Comments on: Daily Calcio News and Notes: 8/5/08

By: Joseph C

Joseph C — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 22:22:41 +0000

If you ever have tryed to build house in Italy you run into the same problem. They don’t like giving up land. Where my family is in Salerno, the church owns a lot of the land. They move slower than are government when it comes to approving something. The city just built a stadium for Salernitana. They use it for other stuff like concerts but what else besides the clubs playing there would generate money for the city? Nobody wants to pull the trigger over there.

Anyways way more important news for all you Palermo fans. Junior Gotti got busted today on some bullshit charges. Just going after us Italians. Anyways hopefully none of your cousins or uncles got pick up with Gotti, and may he be out on bail with no hesitation. Shit don’t stick on tefflon.

By: MAD

MAD — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 22:03:57 +0000

I agree wholeheartedly regarding the stadium issue. I think that may be step 1a in getting the teams more fiscally aware of “real life”.

I think that streamlining the societies’ wage bill is right up there at 1b. To much money is tied up in administrative and on the field personnel-fee and wage. Not enough is coming in from ticket sales (stadium issues again), distribution rights and repackaging. I know that in the US, I get to see more games in a given weekend then I get when I am in Italy. And each team should be selling highlights- seasons-greats of [insert team here]- dvds worldwide, instead of locally.

By the way, this goes for the FIGC as well. which should be at the forefront of marketing the Serie A brand world wide. The players of Serie A are 4 time World Champions, they should be marketed to increase overall brand recognition… make the pie bigger for everyone.

By: ursus arctos

ursus arctos — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 17:54:22 +0000

I think that there is a lot of truth in that, but it is very difficult to implement given the generally poor state of the finances of nearly every Serie A club (even the “big” ones), the bureaucratic hurdles involved in getting permission to build something even if the club found the money and all of the challenges of major construction projects in Italy.

A number of clubs (including Inter and Roma) have had plans for building their own grounds, but nothing has every come of them. Juve have gotten much further than anyone else, and they are still a couple of years away from playing there (assuming that the new set of plans is in fact realised).

By: alessio

alessio — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 17:37:16 +0000

In my opinion, to move Serie A forward, we need teams to start buying out their stadiums. God knows the Italian city councils won’t make any meaningful (or timely) investments into the stadiums, and anyone who has been in them recently knows they are in some seriously bad states. As of now, Juventus is the only one who does…but we’re not playing in it.

By: ursus arctos

ursus arctos — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 15:05:00 +0000

A good roundup of the SuperCoppa debacle, the “re-branding” of Serie C and other examples of the profound malaise from which the administration of Italian football suffers can be found in the latest post on this excellent calcio blog http://www.ilrecalcio.blogspot.com/.