Can Ronaldo’s arrival restore Serie A to its old glory?

The Italian Serie A can never be reduced to a one-man show and it simply cannot be all about Cristiano Ronaldo. Nevertheless, it is hard to understate the impact his arrival at Juventus has had on the league before a ball has even been kicked.

The 33-year-old five-time Ballon d’Or winner is not only one of the two best players of the last decade, he is also one of the most popular people on the planet. Ronaldo has 313m followers across all social media platforms and it feels like he has turned their attention to Serie A.

“Finally the world is talking about the Italian league again,” Fabio Capello marvelled in La Gazzetta dello Sport. “In the 80s and 90s we represented the top. Then we lost our way and weren’t capable of investing in infrastructure.

“With Ronaldo we can attempt to lift our head up. But it’s not enough on its own. We need to have the strength and intelligence to exploit the Ronaldo stimulus and give our game an impulse again.”

The consensus in the media viewed the £99.2m deal, which will earn Ronaldo £27.7m a year, as the most significant step yet in restoring Serie A to its former glory.

“The peak was in 2003 when we had two teams in the Champions League final,” recalled Claudio Ranieri, a former Juve manager, in La Stampa. “We’re not back to those days yet. But I feel like saying the days of skinny cows are over.”

Debate has raged over the past month about whether the Portuguese benefits the league as a whole or just Juventus.

Financially speaking, the Old Lady’s opponents are bumping up ticket prices for her visit, which has led Juve’s ultras to hold a protest at the amount that away days will leave them out of pocket.

But can you blame the rest of Serie A? One of the best players of all time is coming to Ferrara, Frosinone and Sassuolo.

As the fixture list for the first fortnight of the new season was being printed, the owner of newly-promoted Frosinone, Maurizio Stirpe, held his breath. Unfortunately for his team, they must play their opening two home games behind closed doors as punishment for the club’s ball boys unsportingly throwing balls onto the pitch to stop a Palermo attack late in the play-off final.

The idea of missing out on the Ronaldo effect on the gate receipts was an understandable cause of anxiety when you consider that last season the highest attendance at 11 Serie A clubs coincided with when Juventus came to town.

Chievo, for instance, who only sell out the Bentegodi for the Derby della Scala, pulled the shutters down at the ticket office weeks ago for Ronaldo’s first league game on Saturday. The 30,000 allocation might as well have been gold dust.

Still, it’s a shame for the league that the new TV rights package was agreed before Juventus president Andrea Agnelli dramatically boarded a helicopter for Greece to shake hands with Ronaldo on what Tuttosport are calling “Il Colpo del Secolo” – the deal of the century.

The rights are now probably worth 20 to 30% more, which means the Ronaldo tide will not lift all boats. The uplift in revenue is forecast to take Juventus to the next level in the rich list, such are Ronaldo’s commercial powers of attraction. But what does it say about Serie A?

While Gazzetta think Agnelli and the Juventus board deserve the Nobel Prize for Economics, La Repubblica compared the Ronaldo transfer to the plot of Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar.

The league still has its issues – chaos and controversy remain a feature of Italian football. But all that adds to the drama and whets the appetite ahead of the most eagerly-anticipated Serie A season in a long time.

“There is life beyond Cristiano Ronaldo,” as Il Corriere dello Sport put it.

BBC