Serie A wants to stage first overseas fixture in the US within two years | Serie A

A senior Serie A executive has said Italian clubs playing a regular-season game in the United States could happen within one to two years but admitted the league had a long way to go to catch up with the Premier League’s popularity there.

Serie A’s commercial and marketing director, Michele Ciccarese, confirmed an earlier comment by its USA managing director, Charlie Stillitano, that it wanted to be the first foreign league to stage a regular-season game in the US. Ciccarese was speaking to journalists and partners at the league’s American headquarters in New York and standing alongside Serie A’s president, Ezio Simonelli.

“Yes, we would love to do it as the president said; we are working in order to potentially do it, but there are barriers that we need to overcome,” Ciccarese told reporters, citing scheduling concerns such as the clubs’ involvement in midweek European competitions and the potential strain on players. “Who knows, maybe in a window of one to two years potentially we will see the league playing [in the US] if the approvals come.”

The path for Serie A to hold league games outside Italy was officially opened last year when the American promotions company Relevent Sports agreed to drop its long-running lawsuit against Fifa over the global federation’s rule barring domestic leagues from playing regular-season matches outside their home territories. Fifa, after being dropped from the suit, agreed to rescind that rule. Many fan groups and some clubs are against the idea of exporting games.

“It’s always a race to try to be the trendsetter because then the followers come and the trendsetter is who benefits,” Ciccarese said. “It should be done in a way that makes sense for the club without forgetting the fans … you can not play a Milano derby in America because the fans in Italy will get very upset. That game has a big meaning in Italy. So we have to play in a way that is respectful of our audience”

Ciccarese also addressed Serie A’s efforts to expand its brand in the US, admitting the Premier League had a considerable head start in that area and was fully embedded in the country’s soccer culture.

“The Premier league did an amazing job, especially when we were at the top,” he said, referring to the period in the late 90s and early 2000s when Serie A was at its strongest. In that period, the Premier League signed its first significant US TV deals with ESPN and then Fox Sports, followed by a landmark deal with NBC Sports in 2013, which was renewed in 2022 for a reported $450m a season. NBC’s coverage of the league and willingness to put its games on national broadcast television is widely considered to have been instrumental to the competition’s growth in popularity in the US.

Serie A has been broadcast on CBS and Paramount+ in the US since the 2021-22 season, with that relationship extended for a further two seasons last summer.

“[The Premier League] started really promoting it and creating the product abroad, so we came a little bit late,” Ciccarese said. “We took a good slip, let’s say like that. But now we want to go fast.”

Ciccarese and other Serie A executives, along with the league ambassadors Marco Materazzi and Andrea Pirlo, spent much of the event promoting Serie A’s efforts at integrating into the US market. These include grassroots clinics and a more aggressive marketing strategy over the next 18 months to coincide with the Club World Cup and men’s World Cup, which take place in the US this summer and next, respectively.

Ciccarese said the language barrier was a factor they were considering, especially considering the prevalence of Spanish among US-based soccer fans. “But don’t underestimate what artificial intelligence can do,” he said.