The Infront Sports & Media agency’s contract as media adviser to Italian football’s Serie A was approved as expected yesterday, but not without some of the usual drama which has come to mark the league’s assemblies.
Of the 20 top-flight clubs, 16 voted in favour. Napoli president Aurelio De Laurentiis stormed out before the vote was taken in protest at the way some last-minute modifications were made to Infront’s contact. Roma and Torino abstained and Catania was not represented.
The approval opens the way for the league to bring its rights to market next month for the three seasons from 2015-16 to 2017-18.
League president Maurizio Beretta outlined the next steps in the process, stating: “At this point, we start the final and most important phase of the whole rights procedure. We have already taken in recent months the guidelines for the sale of collective rights for the next three years from 2015 to 2018 to the two authorities, Agcom (communications) and AGCM (antitrust).”
The guidelines for the sale of the media rights to Serie A were approved by the two authorities earlier this month.
Beretta added: “Downstream of the decisions of the assembly we have called for May 6 a meeting of the media-rights commission, which will work on the proposed definition of the packages, and on May 7, the league assembly will approve the packages themselves.”
One of the questions under discussion is whether to create a new window for live coverage on Saturday at 3pm. This has been requested by Inter Milan’s Indonesian owner Erick Thohir to target audiences in Asia.
The league wants to draw the main domestic live rights-holders, Silvio Berlusconi’s Mediaset and Rupert Murdoch’s Sky Italia, into competition and will have been encouraged by the words from Mediaset president Fedele Confalonieri yesterday. He said that Mediaset needed to follow up February’s €700m ($966m) snatch of the exclusive rights to the Uefa Champions league with an “aggressive” bid for Serie A.
Confalonieri added: “With the acquisition of the Champions League we attacked a market, and in particular a competitor (Sky), with great conviction. Today the panorama of premium sports rights is far more balanced.”