The CEO of the Serie A League Luigi De Siervo spoke in the panel “The metaverse of piracy”, moderated by the director of Football and Finance Luciano Mondellini, during the Serie A Festival in Parma. «I think we are in a very delicate phase, about halfway through our relay. We started a 4×400, doing the first stage all together with Parliament which gave us a law that identifies the correct path. For the first time we are in a position to understand the problem we are experiencing – began De Siervo –. Discussions about selling rights well or badly are sterile. What needs to be understood is that the money we collect in the auction is the result of the sale of subscriptions. If as a country system we do not guarantee a correct one, the decrease in subscribers risks impoverishing the entire system. The enormity of this problem has been understood.” «Now we have an excellent and perfectible tool, we have built a platform together that we have donated to the authority – continued the CEO of the League -. The first phase of this platform has been excellent. Now the last two fractions begin: the adaptation of the platform to the gigantic amount of data it has to manage, a phase in which the platform must be grounded with a wider and more solid base. Everyone is obliged to register on this platform. Piracy is a colossal and illegal business for pirates but also for legitimate companies that take advantage of this illegitimacy. Here the authorities can change the trend, otherwise the last phase in which we hand everything over to the judicial authorities, prosecuting down to the individual user, becomes useless. What we try to do with these meetings is to raise awareness. The last step is to enable the authority to implement the platforms and communicate with the police. Without these last two steps, the work done so far risks being useless.” On the current situation around Europe: «There was a moment of overall hangover, in which the value of the revenue seemed sufficient. Even in the Premier League they are starting to smile less. All this activity struggles to get everything converted into subscriptions. Where we started from is that ours is the country that pirated sports content the most in the world, here the wound is even more serious. Today we must be able to implement the legislation that sees us in the position of being the leader of a legalization process. We want to pass on the credit of creating a higher audience to our sports clubs. Even the valorization of commercial rights connected to the visibility of brands or even advertising spots have a lower value of 30/40%. Today you are able to certify visibility with data, but we are missing a significant portion of millions of people. Knowledge of the depth of the problem is often lacking. Serie A’s ratings are going well, but there’s this other part that if we can’t convert them, we can’t have an impact. The missing piece comes from the users. Then there is also a security issue, for example when you hand over a payment system to an illegal system you make the sign of the cross. We are also legally attacking PayPal: we are attacking all the subjects who make this activity possible. It is a global and generational battle.” «We must be able to make people understand that the resources that our presidents have depend on the resources of the system – concluded De Siervo -. If there are no champions it is because there are not enough fans paying for the product. When we close a very complicated auction of rights, in the end we work on the same income statement because the more money that comes in, the more we can all benefit. If we don’t reach break-even it’s because the number of pirates is still high. The pirate must be guaranteed to enter the legitimate system. They must learn to pay, the objective over time will be to charge less: if everyone pays, you will be able to pay less. Football and Finance writes it
THE WORDS OF TORREIRA
Torreira: “When I left Fiorentina I cried. Galatasaray will be my last European club.”
