The Geography of Soccer in Italy
Soccer, or Calcio (Italian for “kick”) is by far the most popular sport in Italy. While Italians enjoy other sports, nothing comes close to the level of passion displayed by tifosi (fans) of the hundreds of clubs that represent every corner of the peninsula. Even though Italians unite in their support of Gli Azzurri (“The Sky Blues”, a nickname for the Italian National Team) during international tournaments, their devotion to their favorite clubs is a 24/7/365 affair.
The Google Map below displays the 100 teams that comprise Italy’s top three divisions for the 2019-2020 season. The top division (Serie A) and the second division (Serie B) each have twenty teams currently, while the the third division (Serie C) is comprised of sixty teams divided into three geographic divisions where Groups A, B, and C correspond to the northwest, northeast, and south respectively. Teams on the map are located at their home stadium (unless they are tempoarily playing in another team’s home stadium). You can hide different layers to focus just on certain divisions, and you can click on teams to go to their wikipedia page to get more information.
Just as in almost every other soccer league in the world (are you listening, MLS?), there is promotion and relegation based on the standings every year. The bottom three teams in Serie A are replaced by the top two teams in Serie B plus a winner of a promotion play-off at the end of the season. The bottom three teams in Serie B, plus the loser of the relegation playout are replaced by the winning teams from each of the three Serie C groups and the winner of a national tournament among runners up in each of those three divisions. Nine teams are also relegated from Serie C into the dreaded semi-professional Serie D every year.
Because this is Italy, it’s never as simple as the description above. Every year, many teams are dropped down a division or dissolved entirely for regulatory reasons. This could be a result of not meeting financial obbligations or of failing to meet other requirements laid down by soccer’s governing bodies in Italy. In the most extreme cases, teams declare bankruptcy and must be refounded by successor clubs in the lowest levels of the pyramid. They then have to work all the way back up by winning promotions on the field. While this happens rarely to teams in Serie A, several teams were affected in Serie B just the past season, which explains the absence of historically big clubs like Palermo from this map.
As we can see from this chart, no region has more teams in the professional leagues than Italy’s most populous region, Lombardy. Giants Inter and AC Milan are the headliners, but Atalanta, located just east of Milan in Bergamo, is having the best season of any team in the region. Just to the south along the Po River valley, Emilia-Romagna also has four teams in Serie A, including historic clubs such as Bologna and Parma.
Piedmont (Juventus, Torino), Lazio (Roma, Lazio), and Liguria (Genoa, Sampdoria) have two teams in each of their regional capitals.
Out of the twenty teams in the 2019-2020 edition of Serie A, only three are located south of Rome, in Campania (Napoli), Sardinia (Cagliari), and Puglia (Lecce). The financial difficulty facing Italian soccer is more acutely felt in the south, which has hampered big teams such as Palermo and Bari from playing at the highest level for a while now. The distribution is a little better in Serie B and Serie C with regions like Calabria (Forza Cosenza!) supporting six professional teams, more than their well-heeled northern counterparts.
The northernmost team is the bilingual German-Italian Sudtirol located in the alpine city of Bolzano, while Sicula Leonzio in Sicily is the farthest south.
Only two regions don’t currently have a team participating in any of the top three leagues, Molise in the south and Valle d’Aosta in the northwest along the border with France and Switzerland.
