Why some of the most disciplined investors in global sport are prepared to pay up to sixteen times revenue for a business whose principal attraction may be how inefficiently it has been run.
Data as of September 2026. Sources are listed at the end of this article.
On 2 September, Reuters reported that Carlyle, Bain Capital, Oaktree and Italian investment firm Nextalia were preparing binding offers for a minority stake in a newly created Serie A commercial company. Bids are due on 4 September, with JP Morgan advising the league, and the structure under consideration would place Serie A’s international media rights, overseas sponsorship activity and betting-related business inside a separate vehicle. Investors are reportedly being offered between 10 and 20 percent, although any transaction will still require the approval of at least fourteen of the league’s twenty clubs.
The valuation being discussed is between €3 billion and €4 billion.
That number becomes much more interesting once it is placed beside the economics of the business being acquired. According to Reuters, citing sources familiar with the process, the international operation generates approximately €250 million in annual sales and roughly €200 million in core earnings.
At the upper end of the valuation range, investors would therefore be paying close to sixteen times current revenue and around twenty times core earnings. Even at €3 billion, the corresponding multiples remain roughly twelve times sales and fifteen times earnings.
Those are not the multiples associated with a mature business whose existing cash flows are regarded as fully optimised. They are the kind of multiples investors accept when they believe the current numbers significantly understate the economic potential of the underlying asset.
That, more than the identity of the bidders, is what makes this process worth examining.
The auction is not fundamentally a story about private equity discovering Italian football. It is a story about institutional investors putting a price on one of the most persistent inefficiencies in global sport: a competition with historic clubs, internationally recognisable rivalries, strong domestic attendance, deep cultural relevance and one of the most exportable national identities in the world, yet whose commercial performance outside Italy remains strikingly modest.
Serie A currently earns less from the entire international market than it does from a relatively small number of domestic matchdays every weekend. Its problem is therefore not a shortage of football assets. It is the inability to convert enough of those assets into revenue.
Italian football has understood that distinction for years. What has changed is that the difference between the value of the product and the value presently extracted from it has become large enough, measurable enough and strategically interesting enough to attract major institutional capital.
To understand why investors may believe that gap is worth several billion euros, it helps to begin with what Serie A once represented.
12 to 16 times revenue: the valuation multiple implied by a €3 billion to €4 billion price for a business generating approximately €250 million in annual sales.
13 European trophies: the number won by Serie A clubs during the 1990s, a decade in which Italian teams also employed six Ballon d’Or winners and broke the world transfer record six times. No Serie A club has appeared in Deloitte’s global revenue top ten for the past five years.
€1.3 billion: the difference between Serie A’s €3.0 billion of club revenue and the Bundesliga’s €4.3 billion in 2024/25. LaLiga generated approximately €1.1 billion more than Serie A.
3.6 times: the approximate ratio between Serie A’s domestic broadcast income, around €900 million per season, and its revenue from international media markets, around €250 million.
More than £2.1 billion: the Premier League’s estimated annual overseas media income under the 2025 to 2028 cycle, roughly an order of magnitude above Serie A’s international rights revenue.
30,842: Serie A’s average attendance during 2024/25, one of the strongest attendance figures in the competition’s modern history.
€9 million: the combined operating profit generated by Serie A clubs on approximately €3.0 billion of revenue, equivalent to a margin of around 0.3 percent. Bundesliga clubs generated roughly €400 million of operating profit.
45 percent: the proportion of Serie A club revenue generated by Juventus, Inter and AC Milan in 2024/25, compared with 39 percent a season earlier.
14 of 20: the number of club votes required to approve the proposed transaction. In 2021, seven dissenting clubs were sufficient to stop the previous private-capital deal.
It is difficult to quantify the present commercial opportunity without remembering how profoundly the balance of European football has shifted.
During much of the 1990s, Serie A was not simply regarded as the strongest league in Europe; it was the destination around which elite football organised itself. Diego Maradona played in Naples, Marco van Basten and Ruud Gullit in Milan, Gabriel Batistuta in Florence, Zinedine Zidane in Turin and Ronaldo in Milan. Italian clubs won thirteen European trophies across the decade, while six Ballon d’Or winners were employed in the league.
