Serie A In Crisis: Analysis And Perspectives Of An Isolated League
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In Depth Analysis: Calcio In A Crisis
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04/04/2002. SERIE A EDITOR Andrea Rosselli believes boardroom strategy and an inherent desire to win at all costs put the Italian game out of touch with more entertaining European leagues:
For the second straight season, there won't be an Italian team among the Champions League quarter-finalists. Serie A is balanced, but there are few attractive matches anymore and a number of highly-rated Italian players are expected to move to Spain during the close which begs the question: Is "Il Calcio" in crisis? Most likely, the answer is yes.
This is a real slump, and not only a bad juncture: Italian soccer is bothered by plenty of problems, both on and off the pitch and these issues inevitably affect the teams.
NO LONGER THE BEST LEAGUE...
First of all, the naked truth - Serie A is no longer the "best league in the world". In the nineties, the Serie A teams dominated the European Cups, and this gave everybody the illusion that things would have continued this way. But what really happened was that the huge pressure brought by these results pushed the boards of the Serie A giants (Juventus, Lazio, Roma, Inter, Milan, Parma) on the wrong course.
Indeed, the wealthy owners thought that the only way to keep on staying at the top was spending as much as possible and boardrooms started building the rosters with only one word in their minds - winning. Not playing good football or entertaining the fans, which should be the foundation of a winning team. Find the way to multiply the income from the TV and the merchandising, and spend the money to purchase expensive (and often disappointing) foreigners: dating from the mid 90s, this became the rule.
MONEY RUNS OUT...
The consequences? Here they are. First of all, a huge financial crisis: TV revenue was not the milk cow everybody expected and those enlightened chairmen spent more than they could afford. But unfortunately the bad result of this incorrect mentality came on the sporting side as well. Italian teams simply killed the pleasure of good soccer, filling their rosters with plenty of "ball winners" specialising in only one thing - committing fouls. The average number of fouls in Serie A is around 50 per match, which is clearly unacceptable.
LACK OF ENTERTAINMENT...
So it seems that calcio is centred around getting the three points at all costs. Losing is not the other side of winning, losing becomes a drama. In the other countries, the fans want their team to play an attractive game and winning is often a consequence of that. If an English or a Spanish team lose after playing a good match, the fans cheer at them. In Italy, this team would be booed, because only the win counts.
ENGLAND AND SPAIN MOVE AHEAD...
So meanwhile, the rest of the European countries, especially Spain and England, figured out what they needed to do in order to fill this gap and thanks to a better solution, they gave confidence to their nursery-grown youngsters and the expensive purchase was an exception, not the rule like in Italy. Now they are meeting with the deserved success of this wise work.
What to do now? The Italian game needs to rebuild itself. No more unknown and expensive foreigners, but confidence in the youngsters, possibly after having taught them how to stop and launch a ball, and not how to break the opponent's legs. And please, stop with this annoying defence and counterattacking mentality - it doesn't pay anymore. An example? In their Champions League key match against Liverpool, Roma knew that a draw would have been enough to qualify and played in Anfield with only one striker, while all of their most convincing outings of the season came with the 3-4-1-2 line-up. There is no need to recall how the match ended.
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LIGA EDITOR Stewart Coggin cites the Italian media as a cause of the malaise and argues that although Italy boasts the best defensive players, Spain hosts the most exciting attackers.
NO CONTINUITY?
Many believe the single biggest factor in Serie A's recent European slump is a lack of continuity. The likes of Lazio have undergone overhaul after overhaul in the last two years so no wonder their recent record in the European Cup leaves so much to be desired. And should they qualify for it again next season, can president Sergio Cragnotti really expect it to improve? The club will undergo yet another transitional period over the summer with numerous comings and goings set to take place. This would surely make the likes of Arsene Wenger cringe. For the Arsenal coach preaches team continuity and at the Rome giants there is a distinct lack of it. Lazio are by no means the only culprits but they are without doubt the main ones.
And does the intense media criticism really help the players? The Italian press scrutinises every aspect of their teams' tactical game to the point of obsession. Although Serie A coaches would claim not to be influenced by the press, such pressure must have an effect. Perhaps it's time for the the likes of the Gazzetta dello Sport to give the Italian game a break.
Can we also not just accept that Spain currently has four very good sides who rank amongst the top six or seven in the world at the moment? In terms of counter-attacking, there are few better than Valencia, Deportivo and Barcelona. Valencia, especially, tend to soak up pressure for long periods and then break with such pace that opposition defences are left wondering what has hit them. Witness the Ches' recent Uefa Cup semi-final first-leg clash with Inter Milan. A goal down and a man down after the sending-off of Kily Gonzalez, Valencia appeared to be posing little threat when a swift move up field resulted in one killer ball from Miguel Angulo and an instinctive finish from Francisco Rufete. Bang, 1-1.
Serie A may still boast the best defenders in the world but when it comes to the leading midfielders and strikers, they have fallen behind. The likes of Luis Figo, Zinedine Zidane, Rivaldo, Juan Veron, Patrick Vieira, Thierry Henry, Patrick Kluivert, Ruud Van Nistelrooy and Diego Tristan have all either played or been linked with moves to Serie A but the fact is that they all ply their trade in Spain and England. Serie A of course, still has it's attractions (Francesco Totti, Andriy Shevchenko and Manuel Rui Costa to name but a few) but the days when it attracted the world's very best, are well and truly gone.
LEAGUE OBSESSION...
Could it also not be that for some Italian clubs, Serie A is simply more important? For Real Madrid and Barcelona the Champions League is an obsession, but the feeling is that Serie A's finest regard the Scudetto as top priority. Hector Cuper's Inter have not won the title for 13 years, and there is little doubt that if you put the Champions League and Scudetto trophies in front of them, they'd choose the latter. It may just be that to Serie A's top brass, the honour of being the best team in Italy, outweighs that of being the best in Europe.
