Paolo Dal Pino, president of the Italian Serie A, assured this Monday that body is considering that the championship continues to be contested even if a new national confinement is decreed to contain the coronavirus pandemic. “In the event of a new national confinement, the Serie A championship will not stop and will continue, I see no reason to interrupt it“Dal Pino said in an interview with national television” Rai “.
Serie A, which was interrupted between March and mid-June due to the pandemic, was able to complete the 2019-2020 season last August and began the new campaign in September, by managing to play all the matches of the first eight days. In a period of about a month, between September and October, the Government gave the go-ahead for a maximum of 1,000 people to enter the stadiums, but the new increase in infections caused a new closure of the arenas in November.
Italy, which introduced new restrictions in a decree of November 3, registered 27,354 new infections this Monday of coronavirus and added 504 dead, although there are signs that the epidemiological curve is beginning to flatten. In total, a total of 1,205,881 people have been infected in the country since the beginning of the emergency, on February 21, with the detection of the first autochthonous positives.
Italian football has had and continues to have significant economic losses, which Dal Pino quantified at 600 million euros. “I said that we have lost about 600 million euros this year because of the closure. We have asked the Government, like the other sectors, for aid. We pay more than one billion euros per year in taxes and our request is to delay the term for payment. We do not ask the State for money, “he said.
“We repeatedly write to the Government and I have never received a written responseThe same thing happened to (the federal president, Gabriele) Gravina. I see that in England Boris Johnson has committed for some Premier League issues and Angela Merkel has done it in Germany. Football is not only an important industry, it is part of the Italian DNA“he added.