TMW Radio
During his speech to the microphones of TMW Radioduring the show ‘A Tutta C’, the former number one of Perugia, Massimiliano Santopadrewanted to give his own recipe to help the Lega Pro take the movement a further step forward: “I’ll make a small premise: let’s not fall into the mistake of thinking about the football system by focusing everything on the difference between the various categories. In Serie C you don’t take contributions, it’s true, but equally so is the fact that there are much lower salaries than in B and A. Translated: the higher you go up in category, the more the income goes up but the expenses quadruple. During my journey in Perugia I came close to Serie A several times, but I have always believed that the idea of moving up a category to settle the accounts is just a chimera.
I told Marani that the only solution for the sustainability of Serie C is to lower the number of teams and to insert the salary cap otherwise we will go into default. If the cost of personnel is 95% of a club’s turnover it is impossible to carry out any corporate project in the long term. This is also why there are no longer any Italian tycoons, they are afraid to approach football. Plus they see the protests in every square and when they see the accounts in writing they get scared. This is why I maintain that it is impossible to divide the cake into 60 parts.
Personally, then, I had proposed the ‘salary club’ which allowed a maximum expenditure for the entire club, that is: if you want to spend the entire amount available on a player you can do it, but knowing that you cannot have another budget available .
We must also try to increase income: when in Serie B there was a surge in income from 2.5 million to 6 million, players who earned 100 thousand euros came to the office to ask for 400 thousand. I often hear English football taken as an example, it has 5 billion in revenue, but it is also the football movement that loses the most in terms of budget.”