Serie A CEO Luigi de Siervo hopes that Juve’s points penalty is reconsidered and revealed the league loses €1 billion due to piracy every three years. De Siervo spoke to La Repubblica about the many issues affecting the league, primarily the impact of piracy on the competition, the rising debts and problems that have ‘ancient’ origins:
How much can Italian football lose compared to the three-year period 2021/24?
‘The most difficult tender for TV rights ever awaits us. The market is complex, we have seen Mediaset’s progressive disaffection and Sky’s choice, in the last three years, to have a more marginal role. But what is worrying is that we are in a system where there is a lack of legal certainty.”
Are you talking about piracy?
“With piracy, the one who loses out is certainly Serie A: the damage is around €1 billion every three years, but all football, even Serie B and the Lega Pro, is financed with money from television rights.”
Is there a lack of control?
‘There is above all the omissive attitude of the telecommunications companies. We have the sad record of being the country with the highest piracy rate in the world. And this has happened in the silence of politics and the authorities.”
In the crisis of Italian football, what does the Juventus case represent? An internal problem or damage to credibility on an international scale?
“My disappointment is with the fact that they wanted to intervene during the middle of the championship: this can be an element of distortion. For the rest, we are talking so far about hypotheses of crime and open proceedings: the hope is that this sanction for capital gains can be reconsidered because it is asymmetrical both at European and Italian level.”
So, apart from the Melandri law, the only problem is piracy?
“What is crucial for our future is that this government manages to include in one of the next pieces of legislation a clear regulation against football piracy, which has different characteristics from everything else: it needs immediate intervention, to bring down the pirate site within 30 minutes. Without this intervention we will always be the most pirated football in the world. Therefore poorer. And the responsibility can only lie with politics.”
