The Future of Italian Football Finance

This is the Guardian . Sip your way to your next getaway. Collect Avios with the Wine Flyer . A bottle of champagne shared in the summer sun. A Provence Rose savored over a weekend picnic. Every bottle brings you closer to discovering your next adventure . Start collecting and spending Avios whenever you pop open your favorite wine. Meet wine that whisks you away with five Avios for every one pound spent. Discover more at the wineflyer.co.uk The audio long read is supported by AXA Health Insurance. We all like to feel cared for, AXA Health Insurance builds their teams with people who care, so when you need them, they're there to support you. Their customer care team helps you access the health care you need quickly. But more than that, they listen, they support, they care. For example, AXA Health's dedicated cancer case managers will be a consistent point of contact through cancer treatment and beyond. And, with the ACSA Health Plan, your family can also have that feeling of care. They're the only health insurance provider in the UK that allows you to include family members up to two generations from you, even if they live at different addresses. Pre-existing conditions are not covered, and cover is subject to your policy terms and the care options you've chosen. For cover that cares, visit axahealth.co.uk The Guardian Archive Longre ad Hello, I'm Tobias Jones, an author and journalist living in Italy. I wrote I Feel Like I'm Selling My Soul Inside the Crisis at Juventus, published in 202 3 . This is the story of why Juventus, Italy's big gest football club, was docked 15 points in the 22-23 Serie A season for, as the prosecutor said, repeated violations of the principle of truth. The club was shown to be incessantly trading players at inflated prices to cover up losses of hundreds of millions of euros . So I was drawn to this story because, as well as loving football, especially Italian football, I'm particularly interested in what happens in the murky background of that glamorous sport. And one of the key tenets of journalism is follow the money. And following the money in Italian football takes you to some very surprising places. It was shown that Juventus was spending ninety-two percent of its revenue stream on players' wages. And they were buying and selling players not according to whether they were good footballers In the world, and which is now outdated and indebted. So it's a sort of riches to rag story . So in the aftermath of this article, one of the protagonists, Fabio Parattici, who'd gone to Tottenham Hotspur had to resign. Andrea Agnelli, the famous owner of Juventus, has sort of disappeared from public view . And Juventus has really failed to win any big trophy sin But it's more than about Juventus and Serie A, really. It's about how a billion pound industry should be regulated and overseen recently in the Premier League clubs like Manchester City and Chelsea have been shown or suspected of repeated financial violations, and everyone knows that the incessant churn of players is what football is actually So it the article in a way begs the question of whether football is about belonging or about rootlessness, about whether players represent teams or represent investments . Just a warning. There's a little bit of bad language in this article. Welcome to the Guardian Long Read, showcasing the best long form journalism covering culture, politics, and new thinking. For the text version of this and all our long reads, go to theguardian.com forward slash longwead I feel like I'm selling my soul. Inside the crisis at Juventus by Tobias Jones . On the twentieth of January this year, the Italian Football Association shocked fans throughout the world by docking 15 points from its most iconic club, Juventus, in the middle of the season. Suddenly dropped seven places in the Serie A table . The club was accused of falsely inflating the value of players in transfer dealings and in a separate case of lying to shareholders. The Italian football association FEGC accused Juventus of repeated violations of the principle of truth . In a country renowned for provincialism, Juventus Based in the northern city of Turin, it has about eight million supporters, far more than its nearest rivals Milan and Inter . But in the wake of repeated scandals, the club has also become a symbol for the downfall of Italian football . At the center of the club's current crisis were a series of suspicious transfer deals. In 2021, the regulatory body overseeing Italian football had raised concerns with the FAEGC about 62 player transfers between clubs in Italy and abroad. Forty two of those involved Juventus . The club is accused of having relied on a system whereby two clubs swapped players for exactly the same amount and magically improved their