"Keep up with other leagues" - is it to pay the top-rated players ?

It is. And while it is true that Italian Serie A struggles to be financially competitive with other top leagues, the important "detail" to keep in mind is that no football league is financially competitive with Premier League, and the gap only grows bigger and bigger every year.

Edit: also stadiums, but issues with building new stadiums are often caused by bureaucracy. Also the deals from bettong sites are not that great to be deciding factor of club can build a new stadium or not.

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asdff 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

You would think the situation would sort of fix itself over time where premier league ends up being expensive and serie A starts looking like a more attractive deal. E.g. in NBA if you were a billionaire actually seriously interested on winning a championship (many owners aren't, granted), the worst thing you could do is buy the knicks or the lakers. The best thing you could do is buy some small market team for an order of magnitude or two lower price and then just dump the rest of your cash into securing contracts with the best players and coaches available. Plus most of europe is on the same or similar time zone. And there is the whole champions league where many european fans are already used to following teams out of these other leagues.

	▲	riffraff 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		If you buy a cheap Italian club and spend a ton of money you will do well in the national league and go to the UEFA champions league. But the amount of money a random premier league team gets for their league is tenfold, so you still will struggle to compete. This is one of the reasons there's a handful of non-premier league teams that have reached the UEFA champions league final in the last 10-20 years, while in the 80s you had random teams from all europe winning the Champion's Cup. Concentration of wealth without NBA-inspired salary caps is self reinforcing and killing European footbal.

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TitaRusell 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

This is the hypocrisy of the football fans.

They absolutely hate how football is a business but they want the 100 million eurodollar striker!

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riffraff 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Players wages, players price and fees to various intermediaries which have bubbled up through the years, yeah.

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randysalami 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Party!!!