While football (soccer, to Americans) is popular in many European countries, Italians rank up with Brits and Brazilians with their passion for the sport. With good reason, too; Italy has won four World Cup titles (second only to Brazil, with five), including the most recent and 27 various European titles. If you’re thinking of catching a match on your vacation to, here’s a quick guide to Italian football.
(Image: Italy v Ukraine, Koln 30 June – 7, a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share-Alike (2.0) image from charlesfred’s photostream)
The first thing to know when you’re catching up on Italian Football is the difference between the National Team and the Club or League Teams. The Italian National Team is made up of Italian players from all different professional teams and competes in the World Cup and in the major European tournaments. Sort of like Team USA Basketball. When they’re not training for National Team matches, the players are employed by private teams throughout Italy (and other worldwide football teams). These League teams are broken up into different divisions (similar to American College Football where you have Division I, Division II, etc). The top tier of teams is called Serie A and is made up of 20 teams. I’ll let Wikipedia explain how the Serie A season works:
During the course of a season, from August to May, each club played each of the other teams twice; once at home and once away, totaling 38 games for each team by the end of the season. Therefore, in Italian football a true round-robin format is used. In the first half of the season, called the andata, each team played exactly one time against each league opponent, for a total of 19 games. In the second half of the season, called the ritorno, the teams played in exactly the same order that they did in the first half of the season, the only difference being that home and away situations are switched.
Just like catching a game of hockey in Canada or a baseball game in the US, if you’re a sports fan of any kind you want to catch an Italian football game while you’re over on your tour of Italy. Today, we had the pleasure of being the official transport for Italian football team Internazionale as they played the last game in a 3 game series against Roma. While the home team (Roma) lost, we cheer on both teams for a match well played.
Posted in 
Tags: 6 Responses to “Inside Italy Culture: Italian Football”
Leave a Reply
You are so right. I recently went to my first Napoli game. It was an experience unlike any other and I can’t wait to go again!
Football is a bit tiring game but it has given me great excitement and it is a good physical exercise too.~~-
Another new inclusion, I really couldn’t have said it greater personally.
[...] Italians, Formula 1 is as big a cultural and sporting event as Football and the affectionate nickname for football fanatics also applies to F1 fans: Tifosi. The tifosi, [...]
Where can you see a Football game during the summer? We are traveling to Italy June 21 through July 15th. Any suggestions? We will be in the South in June and then Rome and Venice in July.
Thanks.
The top Italian league Serie A closes its season in late May so you’ll just miss it. The national team will play some games in summer, though I don’t know the dates. Check http://www.fifa.com for the schedule.