balance sheets without actually spending or banking any money. The value of the players being exchanged was allegedly inflated by both sides of the deal to show plus valence or capital gains, the profit on the sale of an asset. The points deduction which Juventus immediately challenged was just the latest crisis to hit the club. Two months earlier, the entire board of directors includ There are now two ongoing cases involving Juventus, one the overseen by Sporting Magistrature regarding capital gains, the other a criminal case in which Juventus is accused of false accounting, market manipulation, obstructing inspectors, and fraudulent Meanwhile, a wider challenge looms. In twenty twenty two, Juventus' revenues slumped eight percent, while its operating costs increased 7.6% . In the past five years, the club has asked shareholders for cash injections of 700 million euros to cover losses of six hundred twelve point nine million euros. It's as if there's been a sinkhole, Giovanni Coboli Gili, Chair of Juventus between two thousand six and two thousand nine told me . There has been this continuous chasing of revenues when what they should have been doing was limiting the disproportionate and senseless costs . Plus Valence scandal didn't involve Juventus alone. The seventy million Euro transfer from Lille to Napoli of Victor Osiman, the star of this season Serie A is also mired in controversy. The four minor Napoli players traded for Os imen are alleged to have been massively overvalued at 19.8 million euros in order to offset the cost . Yet while Juventus wasn't the only club moving players around like chess pieces merely for accounting purposes. The allegations, if proven, would show that the club took the practice to new levels. One Juventus executive rec,orded by investigators looking into the club's murky finances, said, I feel as if I'm selling my soul . In the 1980s and 90s, Serie A was the richest and most glamorous league in the world, where players received the best salaries and fans enjoyed the best football. Now it has become the poor relation of the other major European leagues, with many clubs sinking into the quicksand of debt. According to the latest report from the FAEGC, the accumulated debts of Italian football currently stand at 5.3 billion euros . In mid-April, Juventus's 15-point deduction was rescinded, pending a retrial, and the club sprang back up the table to third place . But that judgment only added to the sense that Serie A is a creaking product, with the position of the league's most famous club dependent on legal, not sporting results. The Juventus scandals are a window into not just the w ider crises in Italian football, but the rot at the heart of the sport . To Italians, Juventus has long evoked both aristocratic glamour and a reputation for chicanery. It was founded in eighteen ninety seven by a group of rich kids from Turin, who gave the club its fancy Latin name meaning youth, and the kit that featured pink shirts with black bow ties . It was seen as the theme of the upper classes, whereas the workers tended to support the city's other club, Tor This image was sealed when Juventus was acquired in nineteen twenty three by Giovanni Agnelli, a businessman who had made a fortune through armament, aviation, shipping, ball bearings , textiles, cement, steel, and retail stores. By then Juventus had swapped its pink shirts for its iconic vertical black and white stripes. There were links between the textile indust ries of Nottingham and Tur in, and when players wrote to order a new kit from England, they received the Knots County strip with black and white stripes . For the past century, the story of Juventus has also been the story of the Agnelles . They have often been described as the Italian version of the Kennedy clan , a royal family within a republic whose name evokes mystique and tragedy. Eduardo Agnelli, who Giovanni had installed as Juva Chair, was killed in a plane accident in nineteen thirty five. His wife, mother to his seven children, died in a car crash in nineteen forty five. One of the couple's sons died in a psychiatric unit in nineteen sixty five. A grandchild died of cancer aged thirty three, another killed himself in two thousand . There was romance and success too. Gianni , Giovanni's grandson, became Juventus chairman in nineteen forty se He was described by Vanity Fair as the godfather of style and an international playboy who hung out with Prince Rainier of Monaco, Errol Flynn, and Rita Hayworth. He also had an affair with Winston Churchill's daughter in law Pamela. The family's company, Fiat, dominated the industrial landscape of post war Italy, and those who supported Jument us felt there were touched by that cosmopolitan Agnelli Gold Dust. It wasn't just the team of the bosses, but of those who aspired to be