Serie A CEO blames TV piracy for Italy decline

Serie A CEO Luigi De Siervo has pointed to amerciable streaming and the resulting deficiency of TV gross arsenic a origin down Italy's struggles to nurture homegrown endowment arsenic the Azzurri strive to instrumentality to the World Cup for the archetypal clip since 2014.

Once a imperishable fixture astatine the World Cup, four-times satellite champions Italy find themselves successful dire straits having missed retired connected the past 2 editions and astatine hazard of missing retired connected a 3rd aft losing their archetypal qualifier against Norway.

Italian authorities precocious intensified efforts to antagonistic online piracy, which is costing billions of euros to broadcasters and sports leagues globally arsenic they effort to support the worth of their broadcast rights.

TV rights marque up the bulk of gross for Serie A teams and De Siervo said "there is inactive a upland to climb" aft they mislaid gross to the tune of €300 cardinal ($345.15m) past year.

"Many question wherefore our nationalist squad is successful this concern and wherefore determination is simply a deficiency of talent, 1 crushed being the losses owed to piracy," De Siervo said astatine an lawsuit connected the combat against piracy.

"All the wealth that is mislaid each twelvemonth is not invested successful the younker teams and successful the maturation of our young players, a large contented that has led our nationalist squad to look galore difficulties.

"In summation to this, the age-old facilities bash not let the clubs and the strategy to get precocious revenues. This has to beryllium changed and this instrumentality goes successful the close direction."

De Siervo said if they proceed to suffer revenue, Italy and Serie A could tumble down UEFA's coefficient rankings.

"We are already acold down the Premier League and the Spanish LaLiga," helium said.

"If we proceed similar this, we volition decorativeness down the Germans and we volition extremity up being astatine the bottommost of the array [of Europe's apical 5 leagues] unneurotic with the French."