emerged that May, involved wiretapped conversations in which Juventus general manager Luciano Moggi worked to influence referee assignments in the club’s favor. Juventus was stripped of its 2004-05 and 2005-06 titles and relegated to Serie B; AC Milan was docked points and barred from the following season’s Champions League. The financial fallout was immediate: Serie A’s aggregate revenue fell 19 percent the following season, dropping the league to fourth among Europe’s biggest earners, behind the Premier League, Bundesliga and La Liga.
But Calciopoli accelerated a decline that had already started for reasons that had nothing to do with corruption. The most consequential was a simple business decision, or rather the delay of one. England created the Premier League in 1992 and immediately began selling its broadcast rights collectively, guaranteeing every club a stable, shared income stream and building a global brand from the outset. Italy did not make the same switch until 2010, nearly two decades later. By the early 1990s, the gap barely existed: England earned less per season than Italy did. By 2002, the Premier League had pulled decisively ahead, and it has never looked back.
Other structural problems compounded the broadcast-rights delay. Most Serie A stadiums date to the World War II era, lightly refurbished for the 1990 World Cup and rarely upgraded since; nearly all remain owned by municipalities rather than the clubs that play in them, cutting off the matchday and hospitality revenue that English and German clubs have used to diversify their income. Average attendance fell from roughly 34,000 per game in 1991-92 to about 26,000 by the mid-2000s, worsened by pay-television’s arrival and stadium-safety restrictions following crowd violence. Longtime AC Milan and Italy defender Alessandro Nesta summed up the mood bluntly a decade ago: “the best players go to play in other leagues — Spain, England, Germany,” he told the BBC, adding simply that Italy was going down.
The current numbers make the scale of the gap explicit. Premier League clubs generated £6.8 billion in total revenue in 2024-25, roughly €7.9 billion at prevailing exchange rates. La Liga and the Bundesliga are now essentially tied for a distant second, both around €5.1 to €5.5 billion. Serie A sits a clear fourth among Europe’s Big Five leagues, its most recent published figure of €2.9 billion built disproportionately on domestic television money in a market that has plateaued since the mid-2010s. The Premier League’s international broadcast income alone, roughly €1.58 billion a year, now exceeds the combined overseas earnings of every other major European league put together, a gap that lets even mid-table English clubs outbid Italy’s biggest names in the global transfer market.
The on-field consequences have followed the financial ones. Italian clubs are on course for a Champions League season without a single representative in the competition’s last 16 for the first time since 1987-88, and it has now been nearly 16 years since a Serie A club last won the tournament. Sports Minister Andrea Abodi has proposed legislation to scrap the current restriction on selling Serie A’s broadcast rights to a single buyer and to tie a larger share of television revenue directly to clubs that develop young, Italian-eligible players, an effort to address both the league’s finances and the national team’s shrinking talent pipeline in the same reform. Whether that proposal moves forward before Serie A’s next broadcast cycle is negotiated will offer an early signal of whether Italian football’s various crises, financial, structural and sporting, are finally being treated as a single problem rather than three separate ones.
— Jose E. Navarro, The Navarro Report / Human-Directed AI Journalism: Research, analysis, and editorial direction by the author. Drafted in partnership with Claude AI (Anthropic).