like them . To its detractors, the club's unofficial motto sums up its dubious mentality. Winning is not important. It's the only thing that matters. The slogan was coined by Giampiero Boniperti, a former Juve player, who went on to become chairman. Between nineteen forty six and nineteen sixty one, Boniperti scored one hundred seventy eight goals for Juventus, but because of the Italy wide cap on salary, his pay packet didn't reflect his true value . To circumvent the regulations, Gianni Agnelli offered to give Boniperti, the son of farmers, a cow for every goal he scored . One day the farmer who sold the cows to Agnelli phoned him to complain. Boniperti always chose a cow that wasn't cal f. Typical Juventus . There have been many other crises and scandals. In 2004, the club doctor was found guilty of having supplied performance-enhancing drugs to players during the late 1990 Was the ringleader in a system of influencing referees that involved several top teams, a scandal known as Calcio poly. The club was duly relegated to Serie B. Ten years later, the suicide of the club's supporter liaison officer Ciccio Bucci led to an investigation that revealed Juventus had been supplying tickets to hardcore fans or ultras, despite their links to organized crime , Italy is divided between those who see Juventus as arch cheaters and those who believe the club is always singled out by resentful and biased magistrates. As Herbie Sykes writes in his book Juve , Italian football is essentially binary, so there's a Juventus version and an anti-Juventus version . The debate was precisely summarized by an exchange I overheard in a bar in January, on the day the points deduction was announced. It wasn't only Juventus, said a fan, referring to the Plusvalence scandal. No, his friend replied, but it is always Juvento us. After the Katshopori scandal in 2006, Juventus fought their way back to Serie A. In May 2010, Andrea Agnelli, grandson of Edoardo, became chairman and he slowly took the club back to the summit of Italian football. Key to the club's resurgence was Agnelli 's decision to hire Beppe Marotta as CEO and sporting director . Marotta arrived from stints at smaller Serie A clubs, where he'd gained a reputation for brilliance in the transfer market and in managing the interpersonal dressing room dynamics on which successful squads are built. Soon afterwards, Antonio Conte became manager and under his guidance, followed by that of Max Allegri, spotting triumphs ensued. Starting in the 2011-12 season, Juventus won Serie A nine times in a row . Agnelli appeared even more successful on the financial side. A new stadium had been opened in 2011, with naming rights sold for 75 million euros before construction had even begun in 2008 . In twenty seventeen, naming rights were sold again to the German finance giant Allianz . Agneli believed that the club could bring in fresh sources of revenue if it reinvented itself as a lifestyle brand, whose signature would be the letter J . Near the stadium, the club built a J Museum, the J Medical, and began further development under the J Village Property F und, which oversaw a J Hotel, the JTC, a training center, and so on. In twenty twelve, Jeep became the club's most important sponsor. In twenty seventeen, the club unveiled a distinctive new logo. Two black lines on a white background forming a stylized J . During those heady years, supermarkets, school playgrounds, and sports centers were full of J slippers, J backpacks, and J shorts. Agnelli was also a rising political power in European football. In 2017, he became president of the European Club Association, an organization representing two hundred thirty four member clubs across the continent. Among other things, the ECA was in constant negotiation with UEFA, the governing body of football in Europe, to ring out more cash for clubs involved in the Champions League. As Agnelli talked with his UEFA counterpart, the Slov enian Alexander Chaferin, the two developed a friendship. They became so close that Agneli asked Cheferin to be godfather at his daughter's baptism in the Vatican . But in the summer of twenty eighteen, Agnelli made a decision that would have catastrophic consequences for the finances of his club. In April, Juventus had lost at home to Real Madrid in the Champions League. Cristiano Ronaldo had scored two goals, won an overhead kick so gravity defying it was applauded by the entire stadium. Juve had reached the Champions League final in 2015 and 2017, and Agnelli was fixated on winning it . He decided the only way was to bring Ronaldo to Juventus. He convinced himself that investing one hundred sixteen million euros to buy Ronaldo made both sporting and financial sense. Marotta, the man responsible for the club's transfer policy, fiercely disagre ed. He was wary of wages