April 12th, Lazio was eliminated by Fenerbahçe in the quarter finals of the Europa League. The Turkish are not exactly an invincible army and the biancocelesti lost a good opportunity to qualify for the semifinals, where they could have faced Benfica. But the Italian football press praised the Petkovic boys for the accomplishment. An English, Spanish, German and even Russian reader could hardly understand, thinking that was a disappointing outcome. It's a matter of point of views. For sure Lazio achieved the best result for an Italian club in the last four Europa Leagues: the last team to reach the quarter finals was Udinese in 2008-2009. The bianconeri were eliminated by Werder Bremen when the official name of the competition was still UEFA Cup. This means that Lazio was the first Italian club to place among the best 16 teams since Europa League started.

Italian clubs snub the second European competition. Why? There is no logical explanation. The last time an Italian raised the trophy was in 1999, when Parma crushed Marseille 3-0 (Crespo, Vanoli, Chiesa). Fourteen years without winning a competition which Serie A clubs dominated for a long time almost without any worthy opposition.

A golden age. In the 1990-1999 decade Italy raised a huge bounty in Europe winning 7 UEFA Cup, 3 European Cups/Champions League and 3 Cup Winners' Cup. In those magic years, the Italian clubs which reached a European final were 25. England, France, Germany and Spain (added together!) collected 24 finalist teams. In the Nineties, a distracted TV viewer could easily confuse the UEFA Cup final with a Coppa Italia final. For four times the UEFA Cup conclusive match was an Italian affair: Juventus-Fiorentina in in 1989-90; Inter-Roma in 1990-91; Parma-Juventus in 1994-95 and Inter-Lazio in 1997-98. In the 1989-1990 season, Italian clubs raised the three main European cups: the European Cup (Milan), the UEFA Cup (Juventus) the Cup Winners' Cup (Sampdoria). Among the Big Five leagues (Italy, Spain, England, Germany and France) no other achieved such a deed.

An unexpected rethink. Why did Serie A clubs start snubbing the UEFA Cup, then Europa League? The economic downfall which the Italian football experienced from the 2000 must be taken into consideration, but that's not a thorough explanation. In the last ten years, clubs like Braga, Fulham, Espanyol and Alavès reached the final. And we are talking about clubs which can't get even close to the revenues that Milan, Juventus, Inter or Roma have.

Sure, as we explained on SerieAddicted.com the revenues available for a club participating the Champions League are hugely larger compared with Europa League ones. But the bad effects of ignoring this competition spread throughout the whole football system.

Basically, the clubs started concentrating more on the Serie A and – in many cases - started considering UEFA Cup/Europa League like a friendly tournament, good for trying younger players or giving an occasions to players who normally sit on the bench. In the last season, for example, Napoli's squad was adequately equipped for the final victory but they were eliminated by the Czech team Vickoria Plzen in the round of 32. Napoli's coach Walter Mazzarri kept many key players like Marek Hamsik, Gokhan Inler, Valon Behrami and Hugo Campagnaro on the bench.

But the lowests points were the 2006-2007 and the 2010-2011 season. In the 2006-2007, there were no longer Italian clubs in the round of 16. Chievo went out in the First round, Palermo said farewell to Europe during the Group stage while Livorno and Parma capitulated in the round of 32. But that was the first season after Calciopoli, and the penalizations inflicted after the scandal opened the doors of the European competition to Livorno, Palermo and Parma. Not exactly top teams. In 2010-2011 Juventus, Palermo and Sampdoria were eliminated in the Group stage while Napoli endured up to the round of 32.

Europa League failure, Champions League punishment. Serie A dominated the UEFA ranking from 1985 to 1999-2000, when La Liga clubs dethroned Italians. But the worst was yet to come. Italian football collapsed in this ranking down to the fourth place (here the current ranking). Now France and Portugal are on its back, a few points away. The most painful overtake occurred in 2010-2011, when Germany climbed over Italy settling in third-place. What did that mean? Something simple as much as disastrous: starting from that season Italy has three clubs only in Champions League, while Spain, England and Germany have four. The downgrade would have happened one year earlier but Inter won the Champions League, temporarily avoiding the unavoidable.

We can read on the UEFA website: “The associations' or country coefficient rankings are based on the results of each association's clubs in the five previous UEFA Champions League and UEFA Europa League seasons. The rankings determine the number of places allocated to an association in forthcoming UEFA club competition”. Italian teams continued to be competitive in the Champions League. They won the trophy in 1996, 2003, 2007 and 2010. The final of 2003 was even an Italian derby between Milan and Juventus and Serie A brought three out of four teams to the semifinals: Inter lost the European derby with the Rossoneri.

As we can see by the graphics, it is evident that the awful exhibitions in UEFA Cup are tightly bound to the ruinous downfall in the UEFA ranking.

What next for Serie A clubs? In the last 10-15 years, Serie A went from being the strongest league in the world, probably of all-time - in terms of triumphs, overall domination, quality of players, number of competitive teams - to the fourth power in Europe. Due to the evolution of UEFA competitions (from three to two continental cups, of which one much more significant than the other in terms of prestige and economic importance), there will probably never be again such a golden era for a single European League: not for the Premier League, whose team, despite the many Champions League semifinals reached in the last 10 years, never really capitalized as much as expected (3 wins, Liverpool in 2005, Man Utd in 2008 and Chelsea in 2012- exactly like Serie A); not for La Liga nor the Bundesliga, which do have the top teams (Barcelona, Real Madrid, Atletico Madrid, Bayern Munich, Borussia Dortmund), but not a sufficiently high average level (definitely not as good as the 1990s Serie A).

The latest UEFA reform might help Italian clubs: starting from 2015, the winner of the Europe League will play the Champions League in the following season, giving that economic incentive that Italian (medium) clubs seemed to be looking for in order to give it all in the second competition of Europe.

But clubs are not the only ones to be blamed for this downfall: the Italian football institutions, like Lega Calcio, never seemed to worry about this negative trend, at least not until it was too late. Never a word to the media, to explain what their policy was on the matter, as if either they did not care or, even worse, they supported the clubs. Hopefully, the arrival of new, foreign owners in Serie A (Erick Thohir, James Pallotta), will bring a new point of view within the control rooms, and will represent the light at the end of the tunnel in which the Italian football industry seems to be stuck. A tunnel hopefully directed towards a new Renaissance.