Serie A is its own worst enemy. No wonder there’s only one team left in Europe
The absence of any Serie A teams in the Champions League quarter-finals has reopened the debate about the state of Italian football. Milan’s exit from the Europa League means Roma are the last Italian team standing in Europe.
Arms crossed leaning back on his stool, Fabio Capello reclined in the Sky Italia studio but was not restrained in his opinions. Once again he posited that Italian sides play too slow, lack intensity and too often games in Serie A are broken up by referees who are quick on the whistle and call a foul for even the slightest contact.
Alessandro “Billy” Costacurta argued it was a question of resources. Serie A just isn’t as wealthy as it was in his day and other clubs around the continent are spending better.
The journalist Paolo Condo, meanwhile, highlighted the absence in Italian teams of young cores steeped in the values of the club, which are often what underpin all great sides from Ajax under Rinus Michels and Milan under Sacchi to Barcelona under Pep Guardiola.
But as Leo Tolstoy wrote in Anna Karenina, happy families are all alike. Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way and each Italian side went out for entirely different reasons that aren’t necessarily related to the state of the league. Lazio, for instance, hadn’t been in the Champions League for 13 years and reached the knockout stages, despite extreme and controversial COVID cases, for the first time in two decades. Elimination at the hands of world champions Bayern Munich was to be expected even if the manner of the first-leg defeat was embarrassing.
Italy trail Spain, England and Germany in Europe in recent seasons
As for Atalanta, expectations were high after last season and, to be honest, they didn’t disappoint, recording more points in the group stage than a year ago and winning at Anfield and in Amsterdam. Ideas can trump talent but, as with Lazio, you’re asking a lot of two teams outside of Deloitte’s top 30 richest clubs to overcome two of the wealthiest sides on the continent. Lest we forget, Atalanta’s wage bill is still in the bottom half of Serie A and it’s frankly a miracle they finish in the top four let alone the knockout stages of the Champions League.
As Paolo Maldini pointed out before the tie with Manchester United, the gap in revenue between them and Milan — 30th on Deloitte’s list behind even Sheffield United — is more than €400 million, not that it showed on the pitch as Ole Gunnar Solskjaer’s side only edged through against depleted opponents.
Apart from Porto and Borussia Dortmund, all the teams through to the final eight of the Champions League have higher turnovers than their Italian counterparts unless player trading is included as a revenue stream. The fact Serie A sides are so dependent on the buying and selling of players to make extra cash is indicative of how difficult it is for teams to have the structural stability necessary to be competitive.
For too long whoever was president of the league has chosen to get lost in internal politics rather than commit to the job of growing the business in the way Richard Scudamore did for the Premier League, and Christian Seifert and Javier Tebas have done for the Bundesliga and La Liga respectively. Even today, Serie A can’t agree on anything, whether it’s the next TV rights tender or the sale of a stake in an entertainment company to a private equity consortium for €1.7 billion. The league is its own worst enemy and its inability to reform itself is perhaps one of the reasons why Andrea Agnelli dedicates so much time to Europe instead.
Meanwhile, grounds continue to fall into disrepair and without privately-owned stadia, there’s only so much money that can be ploughed back into teams under Financial Fair Play regulations. This is where Serie A has really been left behind.
While Atalanta and Lazio actually deserve credit for punching above their weight, the same cannot be said of Juventus and Inter, who are judged by a higher standard. An element of that is obviously history and tradition. But there’s also the recent memory of Juventus, 10th in the money league, coming close to the treble in 2015 and 2017 and Inter reaching last year’s Europa League final too.
Neither expect your sympathy and while Juventus won at the Nou Camp in December, it is concerning that favourable draws against Lyon and Porto have not been capitalised on. With regard to Inter, much will be made of Antonio Conte’s record in the Champions League but the advanced metrics tell you they were desperately unlucky this time around and came undone on account of a ridiculous number of missed chances as well as all those times Arturo Vidal and Nicolo Barella gave away penalties against Borussia Monchengladbach and Real Madrid respectively.
What’s odd is that Italian football is beginning to produce top players again. Not the level of the 1980s and 90s generation, sure. But the optimism around Roberto Mancini’s young Italy team is not misplaced. Barella provided one of the moments of the group stage with his volleyed backheel assist against Real Madrid. Gianluigi Donnarumma pulled off one fabulous save after another against Red Star and who was not impressed with Federico Chiesa in both legs of the Porto tie?
“It’s not tactical” was Esteban Cambiasso’s analysis of Serie A’s woes in Europe this year.
Conte for instance has won the Premier League and so too has Claudio Ranieri, Carlo Ancelotti and Roberto Mancini. Ideas applied in Italy work in England and there’s no doubt Serie A remains a fascinating laboratory of new ideas. But overall it has stayed risk-averse, insular and culturally resistant. It’s enough to recall the ferocity of the pushback to the notion of Ralf Rangnick working in Italy a year ago. Aside from Paulo Fonseca, even the foreign coaches are Italian. Ivan Juric and Sinisa Mihajlovic played so long here that the bel paese is home to them and they are products of the system.
With few exceptions, the same sporting directors move from club to club, appoint a coach they’ve worked with in the past and then sign some players they’ve worked with before. It’s musical chairs and up-tempo it ain’t. It’s complacent, set in its ways and seemingly unwilling or unable to welcome change. Cambiasso believes Italy’s recent difficulties are rooted in culture and mentality.
“I think there are limits tied to history,” he argued on Sky Italia. “Winning helps you, it makes you happy, but it can hold you back too. Watching all the leagues and listening to what people say about them because I’ve travelled a bit and know what journalists are writing here and there, we’ve got limits and I say ‘we’ because in Argentina we’ve got more or less the same problems as in Italy because when people tell us to change our response is always: ‘Yeah but we’ve won however many World Cups’. Spain changed because they’d never won before and the changes they made led to Barcelona winning and Spain winning World Cups…”
“If you want to start over you need to forget the victories and focus on what’s to come,” Cambiasso concluded. “The past is the past and you should never disown it. But if you only look back you won’t go forwards.” Only that way will Serie A stop going in reverse.
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