getting out of control and feared Ronaldo's domineering personality would upset the dynamic and the changing room . Agnelli got his way. In July 2018, Ronaldo arrived at Juventus , and a few months later, Marotta left . Ronaldo's time at Juventus wasn't unsuccessful. He scored 100 1 goals and 134 appearances, winning Serie A twice. But the Champions League remained elusive, and the financial effect on the club was devastating. It was a huge error, Koboli Gili told me. An example of a system being drugged by money in order to chase sporting results, which are always subject to chance . That was the sliding doors moment, says an executive of an Italian football club who asked to remain anonymous. There was an inflationary effect on the wages. Ronaldo's gross salary cost Juventus 54.24 million euros a year, a sum that surpassed the entire wage bill of many smaller Serie A clubs, where players earn 1 to 2 million euros a year. The effect was exactly as Marotta had predicted. According to a report by Deloitte, the percentage of UV's revenue spent on wages shot up from sixty six percent in twenty eighteen to eighty four percent in twenty twenty two . Another estimate from the influential football and finance site Swiss Ramble suggests that by different calculations that ratio is now The biggest problem in football finances, says Roger Mitchell, founding CEO of the Scottish Professional Football League, and now a sports brand consultant based in Italy isn't the top line, it's the cost line, the player wages line. And 92% is at least 20% higher than where it should be. With revenues bound to fluctuate according to results and qualification for lucrative competitions like the Champions League, such a high wage bill was an obvious hostage to fortune. And when the pandemic arrived, Juventus was especially vulnerable . The pandemic was a tragedy for everyone, Alessio Secco, a former Juventus sporting director, told me . But for those who had toyed a little with fate, it created enormous difficulties. The knots, he said, using a phrase that implies chickens coming home to roost, came to the comb . Thanks for listening to the Guardian Longread. The story continues right after this . Calling all passengers to their next escape . The Tuscan Hills are waiting for you. And the Wineflyer is here to help you reach them, collect and spend Avios each time you sip your favorite Chianti . Before long, you'll be basking in the Italian sun . Everyday spending that takes you one step closer to uncorking your next adventure. With five Avios for every one pound spent. Discover more at thewineflyer.co.uk Chase is the digital bank that gives your savings a boost anytime anywhere even when I'm fast asleep you bet you could earn 4.5% AER variable including a 2.25% AER fixed boost for 12 months right now with Chase, you could be boosting your way to O'Dream Wedding. Exactly. Search Chase Boosted Saver. 18 plus UK residents available to new Chase current account customers for their first 31 days. 4.41% gross. Interest pay monthly eligibility and terms of play . Welcome back to the Guardian Long Read In November 2018, Marotta's protege had taken over as the club sporting director. Fabio Paratici had been an itinerant player in the lower leagues, starting out in the Piacenza youth team and eventually playing for twelve different clubs. He was a man who had endured adversity . In nineteen ninety four, he suffered career-rethatening injuries in a car crash, but he recovered and continued to play for another decade . But it was only after his playing career ended that Paratici's football career took off. His luck turned in 2004 when he was appointed by Marotta to be head scout at Sampdoria . Surrounding himself with dozens of TVs that showed games from around the world, Paratici built a youth team that won the triple in the 2007-8 season, the youth team Scudetto, the Italian Cup, and the Super Cup. In 2010, he moved to Juventus with Marota and, when his mentor left in twenty eighteen, Paratici was the obvious successor. He was very charismatic, a Juventus insider told me. Very sociable. He was a fun guy, smiling all the time . You could tell he enjoyed the high life, being part of the Glitterati, surrounded by beautiful women . The good times came to an end in the spring of 2020, when COVID struck . Between march 9, 2020 and june twentieth, there were no matches in Serie A, meaning no match their revenue through ticket sales. Even worse from a financial point of view, broadcasters began demanding renegotiations or rebates on TV deals. With Juventus' wages now devouring so much of the club's dwindling revenue, Par atici asked players to take a pay cut. On march twenty eighth, twenty twenty, Juventus formally announced that its playing staff had renounced four months of wages, implying a saving for the