Despite Serie A's woeful recent record in the Champions League, there is no reason to believe that Italian football won't emerge from this current slump and return to their former glories. The current trend seems to be to kick Serie A while it's down. Everyone from Ivan Helguera to Patrick MBoma have stuck the knife in of late, criticising what they perceive not to be the best league in the world but the most arrogant. However, it is surely a little early for the Premiership and La Liga's finest to start celebrating the demise of Serie A and crowning their own championship as the world's best. The tide could soon turn.
STUDY:
PLAYERS LINKED WITH MOVES AWAY FROM SERIE A:
Juventus:
Montero - Possibly to Real Madrid.
Thuram - Perhaps more likely to some EPL team, but Spain is a definite chance and in any case he's expected to leave Juve.
Davids - Probably to Barcelona.
Lazio:
Mendieta - Back to Valencia?
Nesta - Most likely he will stay at Lazio but everybody
knows that Real want him...
Milan:
Shevchenko - Same thing as Nesta, he should stay but Real want him
Josč Mari and Javi Moreno - both didn't get fully accustomed to the Serie A and should be back in the Liga.
Roma:
Batistuta - most likely to the EPL, in any case he should leave Roma, especially if they buy Tristan, and some Liga team might be interested in the veteran.
PLAYERS WHO LEFT SERIE A: PERFORMANCE ANALYSIS:
Zinedine Zidane - The mercurial Frenchman took a couple of months to settle into La Liga and Real Madrid's style of play after a Ł48 million move from Juventus, but since then he has returned to his bedazzling best. He may have some of the world's best round him but the fact that he has already scored as many league goals for Real this year as he did in any season at Juventus would suggest that he is finding goals a lot easier to come by.
Although he excelled in Serie A, people often tend to forget his lacklustre, lethargic performances where he contributed very little to the team cause. These displays were the exception to the rule, but one rarely leaves a Real match these days without feeling that the Frenchman has given them their full money's-worth.
Vagner - the Brazilian has excelled for Celta Vigo this season, with he and Peter Luccin forming one of the best midfield partnerships in La Liga. The 29-year-old had a desperately disappointing time of things at Roma after failing to fit into Zdenek Zeman's disciplined team formation. He played just 11 league games for the Giallarossi before being shipped out to Vasco da Gama and Sao Paulo on loan. He moved to Galicia in 2000 and is now flourishing in the less pressured surrounds of La Liga. He's a player who likes to express himself and has actually scored three goals in his last two games.
Savo Milosevic - The Yugoslav striker has returned to former club Real Zaragoza after a miserable 18 months in Serie A with Parma. He scored nine goals in a season-and-a-half with the Giallorossi compared to 37 in 72 league matches with Zaragoza in the previous two campaigns. Here is a player who basks in the penalty box freedom that he never really got in England and Italy.
Darko Kovecevic - Milosevic's fellow-countryman is in the same boat. After scoring an impressive 41 goals in three seasons with the modest Real Sociedad, he earned himself a move to Juventus where he found the net just 11 times in two seasons. In his defence he found it difficult to secure a regular starting place with the likes of Alessandro Del Piero and David Trezeguet preferred. After a terrible spell at Lazio -he featured just seven times- he has returned to Sociedad where he's scored five times in 12 games to help the Basques move away from the relegation zone.
Roberto Ayala - Last season, the Valencia defender was named as the best defender in the Champions League as the Ches took Europe by surprise for the second time in two seasons and reached the final. The Spanish League has been the making of the Argentine international and he is now rated as one of the top five or six defenders in the world.
CONCLUSIONS:
There is little doubt that La Liga, along with the Premiership, is the world's most attractive league. Few other countries are treated to the mesmeric skills of Djalminha, the cunning of Luis Figo and the brute power and force of the world's best left-back Roberto Carlos. But why is it that La Liga is now such a haven of attacking football?
Well, for a start, despite Spain's fine recent record in Europe, many of the sides still trail behind their Italian counterparts when it comes to the art of defending. Valencia, apart, La Liga's finest still have a lot to learn about the defensive aspects of the game. While the Spanish League can boast the likes of Roberto Ayala and Patrik Anderson, this pair are very much the exception to the rule. Alessandro Nesta, Fabio Cannavaro, Walter Samuel, Lillian Thuram and Ivan Cordoba are amongst the top six or seven in the world and all choose to ply their trade in Italy. La Liga simply isn't getting the cream of the crop when it comes to world class centre-backs.
Real Madrid, Deportivo La Coruna and Barcelona have all been found wanting at the back at regular intervals over the last 18 months. Real's 'if they score three, we'll score four' attitude may be easy on the eye but is unlikely to be found in the Serie A book of coaching. Barca, meanwhile, conceded an amazing 57 goals last year under Lorenzo Serra Ferrer, although they found the net 80 times- one less that champions Real Madrid. Serra Ferrer is, in many ways, a symbol of Spanish football- entertain at all costs and worry about the consequences later.
On a regular basis we are treated to some of the most appalling defence cock-ups that you just don't see in Italy. Italian goalkeepers like to punch but at least they do it to good effect. Earlier this season Las Palmas' Nacho Gonzalez somehow managed to punch the ball into his own net from a Deportivo La Coruna corner when under no pressure whatsoever. The Argentine has not been the only keeper guilty of such a lapse. This type of thing is seen all to often within the confines of La Liga. Young Iker Casillas at Real has found himself out in the cold in recent matches due to some increasingly error prone performances. This was a young man who was dubbed as the best goalkeeper in the world just a year or so ago.
