Serie A's "recent decline has been variously attributed to the Italian economy, decrepit stadiums, eccentric owners, and violent and racist fans," according to Brian Homewood of REUTERS. Inter Milan CEO Mike Bolingbroke believes that "there is another, seemingly trivial reason:" kickoff times. Bolingbroke said that the "habit of starting some matches at 8:45pm leads to a triple whammy of half-empty stadiums, a poor television spectacle and, most crucially of all, lower sales to Asian markets." He said, "It's a disaster for the league." Bolingbroke, who as right-hand man to club President Erick Thohir is "responsible for trying to restore Inter's position among Europe's elite clubs," said the first problem was that, "particularly on a Sunday, late kickoffs keep families away." Bolingbroke: "You won't get kids going, so if the kids are at home, the parents have to be at home." Although Bolingbroke has been told that broadcasters like the late kickoff, he said he found that a "little difficult to believe." He said, "What the broadcasters want is a great product and they're not going to get a great product when there are empty seats. The best product is the Bundesliga or Premier League where the stadiums are sold out, and neither the Bundesliga nor the Premier League regularly play games at 8:45 in the evening." Bolingbroke recognizes that Inter relies on Serie A "becoming great again before the club can follow suit, a process which centres around the distribution of television revenues." He said that one of the reasons the EPL was so successful was that TV money "was more evenly distributed." Bolingbroke: "But it's not about giving all the clubs a larger slice of the cake because the cake is only a certain size and that means other clubs have to give some money up, which of course would be us. The way around that is to make the cake bigger and to do that, you need to raise the revenues and the way we are going to do that is with international revenues" (REUTERS, 3/22).