public ly quoted company of around 90 million euros . But before the announcement was made, the club and its captain Giorgio Chialini secretly signed an agreement, whereby the club promised to pay in full three of those four months at a future date. In a bilingual message to the players' WhatsApp chat, Ci ellini explained this smoke and mirrors trick to his peers. Juventus will make a press release where it will say that we are waiving four months salary to help the club. I reiterate to communicate only this in the press. For stock market legislative reasons , you're asked not to speak in interviews about the details of this private agreement . Now that Covid had created a hole in the Juventus accounts, Paratici began systemat ically using player exchanges to increase the revenues of the company without actually receiving any money, an accounting technique called plus Valence Incrociate, exchanged or crossed cap ital gains . The system worked because, as with modern art, it's notoriously difficult to put an accurate figure on the value of a football player. If two clubs could agree to sell to each other players that were officially on the balance sheet worth 1 million euros for 10 times that amount for 10 million euros, each could record a capital gain of 9 million euros and add to their books a new asset reportedly worth 10 million euros. It might have been questionable, but it wasn't illegal. Who was to say that the young player hadn't increased in value tenfold. After all, the market undervalues emerging players all the time . Plus Valence was not new. It had been a common practice throughout It alian football prior to Covid. In his book Il Calcio del Futuro, The Football of the Future, Carlo Diana, a former Juventus marketing manager, writes of Italian football being close to declaring bankruptcy, and describes how the industry has been sustaining itself for years thanks only to Plus Valence . The pressure to disguise losses through inflated capital gains seem to have come from the very top. In an email to Paratici and other colleagues on february twenty second, twenty twenty, Andrea Agnelli urged his staff to contain losses through corrective actions . But after the COVID crisis, Paratici began incessantly swapping players with other clubs for allegedly inflated amounts. In the transfer window of the summer of 2020, the Bosnian midfielder Mir Lempianich moved from Juventus to Barcelona for 60 million euros, while the Brazilian midfielder Artur Melo moved the other way for 72 million euros . Both figures seemed to hugely overestimate the players' value. These kinds of deals, of which there were many more, seemed to be win win. As Paratici said in a wiretapped phone call to the Director General of Pisa in september twenty twenty one, if all goes well, there will be loads of money for every one . The practice had become so embedded that in wiretapped conversations, Juventus directors began asking their auditors advice about how to supercatsolare Befadl inspectors at the National Italian Stock Exchange. The transfers often seem to have nothing to do with football. In some cases, Juventus are accused of having decided the value of capital gains required and only then chosen which player suited the sum . In the words of the FAEGC's initial judgment, Juventus systematically planned the realization of capital gains regardless of the identity of the subject to be exchanged, often indicated with a simple X in place of the name of the Juventus players to be sol d. The judgment also recorded surprise that almost everyone at the club appears to have known about the practice. In may twenty twenty one, the public prosecutor in Tur in opened a secret investigation, known as Prisma, into the club's finances . The investigation discovered that Juventus had undisclosed debts to various clubs, players, and agents . One club executive admitted to investigators there is 7 million euros in debt with Atalanta that has never been entered in the balance sheet. One agent was owed 400 ,000 euros. The club's debts to players who were owed months of salary became a form of credit bondage, whereby the money owed could be used as an incentive to stay. With unpaid salaries being rewritten as a loyalty bonus . A secret document was unearthed in which Paratici in july twenty twenty one had written an IOU to Ronaldo for a figure believed to be 19.9 million euros for another round of secretive salary payments during the 2020-2 1 season . In response to a list of questions put to Juventus for this article, the club said that it would not be possible to interview Agnelli and sent over links to its press releases on these matters. Dated April 12, 2023, Juventus announced that the company believes that it has correctly applied the relevant international accounting standards and that it has acted