B teams in Serie C: Solution or problem?
And then there were three. With the announcement of Ancona’s bankruptcy, Serie C has welcomed a third ‘B team’ into its ranks. Welcome, Milan Futuro, the second team of AC Milan.
Back in September, half an hour south of Bergamo, the nation’s previous newest ‘club’ kicked off their Serie C season in front of around four hundred people. It was far from a glamorous start, losing 3-2 to Virtus Verona but this is the brutal reality of Italy’s third tier.
Atalanta U23 are not your average football club, for they aren’t even a club. Their existence is inspired by Juventus and ushered by Lega Pro, the league’s governing body, and other clubs’ mismanagement.
Were it not for Siena entering bankruptcy after several seasons of incompetent Russo-sympathetic Armenian ownership, Atalanta U23 would not exist, and its players would likely be on loan at a club like Siena.
It was the same story five years prior when three clubs failed to register for 2018-19 and Vicenza merged with Virtus Bassano, creating space for Juventus U23, as they were known before their rebrand a few years later.
“We started with a series of defeats and hostile stadiums with protests that still exist today, where instead of seeing the added value for the football system of the second teams they see it as a usurping of places,” said Juventus’ Chief of Staff Federico Cherubini in a Tuttosport interview.
It's too soon to assess the Atalanta U23 project but the human interest in the team remains low.
Six years of Juventus U23/Juve NextGen has given us four Serie C playoff appearances, at which point the Serie B governing body tend to mutter their dissatisfaction at the thought of having a B team in B.
More importantly, the project has produced 20 players that have all featured in a meaningful way across Europe’s top leagues. From Stephy Mavididi to Samuel Iling-Junior, the club have set about doing what they said they would. Sort of.
Only Fagioli, Nicolussi Caviglia, Miretti and Yildiz from that group remain in the Juventus first team picture and it’s only those four, plus Iling-Junior, who broke through at the club. Nicolussi Caviglia and Miretti seem likely to leave Juventus this summer, either on loan or permanently.
Iling-Junior, along with Enzo Barrenechea, both joined Aston Villa this summer for a fee around €22m, allowing the club to bank a healthy profit for accounting purposes.
Juventus’ detractors could also point to a player like Dany Mota, signed for €1.8m in August 2019 and sold to Monza for €4m in January 2020. Doubling your investment in less than six months is both impressive and an indictment of the bizarre nature of modern football economics.
Football purists will never accept Juve NextGen in the same way that Barcelona B or Dortmund II offend the traditionalists in Spain and Germany, certainly while the ‘project’ provides more opportunities for profit than player development.
It’s too early to assess the success of the Atalanta U23 project from a player development perspective but the human interest in the team remains similarly low.
Atalanta U23’s total ‘home’ attendance figure across 19 games last season was 8,060. Serie D club Sambenedettese had 8,228 at their home game with Campobasso in April.
The concept of second teams has a lot of support in Italian football’s upper echelons.
Milan Futuro’s arrival in Serie C presents a logistical problem. There are now three B teams in the league, all located within a 100-mile radius, but Lega Pro (currently) do not allow B teams to play in the same division.
This unique issue means that the three teams are spread out across Serie C’s North, Central and South divisions. The league’s solution: Atalanta (North), Milan (Central) and Juventus (South).
Quite incredibly, Juve NextGen will play in a division where their geographically closest rivals are almost 500 miles south of them. Another strike for those who think the B team movement is bad for football.
Juventus point to the dismal state of affairs at Primavera level, Italy’s U19 league which is now becoming U20.
“There’s no need to get results in Primavera. No fans, no pressure. Kids should play at that level when they’re 16 or 17. Then at 18, they should play in Serie C,” said now former coach Max Allegri of the Primavera system.
Juventus NextGen gives younger players that opportunity, even if last season’s top scorer was 34-year-old Simone Guerra. Beyond Fagioli and Yildiz, as well as Dean Huijsen (on loan at Roma since January), the current team includes Italy U20 captain Luis Hasa and the highly rated midfielder Joseph Nonge.
The concept of second teams has a lot of support in Italian football’s upper echelons. Along with then Milan executive Ricky Massara, the presidents of FIGC, Serie A and Lega Pro all attended a forum called ‘Second teams in Italy and in Europe, a model for the future?’ back in November.
Milan’s introduction is no coincidence. Evidently. Throughout the second half of last season, it was clear that the work was going on behind the scenes in the expectation that a place would make itself available.
Almost half of Italian clubs’ loanees play around half the games in a season.
After all, this is Italy. Serie C clubs go bankrupt every summer. It was Ancona’s turn this year. It’s likely we’ll be talking about another club going to the wall this time next year to make way for another B team.
Sassuolo and Roma are said to be very keen, while Inter are expected to get involved before long. Sassuolo are an interesting case, the fabrication of MAPEI, the chemicals giant that own the club. They have an Atalanta-esque approach to hogging young players, sending more players out on loan than others have in their entire squad.
However, with relegation to Serie B, maybe they’ll have more important issues to worry about in the next year than sending their youngsters to Sardinia for a kicking.
For Milan, it’s a race against time to put a team together. Atalanta had 23 players out on loan in Serie C in 2022-23 prior to joining the league, while Milan had only 5 this season.
Daniele Bonera has his work cut out to get them up and running but he should be helped by Francesco Camarda, the Milan Primavera striker and arguably the hottest prospect in Italian football.
Tales of Camarda’s goalscoring record at youth level make Pele look like Andy Carroll and stepping up to Serie C at 16 is sure to be an early test of the young lad’s mettle. Should Milan Futuro remain in Serie C in 2025-26, perhaps they’ll be forced to take the leap and send him on loan to Serie B for a year, or perhaps even A.
Almost half of Italian clubs’ loanees play around half the games in a season, whereas the B club model offers these big clubs a lot more control. As they cite the almost obsolete Primavera model and the insecurity of the loan market for player development as great issues, they will urge the governing bodies to see the B team concept as a suitable alternative.
An idealist view would be to urge said clubs to stop retaining talent like grazing cattle preparing to be brought to market. However, football exists in an often optimism-sapping state of realism and Italian football is all too aware of this.
Men in suits will continue to tell themselves that the nation’s biggest producers of young players have the nation’s best interests at heart.
Perhaps the Primavera system is the biggest blocker to talented players progressing into first team football, but the Serie A/Serie B coaches must take some blame. Exhibit A: Simone Pafundi and his wasting away prior to escaping to Switzerland.
Behind the glitzy branding of NextGen and Futuro remains a fundamental problem that FIGC president Gabriele Gravina has failed to grasp. Why do so many Serie C, and even the odd Serie B club, find themselves in financial freefall?
Community assets going to the wall and finding themselves in the game’s hinterland. Livorno, Ancona, Siena, Reggina and several more. If the solution to this problem is to bung more B teams into the professional ranks and see the attendances dwindle further then so be it, but it’s fundamentally bad for football in Italy.
One might argue that B teams provide match experience but little pressure. Luca Toni (Modena) and Andrea Barzagli (Ascoli), both 2006 World Cup winners, played in Serie C with the hopes and dreams of their clubs’ fans behind them.
If a Juventus, Milan or Atalanta youngster fails, who are they upsetting beyond those clubs’ board who might wish to attract a big fee or, in extreme circumstances, push them into the first team?
The B team issue will continue to be a point of contention in Italian football for as long as it exists. Fans will mostly hate it; journalists will write about it and sporting directors will look at it the same way I stare at the cured meats section in a supermarket.
