Boasting a level of competition that puts it second only to the Premier League among the European elite, Serie A rightly collects huge sums of cash each season to distribute to its teams.
With the Serie A odds showing just how tight the race for the title is, it’s only fitting that Serie A prize money is distributed fairly evenly, but still with a slightly weighted cut akin to that of La Liga prize money calculations.
Combining even share, merit over multiple seasons, and fan base sizes, here’s a look at how Serie A prize money is distributed between its 20 clubs each season.
How Much Serie A Prize Money Do the League Winners Get?
The exact amount of Serie A prize money that the winner of the Scudetto gets each season varies due to how the prize pool is split. However, the parts that have a set rate award the Italian champions around £60 million.
This comes from the percentage of the sum awarded for league positioning, coupled with the evenly distributed sum from the €1.5 billion (£1.31bn) total Serie A prize money pool.
Equal distribution splits half of the pot into 20 even segments of €37.5 million (£32.64m) each. Top of the table then gets the largest chunk of the 15 per cent put aside for the merit-based prize money.
More cash is paid to each team based on their accumulated results in the division since 1946, and then there’s a popularity payout to add on top and finish the complete split of the total prize money pool.
In this way, there’s a chance that the team that makes good on their football odds to win Serie A may end up with less in prize money than others if they’re one of the lesser-known or newer entrants to the Italian top flight.
How is the Serie A Prize Money Pool Distributed?
Serie A prize money is distributed according to several different factors, helping to encourage competitiveness and make the league all the more enticing. The first is a flat rate of equal distribution that each club gets.
This amounts to 50 per cent of the total €1.5 billion (£1.31bn) prize money pool and €37.5 million (£32.64m) each. Next, there’s a performance-based sum of cash paid.
Prize money for this segment totals 30 per cent of the total (€450m/£392m), but is split into two segments of 15 per cent (€225m/£195.9m).
One 15 per cent segment of this is split between the finishing positions of Serie A, with the league winners getting the largest segment and relegated teams getting the smallest payouts.
The other 15 per cent of this part of the Serie A prize money pool is based on accumulated results. It gives teams that have performed better over the years since 1946 a bit more of the cut than those who’ve performed less well.
Finally, a 20 per cent (€300m/£261.1m) slab of cash remains. This is split between the teams based on the size of their respective fan bases and the overall popularity of each Serie A club.
The calculations aim to strike a balance between rewarding the teams that make Serie A an international draw, but not so much that they gain a huge edge over their peers, while also distributing a fair sum evenly and more on merit.
The Serie A prize money distribution method isn’t quite as even and merit-based as that of the Premier League, what with the popularity payouts, but the system has cultivated a more consistently competitive division – aside from that insane run of nine Scudettos to the turn of the decade for Juventus, of course.
