Italian Football In New Financial Decline Worry

March 30, 2012

It has been revealed this week that Italian football has lost a total of Eur428 million last season, with the findings of a new report highlighting football in the country is suffering from it’s worse financial climate in years.

The second edition of the ‘Football Report’ was published on Thursday having been produced by the Italian Football Federation (FIGC), professional services firm PricewaterhouseCoopers and Arel, Italy’s Agency of Research and Legislation. According to AFP, the collective loss marked a Eur80 million increase on the figures for the 2009-10 season with only 19 of the 107 clubs in the top four divisions generating a profit.

Revenues also declined by 1.2% to Eur2.5 billion with costs increasing by 1.5% to Eur2.9 billion. Attendances also fell by 4% across Italian football with a total of 13.3 million fans seeing gate receipts drop from Eur275.4 million to Eur253 million. The report is designed to identify opportunities for regulatory intervention in order to create a more competitive Italian game, but Italy’s Minister for Regional Affairs, Tourism and Sport, Piero Gnudi, admitted the results were “very worrying”.

“In other areas, with these numbers, we would be talking about companies close to bankruptcy,” he said. “The net worth of football is going down dramatically. We’ve seen other reports where everyone thought that the failure of the world of football is just around the corner and nothing happened. But today the country is going through a crisis…so it will be difficult to find sponsors who invest in football. In addition, we run the risk of not finding clubs that can register championships.”