in full compliance with the principle of fair play. By 2021, it was clear that Juventus was struggling to keep afloat. For years the club had enjoyed cheap credit as interest rates were near zero, but as inflation and borrowing costs rose, the debt ridden club found itself in ever greater difficulty. There was, thought Agnelli, a quick fix, if Juventus and other European so called superclubs could create a super league. Revenue might not only increase, but actually be guaranteed. England, Liverpool, Tottenham Otsburg, Manchester City, Manchester United, Arsenal and Chelsea would never be knocked out . With a three and a half billion euro loan from JP Morgan to be shared among the clubs, the plan would have instantly blown away UV's cash flow problems . News of the Super League broke in April 2021, and it quickly became a PR disaster for Agn elli, Juventus, and just about everyone else involved . The secrecy of the plan made it seem sneaky, and the closed shop nature of competition, albeit with six additional places up for grabs each year, made the clubs appear arrogant . When you're making change in sport, says Roger Mitchell, the trick is humility. You need to say you respect the past and so on, but with the Super League, the comms were horrible . Since the proposed super league would have ended outright UEFA's iconic competition the Champions League, it was a direct assault on UE FA, and Chefer in felt personally wounded by his friend's betrayal. In a hastily arranged press conference in April 2021, Cheferin denounced the disgraceful, self serving proposal, and talked about the club's greed, selfishness, and narcissism. He compared Agnelli to a snake, and later a vampi re The very public spat between UE FA and the Super League became a personal battle between their respective figureheads, Jefferin and Agnelli . The former had been brought up in humble surroundings in Slovenia . A lean strategist, Cheferin easily outmaneuvered Agnelli, playing the part of the common man to perfection . We will not allow them to take football away from us, he said, encouraging fant protests across the continent. By contrast, Agnelli appeared privileged and elitist. He looked like a trust fund baby, says Mitchell . Within days of its midnight launch, the Super League brand had become toxic. Wavering clubs, Paris Saint Germain and Bayern Munich backed UE FA, and the English clubs began hastily withdrawing and apologizing to their fans . For years Agnelli had exuded an aura of patrician professionalism, but now he appeared incompetent . A spray painted picture of him stabbing and deflating a football in Rome was widely shared on social media. To his critics, he was the man who wanted to kill the sport . For those who had worked at Juventus, the Super League Fiasco was no surprise. According to various sources who spoke to me on condition of anonymity, the workplace was always dysfunctional. Agnelli thinks he's a visionary, one former executive told me, but he's a sociopath, a complete control freak . With the prospect of Super League cash gone, Agnelli was desperately trying to find ways to generate income . In september twenty twenty one he hosted a power lunch for the bosses of the FAGC, Serie A and of various other clubs in an attempt to persuade them to create a media company to handle the broadcast rights for Serie A . I hope something emerges from this, he confided to the Director General of Atalanta after the meeting in a wiretapped conversation. Otherwise I don't know what to do. We're slowly going to crash . Shortly afterwards, the club was forced to return to shareholders for a recapitalization . Having already sought a cash injection of two hundred ninety eight million euros in december twenty nineteen. In december twenty twenty one they raised a further four hundred million euros from shareholders . There was also increasing disquiet within the club about Plusvalence . One executive was recorded by investigators saying I swear I've had evenings in which I go home and I feel sick just thinking about it. The practice of buying and selling players purely for bookkeeping reasons was taking its toll on the team too. Incessant churn . Last year's transfers were only about plus Valence, and so it was a fucked up market, he complained in a wiretapped conversation. With Fabio Paratici, there's no reasoning, one executive said to a colleague in another recording. For as long as Marotta was there, he could put brakes on him, but once he left, Fabio had carte blanche. He could wake up in the morning and sign 20 million euros without anyone saying anything. Paratici, who declined to be interviewed for this article, eventually left Juventus in May 202 In the immediate aftermath of Agnelli's resignation last November, Juventus announced that it had revised its accounts, admitting