Italy Serie A considers divisions

I have found the quality of soccer in the bottom half of Serie A to be poor. I think that the bottom teams in the EPL are much better than the bottom teams in Serie A. The reason, of course, is that Italy is dominated by 5 teams. A few smaller, well organized teams like Chievo are near the top, but they usually do not win the Scudetto. (The last winner not in the "big 5" was Sampdoria in 1991.)

I can see how increasing the size of the league would help the smaller teams as they would share the TV revenue of Serie A every year, instead of the paltry revenue of Serie B. But, I'm not sure how this would help the league overall. The overall quality of the league would be watered down, resulting in more blowouts and fewer interesting matchups among the big teams.

 

There has actually been more variety among Serie A champions in the last five years than in the EPL. 4 years. 4 champions. And Inter could've/should have won at least one year which would've made it 5 champions in 5. Most of the 90s were dominated by Juventus and Milan, and that was a bad thing. In fact, the "dominant five teams" were actually the "Seven Sisters" because until the last two years you could count Parma and Fiorentina among teams that had legitimate scudetto aspirations each season.

There is no question the bottom of Serie A is weaker than usual this year with tiny teams like Como and Modena enjoying the rarefied air of the top flight. I think one of the big problems is that Serie A is the only major 18-team European league that relegates 4 teams. This means that from midtable down, every team is under incredible pressure to get a result every game of the season. There is little or no opportunity for those lower teams to give opportunities to younger players. It also promotes the conservative play for which Italy is so often criticized.

Although there are radical suggestions on the table like the one above - or removing pro/rel altogether -the most likely change for Serie A will just be a reduction of relegation spots from 4 to 3 or even 2.

What this WON'T help is the current disparity between teams from the North and South of Italy - in Serie A there are 17 teams from Rome or north, and just one (Reggina) in the South. Next year, it could well be 18 North and 0 South. The division of Serie B into regional divisions has been proposed as a solution to that problem, and the idea of dividing all the Serie A/B teams into divisions has sort of followed on that one.

 

In this new format. Would the new Fiorentina be included even though it is not in Serie B yet?

 

It's very unlikely to happen, but even if it did then Fiorentina wouldn't be in it as they are currently in C2. Even if they go up this year they still need to get through C1 before getting to B.

 

Well, that is the big question for me. If they choose to eliminate pro/rel, how do they choose the top 40 teams? A simple snapshot of Serie A/B and the top 2 teams in C1? If so, then that would exclude the new Florentia Viola team which, even though currently in C2, is among the top 10 attendance draws in the country. They would probably have some other criteria, perhaps based on stadium capacity and attendance. Still, choosing between the 35th and 45th teams is going to be very difficult.

And then you end up with a watered-down product to boot. So just because all the teams are now in the top division, it's not like they'd all suddenly get "
"serie a" revenues. I'm very leery.

 

I think I finally made sense of a poorly written part of that article.

I think this means that the top teams in C1 would go up. The next teams in C1 would playoff for the right to go up and join Serie A. IOW, this paragraph refers to the one season in which the number of teams above C1 would grow from 36 to 40.

If so, then there's no reason to think that in Season 2, there will be any difference in pro/rel. OK, they may change the number of teams that drop. But Fiorentina Viola will still have its chance to get to the top.

 

Actually, I'll admit I didn't even read the article. My information on the topic came from watching RAI yesterday, where it was reported that one of the proposals on the table is abolishing pro/rel entirely.

 

Does anybody know what the rest of the proposals are?