Chiellini: “The government must help football. We need a table, ours is an industry, not just a game”
TV rights and growth of the football product, comparison with the needs of the fan and the scourge of piracy. In the rich agenda of the Football Business Forum, one of the main topics was addressed by the president of the Lega Serie A, Ezio Maria Simonelli in the company of the CEO of Dazn Italia Stefano Azzi and Valerio Gori, marketing manager of Atletico Madrid. Simonelli began like this: “Otts have changed TV, but traditional TV is not dead, many combine with Otts. Now TV adapts to people. The consumer chooses everything, there is an individualized approach with different needs, so we make different packages. And advertising is also personalized, this can increase investments. The big international players are investing more and more in sport. We are very busy abroad. We will be the first League in the world to play in Australia, there are criticisms, the fans don’t they understand, but we need it to bring the world closer to Italian football.”
the measurements
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The central theme of the debate, however, is piracy. According to Stefano Azzi: “The problem is serious, because it is very widespread in Italy. Young people, but not only them, consider it cool: I don’t pay, I’m good. But it’s a problem. The work of the entire industry is nullified by dangerous frivolities, illegal acts. We’re talking about 350 million a year that are stolen from sports coffers. More than 65 percent of the “tax evaders” have a medium-high income, these are people who certainly don’t have economic problems and who can easily afford a subscription. This tells us that it is a cultural issue, not one of poverty. We must make people responsible and to do so we also act through fines. Simonelli added that after Dazn the League of A is also preparing to ask for compensation from football pirates. The request for “compensation” will be higher than the 500 euros advanced by Dazn: “We want to let everyone know that we are taking action, we will advertise in the newspapers. Piracy is a crime and must be fought”.
chiellini and the future
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“Football is becoming increasingly globalized and centralized. The Premier League remains unattainable. And Serie A must implement a fundamental growth path to survive. Global interest in our championship is drastically collapsing. The solution to avoid the fall? Government aid is also needed. Of course, the champions make the difference. But there is a lack of a collective table in which we talk about football as a real industry and not just as a game. We want to be competitive.” Giorgio Chiellini is now Director of football strategy at Juve. But from the height of his degree in economics plus master’s degree in business administration he ranges across the board. Chiellini also played for Los Angeles FC, he knows how they look at us from the other side of the ocean: “In America we are seen as an opportunity, but then you come up against bureaucracy. Milan and Inter have given a signal on the stadium: the need is always to improve the structures. In America they hope to do business not only through the players but with stadiums and everything inside.” And Juve, who also went through economic difficulties? “The objective is to remain competitive. Victories and sustainability are a necessary combination. There is no shortage of investments in youth teams: Yildiz arrived from the Next Gen, we were pioneers, the first to do so. We will continue.”
referees
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The panel on Sport and technology was attended by Pierluigi Collina, president of the FIFA Referees Commission, Eliaz Zamora, Chief Technology Officer of Sevilla who explained how his club has been a pioneer in the use of data since 2019, the director of IBM Software Spain, Fernando Suarez, and Edoardo Noto, T&T customer/digital Deloitte. Will we get to a game directed by artificial intelligence? Difficult, even if the future is already here, but Collina explained how much technology has helped football and the refereeing world, sometimes even “saving lives”. “There will be new apps, but to see how far we want to go, we will have to reflect on how much we would like to use. The data is also useful for the referees to prepare, just like for the clubs. We use the technology before and after the match to give excellent performances: we are not perfect, a wrong decision with the VAR can be corrected.”
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