Italian Football’s Problems Lie in a Familiar Place: Money

Italian Football’s Problems Lie in a Familiar Place: Money

With Italy missing out on a third consecutive World Cup, many have been quick to try and diagnose the source of the nation’s footballing woes, diving deep into player pools, coaching strategies, and development pipelines. But the true source lies in perhaps the most obvious of places.

For years, it has been clear that Italian football has a major money problem. The issue gets brought up in some corners of the football world, but strangely, whenever the nation faces another disaster, it’s largely ignored.

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Instead, the discussions revolve around the lack of grassroots structures, dwindling amounts of Italian players in Serie A, and timidity of the 3-5-2 formation. Fair enough, those are problems that need to be fixed and have been haunting calcio for many years. They have hung around like a stench that spreads across the apartment, leaving every room reeking.

But the rankness is part of a much deeper problem that takes the form of rot underneath the sink. Now, Italian football has reached a point where simply using a room freshener won’t fix things.

Structurally speaking, too many young players fall through the cracks in Italian football at a young age.

This was confirmed by Vittorio Petrone, former agent of Roberto Baggio, who famously created a 900-page report that outlined an overhaul of the Italian federation in 2011. The FIGC largely ignored the document.  

Petrone discussed the “Baggio Report” with Italian podcast Cronache di Spogliatoio, saying, “We’ve calculated that in Italy, only one out of every 67,000 players turns professional.”

Sure, that number might not seem too shocking considering the odds of becoming a pro athlete were never favorable, but it ties into a larger problem within Italian football — a lack of young players getting significant minutes in Serie A.

According to astudy from the CIES Football Observatory, U-21 players eligible for the Italian national team played in just 1.9% of the minutes in Serie A over the 2025 calendar year, which ranked 49th out of the 50 monitored leagues.

It doesn’t end there, as players that are not eligible to play for Italy have played in 67.9% of the total minutes in Serie A this season through April 1. This is the sixth-worst figure in Europe. While England and Portugal rank worse, they both boast thriving academies, which can’t be said for Italy.

Benfica, in fact, rank first for income earned from sales of academy graduates. Sporting rank fifth, with Chelsea, Manchester City, Aston Villa, and Tottenham ranking high up too. One would have to scroll down to the 53rd spot to find Inter, whose biggest sale was that of Andrea Pinamonti. The striker is barely even considered for the Azzurri anymore, falling off the national team radar quite a while ago.

Many Italian clubs have turned to selling their young players as a quick-fix problem to their academy woes. These sales guarantee healthy capital gains, or plusvalenza, thereby temporarily fixing their financial situations. The vicious cycle follows too. Soon enough, the same player will once again be sold, earning a hefty plusvalenzafor his next club.

Instability catches up with the player, affecting his skillset and keeping him completely away from the Azzurri setup. Unless he joins a slightly more self-sufficient club like Atalanta, his career risks falling away.

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A majority of times, young players are simply seen as bargaining chips for larger deals too. Juventus attracted immense criticism for their sale of Dean Huijsen to Bournemouth. The plusvalenza was too much to turn down for a club that is seeking immediate results and a quick injection into their finances when other signings are needed instead.

This has become a trend across the board, as Italian clubs barely have sustaining revenue chains. They rely excessively on sales. It is a largely-ignored issue which allows lesser-known English clubs to sign players from Serie A clubs relatively easily. That is perhaps why Huijsen joined Real Madrid from Bournemouth within 12 months of leaving Juve.

Each Premier League club has five main sources of revenue: merchandising, stadium revenue, broadcasting, transfers, and if relevant, money from winning trophies. The Italian context is much different. Clubs don’t own the stadiums they play in, reducing the revenues earned from ticket sales. In addition, international media interest in calcio has declined significantly in the last 10 years.

Every season, the league faces a real struggle to sell itself to international broadcasters. The most recent international broadcast deal sees the league earn only around €300 million per year. That is just 21% of the league’s total broadcasting revenue, which stands at around €1.1 billion. Unsurprisingly, domestic broadcast revenue has also reduced by €30 million from the previous deal, with channels like Sky Italia often telecasting Premier League games instead of the Serie A.

