Milan Celebrates Its Revival With a Mighty Roar

The past few years have been pivotal for Italy’s top league, Serie A, which has not seen this kind of optimism in quite a while. There is a sense that Italy, energized by new team owners and ideas, might at last have started to reverse its slow steady decline from its peak in the 1980s and ’90s, when all the stars wanted to play in the country, and when the European champions regularly came from there.

Modern soccer has left Italy behind in many ways. The fall of its biggest clubs is a story of bad decisions and big debts, of a league that clung to tradition in a modern media age, of owners who couldn’t agree on a way forward and instead retreated into their aging stadiums while the rest of Europe built new, bet big and cashed in.

Serie A still has plenty to sell, of course: classic brands like Milan and Juventus; adventurous, attacking clubs like Napoli; stars like Napoli’s Georgian sensation, Kvicha Kvaratskhelia, and its Nigerian goal-scoring machine Victor Osimhen, but also Milan’s young wings, Rafael Leão and Brahim Díaz.

But Italian soccer still has problems to solve. Italy appears to have forgotten how to produce elite players — only four Italians started Wednesday’s game — and its clubs can no longer compete with the talent now drawn relentlessly to England by the Premier League’s TV contracts, and to leagues that have more recently offered a better, and more consistent, shot at the Champions League trophy.

It is for that reason that there is a nagging fear that the recent revivals of clubs like Milan and Napoli represent two comets instead of the structural change needed to keep pace with the riches of England’s Premier League, the relentlessness of Germany’s Bundesliga and the glamour of Spain’s La Liga.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/12/sports/acmilan-napoli-champions-league-quarterfinal-first-leg.html