Salary cap and smaller squads in store for Serie B

Adjust font size:

Italian Serie B clubs will introduce salary caps and reduce their squads to a maximum of 22 players next season, according to the country’s Professional Football League General Assembly.
 
“From now on, the introduction of the Serie B salary cap is official,” said Italian Professional League president Adriano Galliani, who currently ruled out similar measures for Serie A. “For the forthcoming campaign, salaries of those signed on with clubs must not surpass 70 percent of total income, a percentage that will go down to 65 percent the following season and 60 percent the one after that.”
 
Galliani said club presidents will pay the wages out of pocket for any players that break those parametres.
 
“As well as the modification of salaries, we will also be introducing a maximum number of players for each squad,” Galliani added. “Twenty two per squad in 2007, 21 in 2008 and 20 in 2009. The clubs, however, can have four extra youth players each and an unlimited number of Under-21 footballers.”
 
The assembly also fixed at EUR 500,000 as the compensation for clubs relegated - for sporting rather than disciplinary reasons - to Serie B from Serie A and to Serie C from Serie B.
 
 
Spanish Barcelona and Real Madrid grow faster than GDP
 
The annual revenue of Barcelona and Real Madrid accounts for 0.053 percent of the Spanish Gross Domestic Product (GDP), according to a report released this month by independent Brazilian auditors Casual.
 
The report’s goal was to demonstrate how much stronger economically the clubs would be if run as businesses rather than non-profit member organisations. Casual cited a report carried out by the University of Navarra in 2004 that claims if the two clubs secured a stock market listing, they would have a market value of over EUR 832 million.
 
The Spanish GDP in 2004-2005 reached EUR 904 billion, an increase of 8 percent on the previous term, but turnover at the two Spanish clubs went up by 19 percent. The figure represents an increase which considerably surpasses economic growth levels.
 
Barcelona-Real Madrid matches are one of the most important events on the country’s sporting calendar. Their November 2004 game drew more than 9 million viewers, meaning that 51.4 percent of all homes in Spain watched the matched on TV. Casual cites other recent studies showing that Real Madrid and Barcelona fans number 22.9 million, or 56 percent of Spain’s population.
 
The clubs, along with Athletic Bilbao and Osasuna, are the only top flight ones that are not plc’s, have more than 215,000 members between them.