All the facts and figures about Italian football in the annual report put together by the FIGC in collaboration with AREL and PwC: professional football has generated €3.8 billion in revenue, and has made €1.3 billion in tax and social security contributions. 4.6 million players taking part, and 570,000 competitive matches contested, which amounts to one every 55 seconds, and 1.4 million members, which produces a total of €3.1 billion. These numbers are sufficient, set out in the 10 th annual ReportCalcio, to give an update on the state of the 12,127 Italian football clubs and the 64,827 active clubs are testament to football’s continued status as Italy’s leading sport, with professional football generating a total of €3.8 billion in revenue and making almost €1.3 billion in tax and social security contributions.

The document dealt with the same range of topics as usual, ranging from a survey of Italian football to an examination of the profile of the National Teams on a sporting, media and commercial level. Our research also examined into the development of youth and amateur football to an analysis of our economic, financial, organisational, infrastructural and fiscal profile of professional football in Italy. New to this year’s edition is an additional section which analyses the profile of the fanbase of Italian football.

“The efforts to make the FIGC more transparent in the last ten years,” observed Federation President Gabriele Gravina,”have been followed up with a vital new section that places focus on the positive and negative aspects of world of football without any spin. As is clear from this instalment of ReportCalcio, football has a vital socio-economic impact, characterised both by its tremendous contributions now and its potential for the future. The Federation is keen to continue investing in the growth of our sport. Italian football has achieved an incomparable socio-economic recovery, but it still has major room for improvement, and this is what our future policies will focus on, with an eye to developing Italian football further.

“This edition of ReportCalcio,” emphasised Enrico Letta of the AREL – “is the best response that the AREL, FIGC and PwC can possibly offer in the aftermath of a crisis like the one that our whole nation, football included, has had to go through, and the effects will continue to be felt for quite some time. Our collaboration started in 2011, and was based on our shared belief that it was possible to apply the same statistical and evaluative techniques that are used in economics to the world of football, and it has brought about some high-quality publications that have been appreciated both by industry specialists and other readers. Today, we are presenting data from 2019, well aware of the fact that we are dealing with information from quite some time ago now, but if we know how the situation was looking before the fateful days in February and March of 2020 will be of great help for a restart that will require commitment and tenacity from everyone, regardless of their field of activity.” “The fact we’ve been so successful in recent months,” remarked the PwC partner Andrea Samaja “has further accelerated the transformation of numerous forms of entertainment; football too will have to keep on pursuing the successful changes that have already been started in recent years, in the face of new challenges. This includes finding more effective ways to engage fans, exploiting the consolidation of the "digital revolution", and integrating, for example, the most innovative frontiers of entertainment such as the world of e-sports.”

As for the fiscal and economic profile of professional football, with a combined turnover in 2018/19 of €3.8 billion, which grew 8.5% thanks to an increase in commercial revenues (+19.7%) and in media rights (+11.8%), while the capital gains decreased by 3.1%. There was an even greater increase in labour costs and in depreciations, bringing about a further exacerbation of losses, up to €395 million in 2018/19 compared with €215 million in 2017/18. Debt has also increased, which has reached €4.7 million, although net worth has increased considerably faster than debt: equity has increased from €37 million in 2014/15 to €623 million in 2018/19. Tax and social security contributions increased to a record figure, which stood at €1.3billion in 2017 (a +7.4% increase compared with 2016 and +47% compared with 2006.) The growth in football’s tax contributions has produced new resources that have benefitted the entire Italian sporting system, with a €60 million increase in 2019 and a €95 million increase in 2020 in the funds distributed by the Sport e Salute organisation, part of the Ministry of Economy and Finance. For every euro the Italian Government invests in football, the nation has received €16.1 in tax and social security contributions. Professional football alone accounts for 71.5% of the total tax contribution of Italian sport.

With that being said, there has been criticism of the infrastructure, despite an encouraging reversal of the trend towards the need for repair and redevelopment works on existing stadiums, due in part to the organisation of the UEFA European Under-21 Championship last summer. A €30 million investment was made into the modernisation of infrastructure and promotional activities: Italian investment in new stadiums amounts to 1% of the European total between 2009 and 2019, with the average age of existing stadiums being 63 years old.

The Italy National Teams have experienced continued success and have continued create excitement for their fanbase. €36 million were invested by the Federation for the development of the National Teams, and in 2018/19, 223 matches were contested by a total of 594 players. In addition to our record-breaking EURO 2020 qualification campaign achieved by Roberto Mancini’s Italy side, it is worth noting the success of the youth teams. The Under-17s and Under-19s have contested four European finals in the last four years, and third and fourth place in the FIFA U-20 World Cup with an accompanying rise for these teams in international rankings), along with our second-place finish in the FIFA Beach Soccer World Cup and the triumph of our newly-founded TIMVISION PES eNazionale in the European Championship. The media profile of the women’s sides has likewise grown, with (122.5 million viewers in Italy, an increase of 45% on 2018), and the commercial dimension of the National Teams, who now have 12 new commercial partners, resulting in a €16 million increase in revenue, and a 27% increase in revenue compared to the previous four-year period, now reaching a total of €170 million.

Testament to the continued passion for football in our nation are the 32 million fans in the country, equal to 64% of the adult population, with 16.1 spectators attending Italian stadiums in 2018/19 (with a rise of 1.1 million spectators in Serie A in the last 3 seasons), and a global viewership of 2.3 billion. And it’s no coincidence that in the ranking of the top-50 most-viewed television programmes, 49 were football matches. Moreover, the 1.4 million members (1.1 million players, 237,000 management staff and over 31,000 coaches and match officials), and that football can rely on a priceless talent base, with 20.4% of young Italians between the ages of five and 16 being members of the FIGC. Football is also a valuable vehicle for integration, with 64,504 foreign-born players registered, and 9% of players called up to the National Teams have origins outside Italy. After the success of the World Cup in France, the Women’s National Team has continued to grow: in the last ten years, the number of women registered has increased by 46.6% (from 18,854 to 27,644), while from 2016 to 2019 the interest in the women’s Serie A has doubled from 11% to 22%. The FIGC is the first sporting federation in the world to have introduced its own Division for Paralympic and Experimental Football, and in the first season (pre-lockdown), around 2,500 footballers tried their hand at the sports.

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