Sport 2025

Pier Paolo Pasolini, who played as a right winger and supported Bologna, said that football was "the last sacred representation of our time". More than half a century has passed since the celebrated intellectual uttered that phrase, and things still stand that way. Football's strength lies in the serial nature of its leagues, in its widespread local reach and in its global dimension, which in recent years has found its fullest expression in the Champions League. This ramification emerges clearly in the absolute figures of the 2025 SIAE Report, with 28.3 million spectators and, above all, spending of 626 million euros: Italians devote the largest share of their annual entertainment budget to football events. Yet the trend is changing. Despite boasting an enormous participation base, football in Italy is beginning to show the first signs of audience "fatigue". The factors are manifold. Two in particular: the competitiveness crisis of Italian football (the national team has failed to qualify for the World Cup for the third time in a row) and competition from other forms of entertainment, both within and beyond sport, especially in the eyes of the younger generations. The drop in spectators in 2025, equal to 1.6% for football overall, rises to 3.5% for Serie A, Serie B and international competition matches. A countertrend compared with other disciplines, in particular rugby (+19.6% on 2024) and tennis (+30.7%).

If there is something new in the Peninsula's "sports bar" talk, it is tennis. And not just today. SIAE data show a now well-established growth trend: in 2022 spectators numbered 546,000, in 2023 657,000, in 2024 683,000, and last year 893,000. In the post-Covid period, in short, tennis (together with padel) has gained around 350,000 paying spectators. The increasingly rich offer of major competitions hosted in Italy — from the ATP Finals in Turin (since 2021) to the Davis Cup Final 8 in Bologna (since 2025), as well as the historic Internazionali fixture — has managed to capture the growing passion for tennis, fuelled by the excellent results of the Italian athletes. Sinner leads a group of players, from Musetti to Cobolli and Jasmine Paolini, who have by now won over a mass audience, as television ratings also show: in recent years, when tennis was also broadcast by Rai, average viewers often topped 5 million, peaking at 7 million for the final between Sinner and Alcaraz at the 2025 ATP Finals, played in a packed Inalpi Arena with its 13,000 seats (capacity will rise to 14,000 this year).

Even more interesting is the spending dynamic. Tennis revenues have grown, from 59.2 to 73.1 million euros, but the average cost of access is lower (from 86.65 to 81.86 euros, probably due to the more affordable Davis Cup tickets). By contrast, in football spending has grown despite a smaller number of paying fans. This is because the average ticket price has risen, from 21.10 to 22.11 euros. The prices of tennis should come as no surprise, since its audience is traditionally of a higher socio-economic background. Moreover, in the process of turning sport into a global business, football has secured the largest slice of the television rights pie. Organisers of tennis events are thus forced to rely on ticketing and sponsorships to achieve economic sustainability.