Interesting focus on the columns of today’s edition of Corriere dello Sportfrom the title “That slow game that doesn’t break through”developed after the many 1-0s in the last round of the championship, especially among the big teams (Napoli, Inter, Juventus and Milan won with this result. In summary: starting from a statistic of Opti.e. the one linked to the number of direct attacks on average in every single Serie A match compared to the European average (understood as the Top 5 championships, and therefore Ligue 1, Premier League, LaLiga and Bundesliga), the newspaper claims that football is creating disinterest because it is no longer spectacular and the fans would be moving away, especially young people, due to the sometimes soporific pace of the matches.
We Italians are the worst in Europe: there are just 4.5 direct attacks in Serie Athere were almost 6 five seasons ago. The difference of 1.5 is enormous if multiplied by the 380 matches of the championship: it means that we lose at least 570 dangerous actions over the course of a season. It will be said that the trend is European: the Bundesliga, in fact, has also seen its numbers drop (they say it was the fault of the “tiki-taken” of Xabi, Marco Rose, Hoeness and Tuchel), even if it remains positioned at a fairly high of 5.8.
All this exchanging the ball, sometimes in a somewhat sterile way, doesn’t help the enjoyment of the game, obviously also penalized by the large amount of time wasted. In each round of Serie A there are between 400 and 480 minutes of “non-football” in which practically nothing of importance happens between the ball going out, substitutions, simulations, protests and seconds spent restarting the game after a foul. And if it is true that the whole world is a country, the differences between one tournament and another are still statistics: the 54′ average of “real play” in Italy and Spain is still less than the 55′ of the Bundesliga and the 56 ‘ of Ligue1 and Premier.