The English top-flight has raced ahead and it is not even in the same planet. At the end of the 2018-19 season, Huddersfield Town earned more TV revenue than Juventus, who won the Serie A during that campaign. That is still relevant, as the implementation of the “Melandri Law” in 2010 disallowed major clubs from selling their own media rights. This was done to protect the lesser clubs (who earned little to nothing) but also denied the likes of Milan and Juve from operating in a similar way as Barcelona or Real Madrid.

Further, Serie A was abolished from securing three-year-long broadcast deals. The five-year model came into play, as the league sought more stability.

If anything, all of it does sound like a muddle. And that is very much an issue in a nutshell. Clubs continue to lose money, leaving them scrambling simply for transfer fees or for them to overperform in European competitions.

Granted, calcio has proved to be revolutionary from a footballing merchandising perspective. The shift from kits simply being a piece of sporting importance to them being a cultural representation has become a hallmark in Italy. As a result, jerseys have stopped being niche and catering to only a specific club’s fans. They are now made for everyone, simply increasing their target audience.

This streetwear-ification has now become a largely overused idea in the European game too. Other major clubs have caught up, using their massive brand names to race ahead. On top of that, jersey sales aren’t the most reliable way to increase a club’s revenue. A significant percentage of earnings from jersey sales goes to the kit manufacturer.

In 2026, the likes of Milan, Juventus, Inter and Roma barely have global fanbases. They are prominently behind the Premier League’s top six and the two La Liga giants, leaving them at a natural disadvantage in the race for merchandising revenue even if they did add a new spark to the business through trendy kit design and merch collaborations.

The stadium problem is bigger. It is best defined by the struggles of Milan and Inter in bringing down the San Siro in favor of a shinier stadium which will hand them a higher say over revenue.

The global fan, unsurprisingly, hates the idea of an iconic venue being brought down. But for the Rossoneri and the Nerazzurri, it would be game changing, and it would seize control away from the city’s administrators and local government. They would turn into asset owners of a new stadium that they can promote and build however they like and globalize the idea without political intervention.

That is why the process took well over five years. Even Fiorentina are famously facing problems in building their new stadium. The Artemio Franchi is owned by the Municipality of Florence and not Fiorentina. A part of it has been brought down to hasten the process for a new home for La Viola. But squabbles remain on, as politicians threaten to bring an entire project down.

Even for the smallest of improvements to stadiums, clubs have to go through a grueling municipal approval process. This has let them down when it comes to having potential VIP boxes at stadiums, making sure that they fail to sell games as an actual experience.

Ironically, average attendance has crossed 30,000 this season. And it has smashed a 26-year record, essentially matching numbers from when Serie A was at its peak.

Despite that, there has been a constant failure to turn bodies into revenue. This makes Serie A only the fourth-most earning league across the top five when it comes to revenue from ticket sales. Despite having comparable attendance figures, the Premier League earns close to three times the Serie A, as clubs in England own their stadiums and everything they earn is solely theirs.

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Collectively, these problems force a side like Bologna to sell a player like Dan Ndoye to Nottingham Forest, who won the bidding war for the Swiss winger over Napoli. Antonio Conte’s side looks set to secure another Champions League spot, while Nottingham is in a relegation battle in the EPL. It’s puzzling that the Midlands club could offer more money for Ndoye than Napoli, but it’s a pattern that will unfortunately keep repeating, and Italian football will continue losing some of its best players to other leagues. These quick sales would appear as a dopamine hits to Serie A clubs, who are always desperate for finances.

The money would be reinvested and the replacement would also follow the same path. But when Italian sides play in Europe, expectations from them would be massive because they were at the top over 20 years ago. Now, it is a case of them having to overperform constantly to meet the standards that the world sets for them. Failure means mockery, leading to the product attracting less and less attention over time.

What holds Italian football back are issues that a new manager or a shiny new signing simply can’t solve. It is a primitive system which drags the nation into mediocrity and pulls it towards financial ruin. Like a rot below the sink making the entire house stink.

Of course, Italian football will definitely benefit from a youth policy that adds uniformity to academies of clubs. The Coverciano coaching school in Florence can be trusted upon to spread ideas that can shape calcio too. After all, some of Italy’s best coaches have come through the institution and have installed principles that have refined the modern game.

Financial instability has stopped those ideas from infiltrating the very roots of Italian football. As a result, those concepts start to gain global appeal before they actually take root in their own country.