While Premier League clubs were spending their way through January,
committing to an outlay of over 800m Euros, in Italy it was a very different story.
Combined, Serie A clubs spent just 33m Euros on new players in the winter transfer window,
which amounts to just over half of what Bournemouth spent alone.
And they’re hardly a financial powerhouse.
So, what’s the problem in Italy? Why can’t anyone spend any money?
The nightly transfer window shows through January were tough to watch as Italy’s specialist
calciomercato reporters tried, with a straight face, to get viewers excited about Lo Spezia
signing a Pole, an Uzbek and a Latvian. One could be the next Khvicha Kvaratskhelia, after all.
This time last year was markedly different. The risk of missing out on the Champions
League and competition from Premier League clubs persuaded Juventus to break the Serie
A January transfer record and sign Dusan Vlahovic from Fiorentina for €70million.
The move was consistent with the Old Lady’s track record of making the biggest signing of the
winter. It happened in 2020 with the scrutinised cross-transaction of Nicolo Rovella, which the
FIGC cited in its case to punish Juventus with a 15-point penalty in the plusvalenza case.
Go back to 2019 and Juventus once again made the single most expensive acquisition in Serie A,
agreeing to hand over €44million to Atalanta for Dejan Kulusevski on the
back of four pulsating months on loan at Parma.
It serves as a reminder of how much Juventus drive the Serie A market. The investigations
into the club’s financial affairs, specifically the revenue generated
from player trading between 2019 and 2021, have had a chilling effect.
Juventus signed nobody this January, men’s team director Federico Cherubini was banned and the
recruitment department reshuffled under Francesco Calvo, the new head of Juventus’ Area Sport.
The club denies all wrongdoing and will appeal to the Italian Olympic
Committee’s Board of Guarantors. Juventus’ new chief executive,
Maurizio Scanavino, has been warmed by the solidarity shown by other clubs and
fanbases since the sentencing and spelled out the fear it has caused.
“It creates concern because today it can happen to Juventus,
tomorrow it can happen to any other team,” he said.
The concern helps, in part, to explain the air of caution around the Italian
transfer window. The renewed scrutiny of cross-transactions — the sale and simultaneous
purchase of a players’ registration rights concluded with the same counterpart — has,
in laymen’s terms, cautioned clubs against doing swaps.
That has meant signing them for cash instead and here’s the problem:
in Serie A, for the most part, there isn’t any.
Inter Milan have a €275million loan to repay by 2024 and the interest is 12 per cent. They, like
Roma, find themselves under a strict new financial fair play settlement agreement with UEFA.
Elsewhere, desperate Sampdoria are in fiscal difficulty, while Verona,
one of several clubs up for sale, continue to drift.
The only team flashing the cash this month, and relatively at that, too,
was Spezia on the back of selling Jakub Kiwior to Arsenal for €25million.
Spezia are deserving of praise for a couple of reasons. First of all,
two years on from gaining promotion to Serie A for the first time in the club’s history,
they could, come June, be the only team from the region of Liguria to still be in
the top-flight as Sampdoria may join Genoa in Serie B. Second, Kiwior was
a €2.2million pick-up from MSK Zilina and the symbol of a buy-low to sell-high strategy.
The hope is other players will now look at Spezia and consider the
club a pathway to teams like Arsenal who, unlike their peers in Serie A,
have the kind of spending power to bid higher and put cash on the table.
But the Kiwior deal also illustrates how dependent teams in Italy continue to be
on player trading in the absence of revenue growth in other areas.
It has been a window defined by players leaving or coming close to leaving. Take
Weston McKennie to Leeds and Hamed Traore to Bournemouth, for example. Then there’s the
case of Milan Skriniar, who was in talks to join PSG this window after already agreeing
to a free transfer to the Parc des Princes in the summer, a disaster for Inter who, a year on
from losing Ivan Perisic for nothing, now stand to make zilch from the club’s best centre-back.
Overall, it’s a depressing picture.The action may be thrilling on the surface — Serie A will
have a fourth different champion in four years if Napoli win the Scudetto — but pop
the hood and look underneath and the league would struggle to get an MOT.
Talking to TV channel RAI 3, Gian Gaetano Bellavia, an economist and legal expert,
said: “The world of football is extremely problematic. Every year it costs €3.5billion,
and in 2021, football clubs (in Italy) had debts of €4.5billion. It’s a bit
of a reflection of Italy. Who pays these debts? Who pays them back?”
This is why Serie A has to fight for its clubs to get new stadiums built. It’s why the league
has to consider external help. After rejecting €1.6billion in private equity
money two years ago amid concerns over how much power the clubs would give up and the
feeling it was a better deal for CVC than for Serie A, the league is still in financial pain.
In early February 2023, it was reported that JP Morgan, the Super League’s banker,
had written to the league to express interest in offering between €700million and €1billion
in bank financing to support the development of Serie A’s media business. US investors in Italian
clubs have long considered the league’s international rights to be undervalued.
But more than the money, Serie A needs expertise at league level on how to maximise its business
potential and overcome the governance issues that continue to hold it back.
Until then, it will struggle to invest in its teams and retain
its best players. No one wants windows like the last one to become the norm.