Italian football map - 2006-07 season

The next country to be featured in our series of country maps is Italy. These maps are brought to us by Bill Turianski, publisher of the Bill's Sports Maps website. As always they feature a map of the country that includes all the major club emblems and a list of attendance figures, in this case all of the top two divisions and a selection of the third division clubs. The emblems are sized proportional to the club's attendance for the 2006-07 season, so that Inter towers over tiny little Albinoleffe. The 2006-07 season was quite a strange one as it followed on the heels of the Moggiopoli scandal and Juventus's season the "purgatory" of Serie B. And actually the attendance in Serie B this past season must have been at an all-time high, considering Juventus, Napoli, Genoa and several other historically important clubs were competing. This led to an overall decline in attendance from the year before by Italian fans who continue to be frustrated by the endless scandals, not to mention the depressingly common incidences of violence at Italian stadiums. The numbers are staggering. Ten years ago, the average crowd in Serie A was over 31,000. In 2006-07 it was 18,000. It seems to have climbed back up a bit this year thanks to the return of the big clubs but the long-term prospects remain bleak without a sea change in Italian football culture.

Lots more where this came from at Bill's website - Bill's Sports Maps.