The UEFA Cup became an especially vivid illustration of Italy’s dominance. Four all-Italian finals were staged in nine years: Juventus against Fiorentina in 1990, Inter against Roma in 1991, Parma against Juventus in 1995 and Inter against Lazio in 1998. At several points during the decade, European competition appeared less like a continental hierarchy than an extension of Serie A.
Financial power followed sporting power. Italian clubs broke the world transfer record repeatedly, including three separate times in 1992. That sequence culminated in AC Milan paying approximately £13 million to Torino for Gianluigi Lentini. Italy retained the record into the following decade, with Lazio paying £35.5 million for Hernán Crespo in 2000, before Luís Figo’s transfer to Real Madrid finally moved the benchmark away from Serie A.
The contrast with the present revenue hierarchy is severe.
In Deloitte’s Football Money League covering the 2024/25 season, no Italian club appears in the global top ten, the fifth consecutive year in which Serie A has been absent from that group. Inter, helped substantially by deep European runs and Club World Cup distributions, are Italy’s highest-ranked club in eleventh place with revenue of €537.5 million. AC Milan rank fifteenth at €410.4 million, while Juventus, which for years stood well above its domestic rivals commercially, sit sixteenth with €401.7 million.
| Club | Money League 2026 rank | Revenue 2024/25 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Inter | 11th | €537.5M | +37% |
| AC Milan | 15th | €410.4M | +3% |
| Juventus | 16th | €401.7M | +13% |
Serie A did not lose its famous clubs during this period, nor did it lose the mythology of San Siro, the intensity of its rivalries or its importance within football culture. What it lost was time.
While English football industrialised the international monetisation of audience and the largest Spanish and German institutions built increasingly sophisticated commercial businesses, Italian football spent much of the same period operating through older stadiums, fragmented commercial structures and a media model heavily dependent on domestic television.
That history is essential to understanding why an investor might place a valuation of €3 billion to €4 billion on Serie A’s international commercial business today. The bidders are not simply valuing the revenue Serie A currently produces. They are placing a price on the distance between the existing business and the business they believe should exist around the same underlying football assets.
European football has never generated more money. Deloitte estimates that the combined revenue of the five largest domestic leagues reached approximately €21.6 billion in 2024/25, an increase of 6 percent in a single year, while the broader European football market exceeded €40 billion for the first time.
The important qualification is that this growth has been distributed extremely unevenly.
| League | 2024/25 club revenue | Broadcast | Commercial | Matchday |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Premier League | £6.8bn | £3.4bn | £2.4bn | £1.0bn+ |
| Bundesliga | €4.3bn | €1.7bn | €1.9bn | €0.6bn |
| LaLiga | €4.1bn | €1.7bn | €1.6bn | €0.8bn |
| Serie A | €3.0bn | €1.5bn | €1.0bn | €0.5bn |
| Ligue 1 | €2.2bn | €0.7bn | €1.1bn | €0.3bn |
Serie A generated roughly €1.1 billion less than LaLiga and €1.3 billion less than the Bundesliga in 2024/25. The Premier League operates at a level sufficiently removed from the other competitions that direct comparison almost understates the structural difference.
Looking at revenue on a per-club basis makes the disparity even clearer. Serie A’s €3.0 billion distributed across twenty clubs equates to approximately €150 million per club. LaLiga averages around €205 million. The Bundesliga, despite containing only eighteen teams, produces approximately €239 million per club. Premier League teams average roughly £340 million each, more than twice the Italian figure before any currency conversion is applied.
More concerning for Serie A is the direction of travel. During 2024/25, Bundesliga revenue increased by 12 percent, LaLiga by 9 percent and Premier League revenue by 8 percent. Serie A grew by only 4 percent. Among the big five, only France performed worse, and Ligue 1’s decline reflected a set of problems that will become particularly relevant when considering the risks attached to private capital later in this article.
A €1.3 billion revenue deficit is already meaningful. A €1.3 billion deficit combined with a structurally lower growth rate is more serious because it compounds. Serie A is not merely starting from a lower point than Germany and Spain; unless the growth profile changes, the distance between them continues to expand.
