Italian football

The top of the Italian football system is Serie A, a 20-club top division contested across a 38-game season from August to May. Below it are Serie B (20 clubs), Serie C (60 clubs in three regional groups), and a wider network of regional divisions. Promotion and relegation connect the tiers, with three clubs going up to and three coming down from Serie A each year. Two Serie B clubs are promoted automatically, while the third promotion place is usually decided through play-offs.

Alongside the league competitions, Italian football runs the Coppa Italia — Italy's main national cup, founded in 1922 — and the Supercoppa Italiana, currently staged as a four-team mini-tournament involving the top two Serie A finishers and the two Coppa Italia finalists. The championship winner each year wears a scudetto — a small tricolour shield — on their jersey the following season. The competition for the scudetto has been dominated across recent decades by Juventus, Internazionale, and AC Milan, while Napoli have re-emerged as a major modern force.

Serie A is the top division, with 20 clubs. Below it is Serie B, also with 20 clubs, run by the Lega Serie B as a separate professional competition. The top two clubs from Serie B are automatically promoted to Serie A at the end of each season. The third promotion place is usually decided through play-offs involving the clubs finishing third to eighth, unless the gap between third and fourth is large enough for third place to go up automatically. The bottom three from Serie A drop down to Serie B.

Below Serie B is Serie C, a 60-club third tier split into three regional groups (A, B, and C) of 20 clubs each. The three group winners and the play-off winner among the next-best clubs are promoted to Serie B each year. Below Serie C is Serie D at the fourth tier, the highest level of amateur football, split into nine regional groups. The pyramid continues through several more tiers of regional leagues below that.

The top four Serie A finishers each season normally qualify directly for the next Champions League league phase. Under UEFA's current format, Italy can receive a fifth Champions League place in seasons when Italian clubs finish among the top two associations for European Performance Spots. The next-best Serie A finishers below the Champions League places qualify for the Europa League and the Conference League.

The Coppa Italia winner qualifies automatically for the next Europa League. If the cup winner has already qualified for Europe through their Serie A finish, the Europa League place passes to the next-best Serie A finisher who has not already qualified. In a typical season, six or seven Italian clubs end up in European competition the following year.

The first Italian football championship was held in 1898 with four clubs from Turin and Genoa. The competition expanded through regional groups across the early 20th century before being reorganised into the modern Serie A format for the 1929-30 season. The Coppa Italia was launched in 1922 as Italy's main cup competition, although the format was suspended several times in the early years and only became continuous from 1958 onwards.

Italian football has been hit by several major scandals across its history. The most significant was the Calciopoli scandal in 2006, in which Juventus, AC Milan, Fiorentina and Lazio were implicated in a referee-manipulation case. Juventus were stripped of the 2004-05 Serie A title — which was left unassigned — and the 2005-06 title was reassigned to Internazionale. Juventus were relegated to Serie B as part of their punishment, becoming the only Serie A title winner to drop to the second tier as a direct result of the verdict. The competition has continued since with its basic structure intact.