As games go, it tends to be seen as a glorified pre-season friendly on par with the Trofeo Berlusconi (played out each year between Juventus and Milan) or one of the multitude of tin-pot trophies that are ritually handed out during August with the aim of giving the illusion that there is some sort of edge to games that ultimately mean nothing.
That the Italian Super Cup is an official game, the one that effectively kicks off the Italian season, often means very little and there have been plenty of occasions when it has been played out amid the general disinterest.
Never, however, has it been as demeaned as it has this season where first it was pimped about for potential foreign interest and then humiliated by the realization that nobody is interested.
“I’m all in favour of playing it abroad,” the Lega Calcio president Antonio Matarrese had opined in May. “There’s interest to take it overseas, and there are a number of proposals even from America. We’ve even had a proposal from China.”
Those proposals may indeed have been made, but the reality was that these were nothing more than initial feelers. Not even the normally football hungry administrators in Dubai, who were only willing to accept provided that the game was played out in January.
Matarrese presented this, in typical fashion, as some sort of revolutionary concept that would be the first step to the rehabilitation of Italian football. He conveniently overlooked that the Italian Super Cup has been played abroad three times: Washington (Milan-Torino 1993), New York (Juventus-Milan 2003) and even in Libya (Juventus-Parma 2002).
After the disappointment in last season’s European competition, this rejection serves as a further reminder of the falling standing of Italian football. The multitude of controversies, bankruptcies and crowd violence have sullied calcio’s reputation to such an extent that few outside Italian confines take it seriously any more.
In the typical blinkered vision of Italian football administrators – as those almost everywhere else, to be fair - all those problems are to be resolved not by tackling the underlying issues but by making cosmetic changes. From this season, the Serie C1 and Serie C2 will be no more. The competitions will still be held and the teams playing in them will be largely the same – once the task of sorting which clubs are financially in a position to start the season is completed – yet they will now be known as Prima Divisione and Seconda Divisione: First and Second Division.
It is a re-branding similar to the one that took place in England which, it has been decided, is the example to follow. So it is that there are name changes and plans for global expansion that mimic the plans for Game 39. There is however, one minor flaw: with nothing of real substance to back the proposals up there is no way in which they can work.
The administration of the Italian game is still a complex one that is hampered by gross inefficiency. The example of the Serie B’s television rights is typical. Up till Juventus’ and Fiorentina’s relegation in 2006, there had been an agreement with SportItalia, a digital terrestrial station. Returns weren’t anything significant but at least it meant some added revenue for the clubs.
With typical short sightedness, SportItalia was dumped on the eve of the new campaign in favour of Sky Italia which paid significantly more for that one season but subsequently had no interest in the division.
At least the Serie B has avoided re-branding. For now. Because surely soon someone will step up with the opinion that the problem in selling the rights doesn’t lie with those whose job it is to make them attractive enough for anyone to be interested but rather in the fact that it is called the Serie B. Just as the post-game handshake between all players, the rule put in place at the start of last season, was meant to put an end to crowd violence.
And so it goes on.
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