Serie A back? The European Finalists Suggest so – But It’s Not That Simple

Fabio Capello paces into the ornate theatre, fingers trailing against the plush red velvet of the seats like an operatic Maximus Decimus Meridius in the Elysium Fields. He looks up at one of the boxes and spots a smiling Fabio Cannavaro, both Italy’s most recent World Cup-winning captain and recipient of the Ballon d’Or, implausibly moonlighting as a cameraman.

“Are you ready?” Capello asks.

Up on stage, one of Cannavaro’s team-mates from that 2006 triumph, the towering striker and inspiration for catchy German pop songs, Luca Toni draws back the curtain and does his best Fabrizio Romano impression.

“Here we go!” he says. Only there is no breaking transfer news. But what flashes up on screen is a big deal.

Action from the six Italian clubs to make it to the quarter-finals of this season’s Champions League, Europa League and Conference League flickers out of the projector. No other league is as well-represented at the three competitions’ last-eight stage as Serie A.

“Calcio is back!” Capello proudly announces, apparently poised to throw roses at the league’s feet.

Upon its release in March, the advert, produced by Serie A, felt premature, to say the least. But it has been updated and re-released after both knockout rounds since.

After talking the talk, the Italian league has walked the walk. Inter are in the Champions League final on June 10, Roma will contest the Europa League one next Wednesday and Fiorentina have made it to the Conference League version a week later.

Maybe Calcio is back after all.

“‘Calcio is back’ isn’t just a slogan,” Serie A chief executive Luigi De Siervo insisted while on a roadshow to sell the league’s TV rights in South America last month. “It means Italian football is finally back at the top of global sport. That’s not only down to the results of its clubs, it’s because of the overall entertainment package. We’ve spent the last four years improving the product to make it more appealing and to position it on the same level as the best sporting events in the world.”

But is Calcio genuinely back? Is it, as the ad’s narrator proclaims, “the best in Europe”? The advert making the claim appears to have been shot at Milan’s world-famous La Scala opera house. Actually, it was filmed at the less-famous Romolo Valli theatre in Reggio Emilia; a reminder that appearances can be deceiving.

After all, it wasn’t long ago that Capello, as a formerly unflinching critic of his country’s game, lamented: “Unfortunately, Italian football is slow. There’s no intensity or aggression. We think we can win through tactics and ball possession. But this becomes very hard when you come up against teams of quality and intensity. The quality of Italian football is low.”

When he said that, Capello was reflecting on Serie A’s failure to send a team to the quarter-finals of the 2020-21 Champions League. The same happened last season too, around the same time the national team rather maddeningly went from winning the European Championship to failing to qualify for a second successive World Cup by losing a play-off at home to North Macedonia in eight months.