The crucial question is therefore where that missing revenue sits. The most revealing answer lies in the relationship between Italy and the rest of the world.
Serie A’s domestic broadcasting business remains substantial, but it has effectively stopped growing.
The 2021 to 2024 domestic cycle generated around €930 million per season through agreements with DAZN and Sky. The subsequent deal, covering 2024/25 through 2028/29, produces approximately €900 million annually, equivalent to roughly €4.5 billion across the full term.
Across two successive auctions, therefore, the league’s most developed media market has remained essentially flat.
International media rights currently generate around €250 million per season.
Putting those figures together exposes the imbalance at the heart of Serie A’s growth problem. Italy, a country of approximately 59 million people, produces roughly 3.6 times more media revenue for Serie A than every other country in the world combined.
That structure might be sustainable if the domestic market were still expanding quickly. It is not. Once domestic broadcasting reaches saturation, almost every meaningful increment of future media growth must come from precisely the part of the business where Serie A has historically extracted the least value.
| League | Domestic media rights per season | International media rights per season | International share |
|---|---|---|---|
| Premier League | ~£1.67bn | ~£2.1-2.2bn | ~57% |
| Serie A | ~€900m | ~€250m | ~22% |
The Premier League provides the obvious comparison, not because Italy can simply reproduce the English model, but because England demonstrates what happens when international revenue eventually becomes the principal source of marginal growth.
The Premier League’s international agreements for the 2025 to 2028 cycle are estimated to generate approximately £6.5 billion over three seasons, or around £2.1 billion to £2.2 billion annually. Its domestic agreement for 2025 to 2029 is worth £6.7 billion across four seasons, equivalent to about £1.67 billion per year.
The significance is historical. The Premier League now earns substantially more from media partners outside Britain than it does from its domestic television market.
That crossover was gradual.
During the 2019 to 2022 cycle, domestic rights generated approximately £5.0 billion compared with around £4.2 billion internationally. By 2022 to 2025, international agreements had moved narrowly ahead, at around £5.3 billion compared with £5.1 billion domestically. Under the current cycles, the separation is decisive. Meanwhile, domestic annual revenue increased by only around 3 percent, despite more matches being made available to broadcasters.
The trajectory contains a fairly simple lesson for every major sports league. Domestic markets eventually approach saturation, regardless of their size. Once that point is reached, the ceiling on future growth is determined increasingly by the organisation’s ability to monetise consumers elsewhere.
The Premier League understood that dynamic early and constructed its international operation accordingly.
Serie A’s leadership understands it conceptually as well. In 2022, chief executive Luigi De Siervo publicly set an ambition to approximately triple international media revenue, which would imply growth from around €250 million towards €750 million. The league also established a New York office as part of a broader attempt to strengthen its international presence.
Four years later, international media revenue remains close to the original €250 million figure, while Serie A is now considering selling a stake in the business responsible for changing it.
That does not necessarily demonstrate a failure of the original ambition. It demonstrates the difficulty of execution. Building sustained international relevance requires distribution strategy, local market knowledge, content, sponsorship infrastructure, data ownership and a willingness to invest for several years before the economics fully appear.
The private-equity bidders are effectively betting that external capital, specialist expertise and tighter operating incentives can achieve what internal reform has not yet delivered.
Even after allowing for currency differences and the Premier League’s structural advantages, the scale of the disparity remains extraordinary. England earns roughly an order of magnitude more from international media markets than Italy. Internationalisation has become central to the Premier League’s business model, while for Serie A it remains largely a reservoir of unrealised value.
What makes Serie A especially unusual is that the weakness in international monetisation is difficult to reconcile with the strength of the underlying product.
Start with attendance.
Serie A averaged 30,842 spectators per game during the 2024/25 season, producing total attendance of almost 11.7 million. It was one of the strongest seasons at the turnstiles in the competition’s modern history. Milan against Juventus drew 75,502 spectators to San Siro in November alone.
Domestic demand is therefore difficult to describe as weak. Italian supporters are attending Serie A football at levels not seen for many years.
