New rules and new business sources: this is how football tries to renew itself and relaunch itself
Monday 13th December Inter e you will know their opponents in the round of 16 of the Champions League, which will be played with the important novelty of the abolition of the double value of goals scored away: whoever has scored the most goals between home and away will pass, otherwise extra time and penalties will decide. This is a historic turning point for football lovers, because since 1965 it was decided to reward goals scored away from home – in the event of a tie in the double confrontation – to favor a more offensive game and avoid defensive barricades. 56 years later, the Uefa Executive Committee has decided for a clear change, believing that, paradoxically, this rule discourages the home teams from attacking too much by exposing themselves to counterattack (especially in the first legs) and that, all in all, “The advantage at home today is no longer as significant as it once was” (words of the President Alexander Ceferin).
The run-up to the young audience
This important regulatory change is yet another attempt to revive interest in a competition which, thirty years after the introduction of the current denomination in 1992, is beginning to show signs of aging. Will it be enough? Not according to the sponsoring clubs of the super lega that, denouncing the “boring” character of the Champions League, proposed and propose far more radical reforms, starting from the three times instead of the canonical two, breaking up the game times to meet the reduced attention span of the so-called “Fortnite generation”. The problem goes far beyond football, as several neuroscience studies show that both the ability to concentrate and the more general intellectual faculties have significantly decreased in the digital age. The topic will necessarily have to be dealt with in more appropriate locations, but in the meantime the big footballers themselves have moved forward: just take a look at their social networks to find more and more individual games, mini-videos made off the pitch and in any case communicative “pills” intended for an audience. more and more at ease with short administrations such as TV series and instead struggles to follow the canonical 90 minutes that for over a century have made the world dream.
Spectators on the run and declining revenues
The most popular sport on the planet is therefore becoming rubber boomer? The risk is there and it is not the only one. The drop in interest crosses in a potentially lethal way with an economic crisis that would instead require a robust increase in revenues. The sad spectacle of closed-door matches during the most difficult phase of Covid-19 has only exacerbated a problem that had existed for some time: the decline in spectators in the stadiums is the direct effect of an increasingly evident relevance of live-tv, with all the problems that have occurred following a multiplication of players that in addition to technical difficulties have forced the fans from the couch to ups and downs between different subscriptions, decoders and streaming platforms. A complication that the most avid fans have endured willingly, but which certainly has not approached the more casual audience.