Once, the Supercoppa Italiana felt like a quiet punctuation mark at the start of the season — a single game, rooted in place, often played in the shadow of summer heat and half-fit squads. Today, it is something else entirely. Staged thousands of miles from Italy, packaged as a multi-day spectacle and sold as a global event, the Supercoppa has become a symbol of Serie A’s uneasy relationship with modern football’s economics. Its repeated presence in Saudi Arabia is not an accident or a novelty, but the clearest expression yet of a league trying to reconcile tradition with survival in a globalised game.
Italian football once ruled the World; it attracted the biggest stars with the biggest salaries and the Italian sugar daddies were only too happy to indulge their clubs. Lothar Matthaus, George Weah, Zinedine Zidane, Ronaldo and Kaka all picked up definitive seasons in Italy, while the big Italian names stayed in the country. Soon though, the marketing teams in England teamed up with Sky to create a monster, one that quickly drove the big money into English football and pulled the biggest stars from around the world.
The dawn of the Premier League
Since the dawn of the Premier League and its rise to some sort of Harlem Globetrotter league, the rest of Europe has struggled to keep up. Only the likes of Real Madrid, Barcelona, PSG and Bayern can attempt to stay the course. In Italy there hasn’t been a European Cup winner since Inter in 2010. Since then, Juventus and Inter have both played two finals, and the less said about them the better. So how does Italy reconcile itself with the rise of the Premier League, how does it compete with the finances available to English clubs? It’s harder for Italy because it was once the King and is now out of favour. The FIGC decided the key to getting back on top is globalisation. Take Calcio to the World.
This hasn’t started with the Milan v Como in Perth, Australia debacle, however. It goes back way before this and with Italy’s attempts to market her showpiece match, the Supercoppa Italiana. For the less educated amongst you, the Supercoppa – or Super Cup – is the Community Shield. A glorified friendly between the last champions and last cup winners, held at the start of the season to raise the curtain. Well, it used to be at least. The current iteration features four teams, is played mid-season and is being held for a fourth consecutive year in Saudi Arabia. So how did we get here?
The Supercoppa in the Middle East
The Supercoppa started life fairly inconspicuously, a crowd of just over 19,000 turned our to watch AC Milan beat Sampdoria at the San Siro in 1988. Then, the nominated “home” team was the Scudetto winners and they would host the cup winners in their home stadium. This continued for a few seasons until the 1993 edition saw Milan narrowly beat Torino at the Robert F Kennedy Memorial Stadium in Washington. The cup went back to Italy after that for a few years until 2002 when it was curiously held in Libya. This was the first politically tinged trip the Supercoppa made, when the Gaddafi regime was happy to pay for the prestige of hosting a high-profile European fixture.
The move was facilitated by Muammar’s son Saadi Gaddafi before his much maligned spell in Italy at Perugia, Udinese and Sampdoria. At the time, Libyan state-linked companies had sponsorship and equity stakes in Italian clubs making the 2002 edition more about local political and commercial relationships than a broader globalisation strategy.
The Middle East would rear its head again 2014 when Doha, Qatar would host Juventus-Napoli, inbetween various Chinese editions. In March 2023, however, Serie A formally signed an agreement with the Saudi government that four of the next 6 editions of the tournament would be played in the country with the format expanding to feature four teams. Qualification for the cup now means the top two from Serie A and both finalists from the Coppa Italia take part in the tournament.
Moving to Saudi Arabia makes commercial sense for Serie A and the FIGC. It’s the richest country in the world, loves football and is willing to invest as part of a controversial “sportswashing” campaign. Saudi Arabia has invested heavily in hosting major sporting events as part of a broader national strategy to “soften” their image in the world stage. For Italian football, the desperation to close the gap to the Premier League and top UEFA clubs necessitates the move. As of September 2025, Reuters reports that Serie A roughly earns €250m a year from international media rights and is desperate to grow that. So Saudi Arabia can buy prestige, and Calcio can buy time (and cashflow).
Controversy follows
Controversy, however, is never far behind any decision to cosy up to Saudi Arabia and the Supercoppa is no different. In 2019, the final in Jeddah triggered major backlash around stadium segregation, women’s access and restrictions on alcohol. This controversy has never fully gone away, the noise just becomes more of a background noise that’s managed through PR and framed as “football’s global growth”. Attendance optics are a repeated talking point, with empty seats clearly visible on coverage, but this isn’t just limited to the tournament being in Saudi Arabia. During the mid-noughties the San Siro hosted three consecutive finals involving Inter, and the attendance was never over 46,000 – leaving roughly 30,000 empty seats. Meanwhile the last two finals at the 26,000 capacity King Saud Stadium have both been roughly 25,000. So the crowds are low, but the stadium is nearly at capacity.
Then there’s the Italian fan argument. Supporters see the Supercoppa as a domestic trophy that’s been removed from local culture in favour of international partners. The local clubs who usually hosts the matches are guaranteed a hosting fee, broadcast money, sponsor exposure and the usually matchday revenues. Italian fans don’t like this being taken outside of Italy and handed to an already rich nation.
Zooming out though, Italian fans are more frustrated at the place their league now holds in Europe. Once the cream of the world’s leagues, it now holds an uneasy place in the “Top 5” debate in Europe. Serie A and the FIGC are desperate to regain their place at the top of the ladder, or at least able to compete at the top. The Supercoppa in Saudi Arabia, then, isn’t a cash grab from the league, it’s the sharp end of a strategy involving international offices, modernised rights sales and exportable events. The Supecoppa Italiana is one piece of a much larger puzzle, one that Serie A hopes will propel it back to the top.
There is another point at play here too, and it’s the willingness of everyone else to deal with Saudi Arabia to propel itself forward. If Italy don’t take their tournament there, someone else will and yet again Italy slips further behind the French, Spanish, German and English leagues. If Saudi Arabia is going to spend its money to bring showpiece football matches to their country anyway, why shouldn’t Italy get a slice of the pie?
However uncomfortable it may feel, the Supercoppa’s repeated staging in Saudi Arabia is less a cultural betrayal than a reflection of Italian football’s economic reality. Serie A operates in a landscape where commercial power increasingly dictates relevance, and where standing still risks falling further behind. Exporting a single, adaptable competition like the Supercoppa allows the league to generate guaranteed revenue without dismantling its domestic calendar, even if it comes at the cost of atmosphere and tradition. What makes the decision more significant is that it may not be the end point but a test case — a signal of how Italian football might increasingly package its moments, its matches and even its identity for an international audience in the years ahead.