Then consider the intellectual property.
Juventus, Inter, AC Milan, Napoli, Roma and Lazio remain among the most recognisable football institutions in Europe. Serie A contains the San Siro, the Derby della Madonnina, the Derby d’Italia and the Derby della Capitale. Inter and Milan alone account for seven European Cups, while one of the league’s current champions is, coincidentally, owned by one of the investors bidding for the international commercial vehicle.
Beyond football, Serie A benefits from something few other competitions can claim: it is attached to one of the most commercially powerful national identities in the world.
Italy exports fashion, luxury, automotive design, food, tourism and lifestyle extraordinarily well. Italian companies have spent generations convincing international consumers to pay premiums for products because they are associated with Italian design, craftsmanship and culture.
Italian football has been considerably less successful at converting the same national association into international economic value.
That is more than an amusing contrast. Modern entertainment businesses do not monetise only the core event. They monetise the wider ecosystem surrounding the event.
The Premier League has spent three decades constructing such an ecosystem. Its matches are distributed almost everywhere. Clubs travel abroad every summer. Sponsors activate locally in major markets. Content is produced continuously and adapted for different languages. Players are positioned as global personalities, while digital channels create relationships with consumers in markets where the majority will never attend a Premier League fixture in person.
International media income is both a consequence of that system and the capital that allows it to reinforce itself. Distribution generates audiences, audiences increase sponsorship value, sponsorship and media revenue strengthen the clubs, stronger clubs attract elite players, elite players generate greater international attention, and that attention contributes to the value of the next commercial and broadcasting cycle.
Serie A possesses many of the starting ingredients for the same mechanism, including an audience that continues to fill stadiums domestically. What it has historically lacked is the fully connected commercial flywheel.
If Serie A’s weakness were limited to international television rights, the answer would largely be a question of auction design. The revenue data suggest something broader.
Italian clubs generated approximately €1.0 billion in commercial revenue in 2024/25, representing a respectable increase of 8 percent and supported by major new sponsorship agreements, including Inter’s front-of-shirt partnership.
The comparison with rival leagues is nevertheless severe. Bundesliga clubs generated approximately €1.9 billion commercially, while LaLiga produced around €1.6 billion. Premier League commercial revenue reached approximately £2.4 billion, increasing by 13 percent in a single season.
German clubs therefore generate almost 90 percent more commercial revenue collectively than Italian clubs.
This category is especially important because commercial income is more directly influenced by management than broadcasting revenue. Sponsorship, merchandising, hospitality, licensing, international partnerships, stadium utilisation and content operations can all be improved without waiting for the next central media-rights auction.
Deloitte’s analysis of the Bundesliga illustrates how much of the German advantage is generated away from traditional matchday activity. Sponsorship grew, but so did arena revenue derived from hospitality, rental agreements and non-football events, with EURO 2024 providing an additional boost.
German stadiums produce revenue on days when no football is being played.
LaLiga’s commercial revenue increased by 22 percent, helped by Barcelona’s renewed Nike agreement and the first full year of commercial activity surrounding Real Madrid’s rebuilt Bernabéu.
That leads directly to the most visible piece of Italy’s commercial deficit.
Serie A generated approximately €500 million of matchday revenue in 2024/25 despite its strong attendance. LaLiga produced around €800 million. The eighteen-team Bundesliga generated about €600 million, while Premier League clubs exceeded £1 billion for the first time.
The question is therefore not whether Italian supporters are attending. They clearly are. The question is how much economic activity surrounds each attendance.
Modern stadium economics stopped being primarily about ticket sales years ago. Premium hospitality, naming rights, restaurants, retail, museums, conferences, concerts and non-matchday entertainment allow leading venues to operate as year-round commercial properties.
Italian football largely missed that transition.
A significant proportion of Serie A stadiums remain municipally owned and, in many cases, retain infrastructure associated with the Italia 90 era. Clubs often operate as tenants inside public buildings, limiting their control over hospitality, naming rights, surrounding development and event programming.
The result is a structural revenue disadvantage that repeats itself every week and then continues through the rest of the year.
