Meloni scores Serie A own goal
Ending the "Beckham Law" tax breaks is bad news for Italian football and might hurt the prime minister politically
2024 kicked off with a bang in Italian football — and politics. Starting Jan. 1, foreign players will no longer be able to benefit from tax breaks under the so-called Decreto Crescita (Growth Decree), Italy's answer to Spain's Beckham law.
This means that all Serie A players will now be taxed the same regardless of origin or when they were signed. Clubs that agreed on a net salary with a star — as is the norm everywhere outside of the EPL — will now have to fork out roughly double in taxes per player they signed under the previous law. (The specifics are a bit more complicated, so if you're interested check out this fantastic Tifo video explainer).
As expected, since then most of the media coverage has focused on the clubs' reaction, which has overwhelmingly been against the government's decision. They say this will kill the competitiveness of the domestic championship and trigger an exodus of players to England, Spain, Germany or France. To be sure, they are correct.
Making it harder to attract foreign talent will quickly hurt the overall quality of the Serie A and widen the gap between the richer and poorer clubs — as it did in LaLiga when Spain changed the Beckham Law in 2009. What's more, the timing could not be worse: The Italian league was just beginning to emerge from its Lost Decade.
(Following years in the doldrums, Italian football got its mojo back after 2019, when the Guiseppe Conti government passed the Decreto Crescita so Juventus could afford to sign Cristiano Ronaldo from Real Madrid. Result: Thanks to CR7, la Vecchia Signora is now the country's No. 1 brand on social media.)
However, I'm more interested in the politics of it all. Why is a far-right nationalist like Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni emulating a center-left globalist like then-Spanish PM Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero? Could this decision come to haunt her next time Italians go to the polls?
"Wearing your geopolitical glasses, it becomes evident that Meloni doesn't align with figures like Zapatero or Le Pen; rather, she embodies a distinct populist stance" says Valerio Mancini, director of the Divulgative Research Center at the Rome Business School and co-author of the book "Calcio & Geopolitica" (which, by the way, I am dying to read once it's translated into Spanish in April).
Officially, the government claims that a tax exemption for calciatori stranieri is "immoral" at a time when Italy needs to cut both spending and red tape to unlock billions of euros in EU pandemic-era relief funds. That’s a lot easier than reducing subsidies or (gasp!) reforming pensions in the European country with the oldest population.
Meloni and the main proponent of removing the tax breaks for footballers, Deputy PM and Lega party leader Matteo Salvini, probably hoped that Italians would be too distracted to notice if they tweaked the law in the middle of the Christmas holiday season. And after all, Barcelona and Real Madrid dominated European football for a decade after Spain ditched the Beckham Law, right?
Wrong.
"2024 is not 2009," explains Mancini, who refers to the past 15 years as the "Sad Decline." All national leagues, not just the Serie A, have lost quality and influence to the EPL, which has grown disproportionately thanks to smart planning and oodles of foreign investment. Only Real Madrid and Qatar-owned PSG can compete on wages with even modest English clubs; Barcelona are broke and Bayern Munich famously avoid bidding wars for players.
Claudio Lotito, president of Lazio and an MP for the late Silvio Berlusconi's Forza Italia party, says Meloni will soon regret ending football exemption in her revised Decreto Crescita, which for Lotito smacks of “pure demagoguery.” Italy's youngest and first female prime minister is a political novice making rookie mistakes, as the populist Five-Star Movement did when it came into office in 2018 with zero political experience.
"Football is not just a game — especially in Italy," says Mancini.