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. Photo by Getty Images/Getty Images 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 a study from the CIES Football Observatory , U-21 players eligible for the Italian national team played in just 1.
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