Real Madrid offers a useful illustration of the alternative. The club has invested approximately €1.35 billion in the redevelopment of the Bernabéu, and the early financial effects are already visible. Matchday income doubled to €248 million as the project approached completion. Stadium tours operate on 363 days of the year, major concerts have been introduced, and in November 2025 the stadium hosted the first NFL regular-season game played in Spain.
One modernised venue is contributing materially to the revenue profile of the largest club in LaLiga and, by extension, to the league’s aggregate commercial performance.
Italy finally appears to have reached its own structural turning point.
On 5 November 2025, AC Milan and Inter completed the joint acquisition of San Siro and the surrounding land from the City of Milan for approximately €197 million. The transaction is being examined separately by Milanese prosecutors, but the clubs are proceeding with plans for a new 71,500-seat stadium designed by Foster + Partners and MANICA, with opening targeted for around 2030 or 2031 ahead of Italy’s role as co-host of EURO 2032.
For investors considering a stake in Serie A’s international commercial operation, that project matters enormously. A modern San Siro district would improve premium hospitality, sponsorship inventory, events, international positioning and the visual presentation of one of the league’s strongest global assets.
The limitation is equally clear. One stadium does not solve a league-wide infrastructure problem. Italy’s stadium deficit has accumulated across several decades and across almost the entire competition. Milan can establish a precedent, but closing the broader gap will require similar structural changes elsewhere.
Serie A’s profitability makes the urgency clearer.
Italian clubs generated around €3.0 billion of revenue in 2024/25 but converted that into only €9 million of combined operating profit. The implied operating margin is approximately 0.3 percent. After player trading, financing costs and other items, aggregate pre-tax losses were roughly €300 million.
The Bundesliga generated approximately €400 million of operating profit on revenue of €4.3 billion, producing a margin around 9 percent and its strongest result on record. It was also the league’s third consecutive year of pre-tax profitability. LaLiga produced around €300 million of operating profit and recorded its second successive profitable season.
A football system operating at a margin of 0.3 percent has almost no ability to finance a large-scale transformation from internally generated cash flow.
Italian clubs cannot simply invest their way towards the commercial standards of England or Germany because very little cash remains after the existing business has been funded. Revenue growth is therefore not merely one strategic option among several. It is becoming a prerequisite for creating the investment capacity needed to close the wider gap.
The complication is that the most developed domestic revenue lines are already mature.
That combination explains why a competition with Serie A’s history and institutional pride is prepared to consider selling part of its future international economics to investors such as Carlyle, Bain and Oaktree.
Another figure adds an important dimension to the investment case.
Juventus, Inter and AC Milan generated approximately 45 percent of total Serie A club revenue during 2024/25, compared with 39 percent one season earlier. Their share was lifted partly by strong performances in expanded UEFA competitions and payments associated with the 2025 Club World Cup.
Revenue concentration is not inherently unusual in European football. Spain is arguably even more concentrated, with Real Madrid and Barcelona combining for more than €2.1 billion in revenue, equivalent to approximately 52 percent of LaLiga’s total.
The difference lies in how that concentration is used.
Real Madrid and Barcelona operate two of the most powerful international commercial platforms in global sport, while LaLiga has spent years attempting to use their international appeal to create value for the competition as a whole. El Clásico is distributed into more than 185 countries and functions as a league-level international property as much as a club rivalry.
Serie A’s three largest clubs generate substantial attention, but much of that attention continues to be monetised primarily at club level. Even those institutions remain below the global revenue elite, ranking eleventh, fifteenth and sixteenth respectively.
The strategic challenge is therefore not to invent internationally relevant clubs. Italy already possesses them. The challenge is to make their reach create more central value for Serie A itself, allowing the other seventeen clubs to benefit from a stronger international ecosystem rather than relying almost entirely on their own commercial capabilities.
The valuation begins to make more sense once the transaction is viewed through that lens.
Private-equity investors are not paying fifteen to twenty times earnings because they believe €250 million represents the mature earning power of Serie A’s international business. Their investment case depends on the opposite assumption.
They are effectively valuing the gap between the present operation and a more efficiently monetised version of the same asset.
