Post-tournament retention will be a key metric for the success of the 2026 Fifa World Cup according to Lega Serie A USA’s CEO and Marketing Director, Andy Mitchell.
The tournament, which will be held in the US, Mexico and Canada, marks the first time that the World Cup has headed to North American shores since the US hosted the 1994 iteration of the tournament.
Speaking to Callum Williams, Senior Journalist for Insider Sport, Mitchell said: “If I look ahead to the World Cup, there’s going to be massive organic growth but I think as a soccer industry, and for Serie A specifically, what we really need to focus on is retention.
“In [1994], everybody thought that that was the moment that soccer was going to really take off and what we saw was that following the World Cup, we sank back down to where we were previously.
“It’s on everybody in the industry to think about how we drive retention following the [2026] World Cup. There’s going to be some drop off but we need to drop off at a level that’s well above where we were [pre-tournament] and continue to grow from there. There’s a lot of investment in the US so I think we’re poised to take advantage of the World Cup as an opportunity for long-term sustained growth.”
Serie A’s efforts to engage a US audience are boosted by the fact that the league is home to a number of players from the US Men’s National Team (USMNT), the most high-profile of which is AC Milan’s Christian Pulisic.
Looking more specifically at the connection between Serie A and the US, Mitchell also highlighted the cultural connections between the US and Italy.
The US has historically been a landing destination for Italians who left their homeland and Mitchell revealed that a recent study by the league found that 51 million Americans have a cultural “affinity” to Italy. Additionally, a further three million Americans visit Italy every year on holiday.
As a result, Mitchell stressed the importance of Serie A “creating a cultural connection between people’s travels and sports” as a way of growing Serie A’s audience in the US.
Last season, Serie A USA also launched Calcio Weekly for its North American audience, an ‘American-centric’ weekly newsletter that aggregates news from around the league, with a particular focus on the exploits of the American players in the league.
As well as an American influence on the pitch, Serie A has also seen a rise in the involvement of Americans in the ownership of teams. In a trend similar to across other European leagues, almost half of Italy’s top-flight clubs have US owners.
According to Mitchell, this offers the chance for Serie A to learn from the US sports model, which has a strong focus on sponsorship and commercialisation.
He said: “Given the global distribution of content and the ubiquity of travel being relatively easy, we are truly in a global marketplace. We can all learn from each other and we’ve had conversations with all the different leagues here in the US about how to potentially work together [and] exchange learnings as we work to grow our respective sports around the world.
“I think the biggest lesson that we can take from them is commercialisation. How do we get commercial in a way that’s very organic to the sport and is adding to the fans’ experience and is not disruptive? I think American sports have done a good job of that.
“So a lot of what I look at is, how do we think about commercialising this league in this market in the same way that traditional American sports have? And what can we learn from them and deploy in this market.”
