BungleBear
Well-Known Member
- Joined
- 22 Nov 2024
- Messages
- 164
The Italian economy never recovered from the 1992 foreign exchange crisis, it was pretty cheap there in the late 1990s for football, getting 3000 lira to £ when it was 2000 at the start of the decade. Fans stopped going as they were skint and jobless, but you could pick up a ticket for a top game in the late 1990s for £15 on the day, about the same as City in the north stand for a lower league game at the time. Some games were free for women, and all the prices of all the games were listed in La Gazzetta dello Sport.Yep, doesn’t matter who anyone supports when it comes to this. Fans have to take a stand and do it together as one before it’s too late.
English football is going to implode soon. It’ll be like Serie A from the late 90s and 00s where ticket prices went through the roof and fans just stopped going.
Juventus used to get about 25,000 in their old Stadio Delle Alpi which held 70,000. There was a Turin derby in that stadium that had an attendance of just 19,000 in 2003… and Juve got to the CL final that season. That stadium was only built in 1990 and ended up being knocked down in 2009. It was newer than the Etihad is now when it was demolished.
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Even the two best supported clubs: Inter and Milan; struggled with 36,000ish average attendances in their 80,000 San Siro at times in the mid 2010s.
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Roma v Sampdoria in 2014:
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Clubs priced out their fans, fans stopped going, huge stadiums were empty, TV companies stopped buying their TV rights and the clubs were skint. Only 2 Italian teams have won the CL since 2003, and none in the last 14 years.
It’s slowly starting to get better in Serie A now. The Milan clubs are back getting 72,000 average attendances. It’s probably the second best quality league in Europe behind the PL now. But it had two decades where it ate itself and was in a terrible mess for what was once the greatest league in the world that everyone wanted to watch.
Yet even now they are showing they haven’t learnt their lesson: look at the attendance between Milan and Liverpool earlier this season in the CL: 58,000, 22,000 empty seats when their Serie A attendances are over 70,000… all because they tried to cash-in. Tickets were said to start at €125 for home fans. That’s half a season ticket in the Bundesliga, just for one CL game.
The grounds built for the 1990 world cup were poorly constructed and not made to last, nor based on expected attendances for the clubs. The PL killed off Serie A by paying better wages, the tipping point being around 1996.