Serie A: Italian clubs and the layers between them and the player
How communication between clubs and players in Italy reveals systemic flaws across European professional football.
The system of multiple intermediaries
In Italy, a top-level player often has a main agent, a lawyer, a tax advisor, and sometimes a local intermediary for each market. When a French club wants to recruit a Serie A player, they do not speak to the player. They do not even speak to the agent. They speak to the intermediary's intermediary. This creates a communication chain where each link adds noise, delay, and risk.
Why it works anyway
The Italian system has one merit: it shields players from overexposure. A Serie A player is not contacted directly by fifty clubs during the transfer window. The intermediaries filter. The problem is that this filter is also a source of opacity. Who said what to whom? When? Under what mandate? These questions often go unanswered.
The problems we observe
The main issue is information loss. When a message passes through three intermediaries, meaning shifts. We have seen negotiations fail because an intermediary misrelayed a condition. We have seen clubs pay commissions to people with no official mandate. The system runs entirely on oral trust, and it breaks regularly.
A potential path forward
What FOOTPASS proposes is not to eliminate intermediaries. It is to make the communication chain transparent. Every person in the conversation is identified, their role is defined, their mandate is attached. If an intermediary claims to represent a player, you see it immediately. If someone has no mandate, they do not enter the conversation. It is blunt, but it may be the only way to clean things up.
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