The Infront Sports & Media agency, media-rights sales adviser to the Lega Serie A, has offered to guarantee the league media-rights income of €5.5bn ($7.5bn) over the six seasons from 2015 to 2021 to retain its role with the top division of Italian football.
The proposal was put forward by Infront Italy president Marco Bogarelli at a Lega Serie A meeting on Monday.
Infront’s current six-year deal as adviser is due to expire at the end of the 2015-16 season.
The agency proposed a new contract worth €900m per season for the 2015-16, 2016-17 and 2017-18 campaigns, rising to €930m for each of the 2018-19, 2019-20 and 2020-21 seasons.
Infront’s role has come under scrutiny recently. Seven Serie A clubs, led by Juventus, wrote to the league last month calling for a thorough assessment of market conditions both in Italy and abroad before the adviser contract is awarded from 2016 onwards.
Although none of the clubs openly criticised Infront, reports claimed that they were concerned that the agency had been paid an excessive commission for selling the media rights for the 2012-13 to 2014-15 period. Infront is thought to earn about €35m per season from its current deal.
Juventus, along with Fiorentina, Internazionale, Roma, Sampdoria, Sassuolo and Verona, also called for an open tender process to appoint an adviser.
Infront also outlined its plans to launch a league television channel in the event that offers from the country’s main pay-television broadcasters, Sky Italia and Mediaset Premium, were below current values. The agency cited findings by market research company Eurisko that the channel could have 5.6m subscribers – 2.3m on the Sky platform, 1.4m on Mediaset and 1.9m new subscribers.
The agency also discussed new ways of packaging live rights, which would enable Sky to get a greater level of exclusivity for its rights fee than is currently the case.