Serie A is back.
While the price of national television transactions of the series continues to fall, enthusiasts continue to compete in the ruins of the country week after week. In October 2023, Serie A clubs agreed with a national agreement of $ 977 million consisting of the year with Dazn to transmit the summer from 2024 to 2029. This figure has decreased compared to the existing agreement, which is around of $ 1 billion with one year after year, shared between Dazn and Sky Italy.
And yet, while there is diminishing hunger from TV executives to pay big money for Serie A, attendances for games haven’t been higher. After 30 games of this season, the average attendance for Serie A is 30,913, the third highest among Europe’s top five leagues. Compared a decade ago, when the 2013-14 average attendance was just 23,331, the leap is huge. In fact, you have to go back some 26 years to the last time Serie A posted figures this impressive, to a time when Serie A was still the greatest league in the world.
Superstars such as Ronaldo, Alessandro Del Piero, Roberto Baggio, Zinedine Zidane, Gabriel Batistuta — and everyone in between — played to an average attendance of 31,223 during the 1997-98 season. Then, Serie A was home to the cream of the crop from the world game. Now, there isn’t anywhere close to the same level of players in the league (not even in the biggest teams), but the appetite for fans to return to arenas across the country has swelled to unseen numbers in the 21st century.
Prior to the pandemic, attendance had been on a slow upward trajectory. The 2017-18 season saw the figure jump to 24,783 from 21,966 the year prior. Juventus were in the midst of their stranglehold of the Italian game, but Napoli’s title challenge raised excitement among fans, even if their challenge ultimately collapsed in a hotel room in Florence. The following season saw the figure jump again, slightly, to 25,062.
Then Covid happened and without total knowledge for 3 direct seasons. Last season, the first full crusade in 4 years, when all stadiums were absolutely open to the public for a full season. The end result resulted in a huge increase in fans attending matches, with 29,537 average attendances, the most Italy had seen since the 2000-01 season.
Now that figure has risen again (and it would be higher were Atalanta not redeveloping part of Gewiss Stadium, limiting their capacity), but why?
We have the feeling that enthusiasts, who can no longer go to the stadiums for more than a year due to the pandemic, were no longer passing through to keep the footballs to acquire. Games has reignited the thirst of Calcio enthusiasts to broadcast stadiums across the country, a vintage “you don’t know what you’ve got until it’s no longer there. “In Europe, make the exhibition like Italy and therefore in the virtual age where everything is an “event” and where everything is downloaded on social media, the preference on the south bend of the Stadio Olimpico after the Roma on some other closed countertop In shape or be among the 70,000 enthusiasts in a deafening wholesome, now it’s bigger than ever.
The people have returned, but the Italian government cannot let this renewed wave of enthusiasm go to waste. Juventus and Udinese aside, all of the teams in Serie A deserve better stadiums and, as ever, clubs are still struggling to get stadium projects off the ground. Atalanta’s newly constructed Curva Sud should be built and in use by the beginning of next season, expanding the capacity to 23,000 seats. Yet nothing else is currently in the works.
Of course, the country is full of stadium “blueprints,” blueprints and rendered photographs showing what proposed new stadiums could look like in the distant future. But Rome, Inter and Milan are still fighting with city councils over permission, while Fiorentina, Bologna and Cagliari are in other stages of their own fight. Now that Italy shares hosting duties for Euro 2032 with Türkiye, the Italian government is under pressure for its notoriously strict legislation related to structural projects. Thirteen of the stadiums used by existing Serie A groups were built before 1967; seven date back to World War II.
Fans deserve comfortable seats close to the pitch with modern facilities. Anyone who’s been to the vast majority of major grounds in Italy can testify this isn’t the case, far from it in fact.
With fans now returning in droves, the ball is firmly with the Italian state, and with Euro 2032 only eight years away, the pressure is growing.
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