In private-equity terms, Serie A’s international business can therefore be understood not as a genuinely small commercial property, but as a potentially large one operating with the economics of a smaller organisation. The inefficiency is not incidental to the valuation. It is the reason such a valuation can be justified.
The process itself also demonstrates that this conclusion is not confined to a single bidder.
Reuters reported in April 2026 that JP Morgan had approached funds including Apollo, CVC, Ares and Sixth Street regarding the same opportunity. The current shortlist has narrowed to Carlyle, Bain, Oaktree and Nextalia, but the earlier breadth of interest suggests that a considerable proportion of the specialist sports-capital market reached a similar view about the underlying asset.
If Serie A were able even partially to close the international gap, the economics would change quickly. The league’s own previously stated ambition to triple international revenue would imply annual income approaching €750 million.
The bidders will differ in how they believe that can be achieved, but the principal levers are relatively easy to identify.
Distribution. Serie A needs to become easier to consume across international markets while treating each territory as a commercial market rather than merely a rights auction. The league currently sells international coverage; the stronger model is to manage a sustained local presence around that coverage.
Localisation. A supporter in Jakarta should not necessarily receive the same commercial product as a supporter in New York, Riyadh or São Paulo. Local-language content, creators, regional partnerships, club tours and market-specific sponsorship programmes can turn passive broadcast reach into communities with measurable economic value. Serie A also possesses an unusually valuable diaspora advantage, particularly across the Americas, where tens of millions of people of Italian descent represent a level of inherited cultural familiarity most sports properties could never manufacture through paid media.
Sponsorship. A more integrated global Serie A operation could package international inventory strategically across categories and territories rather than leaving much of the value fragmented between twenty clubs whose commercial departments vary considerably in scale and sophistication.
Data. Broadcasting provides audience reach, but direct knowledge of the audience creates pricing power. Like many traditional sports organisations, Serie A has limited direct ownership of the relationship with large parts of its international audience, which means sponsorship and commercial conversations remain heavily dependent on estimated reach rather than identifiable consumers.
Italy itself. Perhaps the most distinctive opportunity lies outside football. No major league operates alongside a national brand with a stronger existing association with fashion, luxury, design, automotive culture, food, tourism and lifestyle. Serie A has the possibility of positioning itself internationally as the football expression of Italian culture in a way no competing league could reproduce credibly.
None of these ideas is especially radical. Many are variations of strategies the Premier League has pursued for decades.
That is precisely what makes the investment thesis so compelling. The commercial playbook is not speculative, the underlying assets already exist and domestic attendance demonstrates that demand for the core product remains strong. The question is whether Serie A can create the structure, investment capacity and incentives necessary to execute that playbook internationally.
Oaktree’s participation gives the auction an additional layer because the investment manager already owns Inter.
Oaktree took control of the club in May 2024 after Suning failed to repay a loan of approximately €395 million. As a result, one of the bidders for Serie A’s international commercial business also owns one of the league’s most valuable participating clubs.
If Oaktree were ultimately successful, it would hold economic exposure at two levels of the same system.
Inter’s sporting and commercial success would contribute to the value of Serie A’s international business, while growth in the league’s central international revenues would in turn increase Inter’s economics.
That can be interpreted either as alignment or as concentration, depending on the perspective taken.
More broadly, it reflects a change taking place across sports investment.
Institutional capital is increasingly interested not only in teams, but in the infrastructure around competition: media rights, league-level commercial companies, venues, data businesses and distribution platforms.
A club exposes an owner directly to sporting volatility. Injuries, recruitment decisions, qualification and relegation can materially alter the financial outcome of any individual season.
A stake in the commercial engine of a league provides exposure to the competition more broadly, irrespective of which participant wins it.
The risk profile is therefore different, and potentially more scalable.
Serie A came remarkably close to accepting external capital once already.
In late 2020, all twenty clubs initially supported a proposed €1.7 billion investment by a consortium led by CVC, Advent and FSI in exchange for 10 percent of a new league media company.
By February 2021, seven clubs, including Juventus and Inter, had withdrawn their support on the basis that the terms undervalued the league’s media rights. Fourteen votes were required then, just as they are now, meaning the opposition was sufficient to stop the transaction.
