Napoli owner calls for Italian league to stream matches straight to fans

The owner of Italy’s top football team has called for the league to ditch its traditional broadcast model and deliver matches straight to consumers, warning that rampant piracy and waning interest threaten the future of the sport.

Aurelio De Laurentiis, president of recently crowned Italian champions Napoli, said Serie A should take control of broadcast production of live matches, which the league could then stream via established platforms such as Netflix and Amazon Prime.

The Napoli owner said he had first made this proposal to the Serie A teams two years ago as part of a wider project to reinvigorate Italian football and put it on a more sustainable financial footing.

“You put together Amazon, Apple, Netflix, Paramount Plus, Discovery HBO and you put it altogether, and you say, Serie A will produce itself the Serie A matches, and we’ll use those platforms as a physical distributor for our games to make a direct bridge from the league of Serie A and the supporters,” De Laurentiis told the Financial Times.

Rights holders across the world of sport are examining whether to offer live matches direct to consumers due to concerns that the longstanding model of big ticket, multiyear deals with pay-TV companies is under threat.

Spain’s La Liga now offers a subscription service to UK viewers on Amazon Prime, enabling fans to watch games produced in-house by the league. Germany’s Bundesliga is in talks with a handful of private equity firms over a potential investment that could result in a new direct to consumer streaming platform. During the Qatar World Cup last year, Fifa offered matches free to fans in Brazil via its Fifa+ streaming platform.

Many in Italian football see a pressing need to catch up with rival leagues. Serie A was the sport’s pre-eminent club competition in the 1990s, but it has since endured years of decline due to under-investment and scandal.

This season Serie A earned €1.2bn from its combined domestic and international broadcast rights, according to Enders Analysis, compared to €2.1bn for Spain’s La Liga and €3.8bn for the English Premier League.

Serie A, the Premier League and Ligue 1 are all due to put their domestic broadcast rights out to tender later this year. Following a recent change to Italian law, Serie A will be able to auction its media rights for five years instead of the previous three. League executives have already floated the idea of raising capital from banks or private equity firms in order to build a direct-to-consumer platform.

De Laurentiis, who is also a prominent film-maker, warned that piracy is eroding demand for sports subscriptions. In 2015, Italy had 4.3mn subscribers for pay-TV channels to watch Serie A, but today that number has dropped to just 1.9mn, due to piracy, he said.

The Napoli owner, 73, also worries that young Italians interest in football is waning, saying many youths now prefer to play “soccer-related video games that are faster than real games.” He has suggested that the Italian government find a way to introduce football instruction into the educational curriculum to maintain public interest.

“We have to reconquer the young generation,” he said. “The speed of this kind of video entertainment has nothing to do with the oldest game of the world — soccer. It is too slow for them. We have 15 minutes between first half and second half. They are watching the match; the break comes, and they go and never came back.”