ROMA (ITALPRESS) – Starting from team and dialogue concepts. But above all young people to contribute, in fact, to relaunch football in Italy. The first 365 days of Paolo Bedin in the role of president of the League B Series went to archive with positive results. “It was an intense year – he said in an interview with Italpress –, a year of work, a year of analysis, although it was a place I already knew having held for nine years the role of General Manager of League B, while missing for seven years. It was certainly a year of design – he added – of political dialogue with clubs, of relations with sports institutions, starting from League Serie A, but of course also with Figc, League Pro and technical components. It has been an interesting year, rich in commitments and also useful to reorganize the structure of the League more efficiently.”.
Several themes addressed in the last assembly of the year, including the one concerning the different platforms that today broadcast the Serie B championship: “It is a good budget that allows us to have a mixed proposal with an exclusive licensee who is Dazn, who airs all our ten weekend races and does it with editorial quality. Then there is an experiment started in November 2024, which is that of the channel, LaB Channel, distributed on the Amazon Prime platform and recently, for a few months, also from One Football”.
“The League is traveling in parallel with a very first-order licensee, with whom the reports are excellent and with whom we have just launched, among other things, an editorial product called ‘Match of the Week’, which will see in the Friday evening of Boxing Day a productive upgrade by the League and editorial by Dazn.”.
Paolo Bedin then reiterated what will have to be one of the central themes in view of the coming months, namely economic sustainability by the clubs: “Workers and therefore the institutions, the League and sports companies, are already well aware that economic-financial sustainability is the most important issue, because numbers are clear and the situation is worrying. We must be good at transferring the concept to fans, to make it clear to the approximately 8 million fans of the Bkt Series that there is a need for sustainability to give continuity to their clubs, their passions, their sports faiths. The company continuity allows the fan to have certainties on the future and at the same time reduces the risks of default, failures or missing inscriptions: as executives we have the responsibility to focus on this issue, because this will be decisive in building the future of Italian football”.
The dialogue between the various components, therefore, becomes a fundamental tool in order to address the problems of Italian football: “There are absolute respect and esteem among the top of the sports institutions. The president of the League Serie A Ezio Simonelli, when I served as Director-General with President Abodi, was our chairman of the Audit Board. I have had the opportunity to work with President Marani, with President Gravina the reports have always been excellent. It is a time when there is the possibility of dialogue and there is the need to do so in the shortest possible time, to try to find solutions to the problems of our system“.
On the possibility of a reform of the championships to decrease the teams, Paolo Bedin wanted to express a clear concept: “The focus is not the reduction of the teams, but to find a system from the top to the base that is sustainable from the economic-financial point of view. If we have to question the composition of our championships and the theme of promotions and reversal, we must do so, with the necessary economic compensation, for the good not so much of a single League, but for the good of the system. On the fact that the professional teams are too many, it can be true but it is a historical fact, because our country is, in Western Europe, the state with more common above the 50,000 inhabitants: the characteristic of having so many teams is born from our geography”.
The president of the B Series League then used another key to support thesis linked to sustainability: “The system needs to have additional certainties, it needs to be cooled in terms of business risks. The properties invest and need to do so within a more sustainable framework. Another theme I would like to highlight is that of the entrepreneurial exchange, we need to have solid properties, we would also need to recover entrepreneurs who are expression of the territory where the club stands. This can only happen if there are also economic-financial parameters and indices that are appropriate in some way”.
The other crucial issue also concerns the growth and development of new players: “The League B and the League Pro for years have internal rules of redistribution of a substantial part of their resources. We must insist and find other parameters that motivate our teams to invest on young people. The problem is about player flows from our league to Serie A and Serie C to Serie B. We must train young people, but then we must also have the chance to play in the upper championships.”.
Young people and sustainability are the two themes on which the B Series League will intervene decisively in the coming months. On the table also the territoriality of the championship, crucial aspect to cut out an even wider space in the football system: “Our economy is a network economy, it is a chain economy, I have often used this term: the role of the B is that of intermediate ring of professionalism. That represents an important split of the country, over 15 million inhabitants, 20 cities, 20 provinces, 120 thousand subscribers, 8 million social followers. And the technical mission is very precise, that of being the workshop of young people: not only players, but also coaches, arbitrators and executives.”.
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