that it had underestimated losses for the twenty twenty twenty one year by twenty one million euros, bringing its official losses to 2 26.8 million euros . The financial statements of Juventus, the F EGC wrote in his ruling against the club in January, are simply not reliable . Agnelli was banned from involvement in Italian football for two years . Parati ci, the man at the center of the scandal, was banned for two and a half . FIFA, the governing body of global football, has since extended that ban worldwide. After losing his appeal earlier this month, Paratici resigned from his role as managing director of football at Tottenham Hotspur, the club he joined in summer of twenty twenty one . Juventus has announced that the company trusts it will be in a position to demonstrate the correctness of its conduct at the Plusvalenza retrial, which will take place at the end of May. There is no possibility that Juventus will go bust. sixty three .8% of its shares are held by the financial giant X OR, which is owned by the Agnelli family and which enjoyed a net income in 2022 of 6.2 billion euros . But the crisis is likely to become even more acute in the coming months. The next hearing into the criminal case will take place on may tenth, and UE FA might also intervene, with powers to impose transfer embargoes, financial penalties, or even exclusion from UEFA competitions . Those who defend Juventus point out that it is subject to far more scrutiny, not just because it is the country's most famous club, but because, as one of only two publicly listed companies in Serie A, the other being Lazio, it is subject to different rules and increased scrut All the other football clubs that are not publicly listed companies have a greater freedom of action and a big advantage compared to those that are . Most observers feel it's inevitable that Juventus will be delisted in the coming months, to avoid such restrictions and burdens. But buying out all other shareholders is likely to be an extremely expensive operation for EXO. In February, Juventus supporters complaining of buyers were given extra When footage emerged from 2019 in which Ciro Santoriello, who would go on to become one of the Prisma investigators, joked about being a Napoli fan who hates Juventus . If the system wants to bring down a protagonist, it can always create a scandal. Carlo Diana, the former Juventus marketing manager, told me wearily . Many Juventus insiders believe that although he came up with the wrong answers, Andrea Agnelli was actually asking the right question. How can Italian football increase revenue to make it competitive once more . UV's crisis lays bare the financial predicament in which most Italian football clubs now find themselves. There is a vicious circle of low investment, which makes it hard to attract or retain the very best players, which makes it impossible to sell media rights at top rates, which means there is low investment, and on and on. The product just looks awful, says Mitchell. The stadiums are dreadful, the empty stands look horrible, the football is two gears slower than in Spain or England. A law that limits the sale of broadcast rights to short-term deals means that investors have no incentive to nurture the long-term development of the product. The collapse of TV rights sales has brought many Italian clubs to the brink of bankruptcy. In the 2021-24 cycle, the foreign rights to Serie A were sold for $6 58 million dollars five hundred twenty nine million pounds compared with in the twenty twenty two to twenty five period the Premier League's six point five five billion dollars or for the twenty eighteen to twenty four period La Liga's four point four eight billion euros . With current income from foreign media rights now so low, Serie A clubs are exploring selling a share of future revenues to investors . In June 2022, Barcelona, another club caught up in the spending arms race at now 1.1 billion euros in debt, sold 25 % of the club's TV rights until 2047 to an investment firm. Football finance experts are aghast at the prospect, likening the move to taking out a second mortgage. It's always jammed today, pay tomorrow, says Mitchell. Like many others, he uses the language of addiction to describe clubs' desperate search for cash. These deals, he wrote recently on his consultancy business's website, are like giving a junkie ten bags of cash with the request that they go and get a hot meal. You know what is really going to happen . Rather than investing in infrastructure, the money will go on players and agents in the never ending quest for sporting success. Seiko, the former Juventus sporting director, points to subtle, almost anthropological reasons for the current crisis. Football in Italy, he says, has always been a party, something that allowed you to escape the conditions