CVC subsequently deployed capital into Spanish football instead, where its partnership with LaLiga contributed funding towards a wider programme of infrastructure and commercial modernisation.
The experience of European football since then provides a useful comparison because private capital has produced very different results depending on the structure surrounding it.
France offers the clearest warning.
CVC invested €1.5 billion in 2022 for 13 percent of the French league’s commercial subsidiary, implying an overall valuation of approximately €11.5 billion. Ligue 1 club revenue subsequently declined by 15 percent to €2.2 billion in 2024/25, while operating losses more than doubled to approximately €600 million.
One of the most important features of the decline was the unwinding of CVC-related distributions that clubs had previously received. Investor capital had temporarily appeared within the economics of the league in a way that resembled operating growth, without the underlying commercial business improving sufficiently to replace it.
CVC has reportedly marked down the value of the investment, while a later attempt to raise capital around its broader Global Sport Group at a €9 billion valuation cleared closer to €7 billion, with the French experience contributing to investor caution.
The lesson is not that external capital cannot work. It is that capital cannot substitute for demand, nor should one-off investment proceeds be treated as though they were recurring revenue.
Germany represents the opposite extreme.
In February 2024, the DFL abandoned a proposed transaction worth up to €1 billion for approximately 8 percent of future media revenue over twenty years. The process did not collapse because investors rejected the economics. It collapsed because supporters rejected the structure.
Months of protests escalated across German stadiums, including the now-familiar sight of tennis balls and remote-controlled cars interrupting matches, until the political cost of continuing became unsustainable.
The contrast with Italy is instructive. In Germany, organised supporter opposition stopped the process. In Italy in 2021, seven club owners did.
Spain provides a more encouraging example.
External investment through the CVC partnership was combined with a league-level commercial strategy and significant infrastructure investment, including the redevelopment of major stadiums. LaLiga subsequently recorded commercial growth of 22 percent and total revenue growth of 9 percent in the most recent season.
The Serie A decision therefore sits somewhere between these cases.
The relevant question is not whether private capital can contribute to revenue growth. Properly deployed, it clearly can. The more difficult question is whether Serie A can accept external capital and the commercial discipline associated with it without surrendering too much of the upside it is attempting to create.
Equally important, the league must avoid repeating the central French error: treating investment capital as operating income rather than as funding for the construction of a stronger long-term business.
Reduced to its core assumptions, the investment thesis depends on four propositions.
The first is that Serie A can at least double its international revenue over the next one or two media cycles.
The league’s own previously stated ambition to triple international revenue suggests that the scale of the opportunity is not disputed internally. The Premier League demonstrates that international income can eventually exceed domestic media revenue. Serie A’s performance during the past several years, however, demonstrates that the transformation will not occur automatically.
The second condition is governance.
Fourteen of twenty clubs were unable to deliver a transaction in 2021. Any investor entering today is therefore underwriting not only a commercial plan but also the ability of twenty independently owned football clubs to maintain sufficient alignment over a long investment horizon.
Three clubs generate almost half of Serie A’s revenue, while the other seventeen control the overwhelming majority of the votes required to sustain strategic change. Managing that tension may represent one of the least quantifiable risks in the entire investment model.
The third condition is that the physical product supporting the commercial strategy improves.
The proposed San Siro redevelopment, the approach of EURO 2032 and strong domestic attendance all point in a constructive direction. International marketing can only do so much if the stadium environment through which the league presents itself remains visibly below the standard of competing European properties.
A competition selling the image of Italian football abroad requires venues that reflect the same ambition.
The fourth condition is that Serie A absorbs the lesson from France.
Investor money must be used to build distribution, content capabilities, data ownership, commercial expertise and international market presence. It cannot become a temporary substitute for revenue or a convenient distribution to clubs.
The distinction between the more encouraging Spanish experience and the problems encountered in France lies not simply in the presence of private capital. It lies in what the capital financed and what the recipients allowed themselves to count as genuine economic progress.
None of these assumptions is guaranteed. None is unreasonable either.
