Reforming Serie A: an urgent matter that can no longer be put off

There are five matchdays left until the end of the most technically and emotionally barren Serie A season in history, in what will likely be remembered for a long time as the annus horribilis of Italian football.

We haven’t even reached May yet, and on top of our national team’s third consecutive failure to qualify for the World Cup and the elimination of all our club sides from European competitions as early as the quarter-finals (something that hasn’t happened for nearly 40 years), as of yesterday we can consider any remaining interest in the league to be all but over.

Inter are set to win the title with their feet up, the battle for the places guaranteeing entry to the next Champions League has taken a fairly clear turn, and even the relegation battle is now confined to just two teams, Cremonese and Lecce, with Pisa and Verona virtually already relegated.

In short, whilst we could once at least take comfort in the unpredictability of our league, it seems that even this aspect has now deserted us. A genuine and radical change is urgently needed – in terms of people, ideas and plans – but since ‘the octopus’ requires certain guarantees to remain in place, it is likely that following Gravina’s resignation, we will end up jumping out of the frying pan into the fire with either Malagò or Abete.

We’ll go back to babbling about reforms and barking at the moon about a rebirth after our national team’s first friendly win, but you can bet that without government intervention, apart from a few minor tweaks and marginal measures, everything will remain virtually unchanged.

Yet one of the first steps that should be taken, to try and restore some enthusiasm and appeal to our league abroad as well, is to change the format of Serie A, currently an absurd twenty-team tournament stuffed with useless sides like Torino FC, Udinese, Fiorentina, Genoa or Parma, accustomed to spending their seasons languishing around mid-table.

If there is one idea on which almost everyone, albeit at different times, is converging, it is that football, to survive the growing disinterest of the younger generations, needs two things above all: more spectacle and more big matches. There’s no point beating about the bush: matches like Juventus v Inter, Milan v Napoli or Roma v Lazio are worth, at every level, roughly the same as ten or twenty Torino FC v Parma fixtures.

The number of teams in the top flight must be drastically reduced, but not just to eighteen or sixteen – which would already help enormously without, however, solving the problem decisively – but, in my view, to as few as ten. Instead of two leagues, Serie A and Serie B, each with twenty teams, let’s have four leagues of ten, with cross-over play-offs between the top sides in the second half of the season.

Imagine a league where every Sunday the only matches played are between Inter, Milan, Napoli, Juventus, Como, Roma, Lazio, Atalanta, Bologna and Sassuolo. All big matches, or almost all, but above all fewer fixtures, which would also allow us to restructure the Coppa Italia more effectively, perhaps based on the current format of the Champions League, and create an innovative second tournament ready to attract interest and sponsors from abroad too.

Too good to be true? Probably, but I’m keeping this detailed proposal of mine tucked away, ready to be sent to the relevant authorities. You never know, perhaps one day an enlightened commissioner will come along...

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