December 23 – Arrivederci Football Italia
FOR every English football fan of a certain age there’ll always be a special place in their heart for Serie A. In 1992 Channel 4 began showing Football Italia in 1992 and for 14 years viewers who had seen domestic football snatched away by Sky were treated to some of the best players on the planet every Sunday afternoon. It wasn’t to last though and today in 2006 Football Italia came to end when Internazionale took on Atalanta.
In the early 1990s Serie A was undoubtedly the biggest league in the world. The planets biggest stars, such as Baggio, Matthaus, Rijkaard, Gullit, Van Basten, and Zola were joined by some of England’s best, such as Paul Gascoigne, David Platt and Paul Ince.
What really made the show tick was one of football’s best frontmen, James Richardson. Laconically sitting at various cafes on the piazza’s of Italy he would slurp on his cappuccino and take us through the Gazzetta dello Sport with a multi-storey ice cream to his side.
On the pitch the competitive nature of Serie A would put today’s Premiership to shame. The ‘seven sisters’ of Milan, Inter, Roma, Lazio, Juventus, Parma and Fiorentina all had the resources to fight for the title, before the financial bubble burst, and several of these teams that were built on mountains of debt began to struggle.
The financial turmoil that greeted the new millennium in Italy also brought about a slide in viewing figures. Whereas the glory years so no less than three million viewers every Sunday afternoon, by the 2006/07 season Football Italia had been relegated down to satellite channel Bravo, where less than 20,000 would watch. Throw in the Calciopoli affair that summer and the TV suits decided enough was enough and pulled the plug.
A short-lived resurrection followed on Channel Five last year, but remarkably no station picked up the rights for this year’s fight for the Scudetto, which thanks to the arrival of Jose Mourinho and Ronaldinho among others, is shaping up to be one of the more exciting seasons in recent years. However, with a David Beckham-shaped arrival on the horizon this may well change.
See some classic Football Italia fare below, as James Richardson puns his way through some analysis with a typical leftfield guest in Elvis Costello and wonder why all football coverage can’t be this good. See what else was going on in the big bad world of football today here and we’ll be back for some night before Christmas action tomorrow.
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January 6 - Football Italia is Go! | On This Football Day on January 6th, 2009
[...] 6 – Football Italia is Go! Italy January 6th, 2009 NO we are not talking about the popular Channel 4 programme which brought all the thrills and spills of Serie A to the British public, but Italian football [...]