What's wrong with Italian soccer?

By Paddy Agnew, Special to SI.com, World Soccer

Inter Milan and the rest of Serie A have been overtaken by the English Premier League when it comes to Champions League soccer. Matthew Peters/Manchester United via Getty Images

Serie A's status suffered another blow with the failure of any Italian clubs to make the last eight of this season's Champions League. Is Italian soccer on the slippery slope of irreversible decline and fall? The question inevitably asks itself in the wake of Serie A interest in the Champions League being ended by teams from the English Premier League for a second successive season.

With Arsenal, Chelsea and Manchester United making short shrift of Roma, Juventus and Inter Milan in the first knockout round, Italy found itself without a single team remaining in the Champions League. This was an even worse performance than last season, when Roma made it to the quarterfinals only to be dispatched 3-0 on aggregate by Manchester United. All in all, in the space of six years, English clubs have achieved a total and seemingly inevitable turnaround.

Cast your mind back to the 2002-03 season, when Milan, Inter and Juventus all reached the Champions League semifinals, in the company of Real Madrid. Milan won the eventual final, beating Juventus in a penalty shootout -- at Old Trafford, no less. If, in '03, English fans had to stand idly by as two Serie A sides fought out the final on English soil, there is every possibility that Italian fans will be doing something similar this year should two Premier League clubs meet in the final at the Stadio Olimpico in Rome.

The Money League

So what has gone wrong? Adriano Galliani, right-hand man of Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi at Milan, has a ready-made answer. "Today's league tables coincide with club turnover," claims Galliani. "We're playing in a new championship now; it's called the Money League. How come Portuguese teams, Dutch teams or even a side like Red Star Belgrade win nothing these days?"

Galliani is the first to admit that Italian soccer has been slow to move and react to changing times. And he has been saying it for at least five years now. "The main reason for our crisis is basic economics," he explains. "Our biggest problem is that clubs like us share a stadium and don't have one of their own."

As an example of what he is talking about -- by way of lost revenue through Milan sharing the San Siro with Inter -- Galliani points out that as soon as major sponsors discover that the stadium "changes color" (switches club) every week, they pull out of major sponsorship deals. It would simply cost too much to have to mount and then dismantle semi-permanent advertising hoardings linked to the two different clubs on a weekly basis.

Galliani says that it is inevitable that the best players in the world will follow the money ... all the way to the Premier League. He points out how, back in 1990, Real Madrid was very keen to buy Milan's great Dutch striker, Marco van Basten, but in those days, Milan's revenue far outweighed that of Real so the club could afford to reject a Spanish bid.

If an offer like that were to come along today -- and the club's apparent willingness to sell Kaká to Manchester City this past January would seem to prove the point -- Galliani admits: "We would simply lose the player."

There are those, though, who feel that, while money may explain a lot, it does not tell everything. Former Germany and Bayern Munich coach Jürgen Klinsmann, someone who knows Italian soccer well having spent three seasons with Inter in the early 1990s, offers another less comfortable explanation for Italian failure in the Champions League.

"It simply means that Italian teams have fallen behind," believes Klinsmann. "It's all very well being the great tactical maestros, but that's no longer enough because football today lives by movement off the ball. In England and in Spain, the pace of the game is much faster, more aggressive and direct. In Serie A, the game is still slow and closed down.

"I have to be honest, I watch a lot of Serie A and you can see these problems. And then you see Italian teams pay for it when they play in European competition. Milan was a disaster [against Werder Bremen in the UEFA Cup], while Juventus and Inter are out quite simply because they are a reflection of the overall level of Serie A. I think, too, that the entire Italian soccer movement is suffering from complacency after winning the World Cup. Teams aren't hungry anymore."