That combination is effectively what a valuation of twelve to sixteen times revenue represents: investors are not paying for certainty, but for the possibility of capturing a large amount of value that is visible, structurally plausible and currently unclaimed.
Once all of the detail is stripped away, the investment case is relatively straightforward.
Serie A generates approximately €3.0 billion of annual club revenue. It trails the Bundesliga by €1.3 billion and LaLiga by €1.1 billion, while growing more slowly than both. Italian clubs collectively produce roughly half the commercial revenue generated by German teams. Domestic broadcasting has shown essentially no growth across two successive cycles, while international media rights contribute only around €250 million annually compared with more than £2 billion for the Premier League.
At the same time, Serie A’s clubs generated only €9 million of combined operating profit from those €3.0 billion of revenues.
The existing economics are therefore difficult to describe as healthy.
Yet the underlying football property remains unusually strong.
Serie A is attracting crowds at levels not seen for a generation. It owns clubs whose names are recognised across continents, rivalries with histories stretching back more than a century and a global fan base amplified by one of the largest and most geographically dispersed diasporas in the world.
Within living memory, it was the strongest and richest domestic competition in football.
It also operates inside a country whose identity commands a commercial premium across fashion, food, automotive design, luxury, tourism and lifestyle, while football has historically captured surprisingly little of the same international willingness to pay.
Private equity is therefore not making a €3 billion to €4 billion bet that Serie A’s international operation is already worth that amount on the strength of its current €250 million revenue base.
The bet is that Italian football has spent much of the past thirty years under-monetising assets whose global relevance never disappeared, and that a meaningful portion of that lost economic value can still be recovered.
Whether the bidders ultimately prove correct about the size of the upside may not even be the most important question.
Serie A faced a similar decision in 2021, when seven clubs concluded that the proposed transaction undervalued their future. Five years later, the revenue gap with Germany and Spain has widened, domestic broadcasting remains flat and another group of investors is offering several billion euros for exposure to the same unrealised international potential.
The decision now is whether Italian football can agree on how to capture that value collectively, and whether it can do so without selling away an excessive share of the economics it is finally trying to create.
Italy does not suffer from a shortage of football heritage, spectators, recognisable clubs or international cultural appeal. Its weakness has always been the conversion of those advantages into a modern commercial system.
For the first time, the market is attaching a very explicit price to what solving that problem could be worth.
Vinciamo Sports. Sport. Reimagined.
A note on process: AI tools were used to support parts of the research, data visualisation and editorial refinement of this article. The analysis draws on the studies and sources listed below.
Sources: Reuters, including reporting on the Carlyle, Bain, Oaktree and Nextalia bidding process for Serie A’s international media vehicle on September 2, 2026, and earlier reporting on the process in April 2026; Deloitte Annual Review of Football Finance 2026 for 2024/25 league revenues, revenue composition, growth rates, profitability and concentration data; Deloitte Football Money League 2026 for individual club revenue and rankings; SportsPro and Front Office Sports for Serie A international media-rights reporting, the league’s international revenue ambition and New York office, together with reporting on CVC’s Ligue 1 valuation and Global Sport Group financing; Sportico, Forbes and Sportcal for Serie A domestic DAZN and Sky rights covering the 2021 to 2024 and 2024 to 2029 cycles; Premier League domestic and international media-rights reporting covering the 2019 to 2022, 2022 to 2025 and current cycles; Bloomberg and Sportico regarding Oaktree’s takeover of Inter Milan in May 2024; Bloomberg and Inside World Football concerning the CVC, Advent and FSI Serie A process in 2020 and 2021; CVC Capital Partners and White & Case on the LFP commercial subsidiary investment in 2022; Bloomberg, ESPN and SportsPro on the DFL investment process abandoned in February 2024; AC Milan, AP and StadiumDB regarding the San Siro acquisition in November 2025 and subsequent stadium plans; Real Madrid financial communications concerning the Bernabéu redevelopment and stadium revenues; attendance reporting for Serie A 2024/25; FourFourTwo and World Soccer for historical Serie A performance and transfer records.
A. Strulak writes on sports business, commercial strategy and the economics of rights. Vinciamo Sports, Sport. Reimagined.
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