For many, the football played in the lower divisions is more human, more romantic. Truer, then. It is hard to think otherwise: if we look at Serie C, just to give a practical example, the landscape that opens up before our eyes is that of a rich, exciting, hard-fought league, one that crosses Italy from North to South, from East to West. Of a league that is a true training ground, a breeding ground for talent, with an overall average age of 25.3 years. Obviously we are talking about a league that is not perfect, like every football league in the world, but one that manages to excite a heterogeneous, transversal fanbase. A fanbase that is growing.
The numbers, in this sense, are eloquent: according to figures from Lega Pro, the body that organizes the Serie C championship, more than five million people regularly follow the matches; in stadiums, over the last season, attendances have grown significantly (+8.6%) and more than 50% of social interactions come from an audience aged between 18 and 34.
In short, to put it in a few words: Serie C is liked by an ever-growing number of people. And they are mostly young people. Perhaps because, as mentioned at the beginning, we are talking about a community that stretches across the entire country, that follows teams made up of developing talents, and therefore goes beyond the “classic” limits and boundaries of mainstream football, involving fans with zero mediation. In a direct, more visceral and therefore more accessible way.
The Official Match Ball for the 2026/27 season takes shape from this idea of accessibility, born from the collaboration between Decathlon and Serie C and based on the same technical platform developed for the French professional championships Ligue 1 and Ligue 2. The partnership between Decathlon and Lega Pro is founded on an idea of football rooted in territories and people: Decathlon, in fact, is a brand that has always been committed to making sport accessible, within everyone’s reach. And so the match is truly perfect, given that we are talking about an extremely widespread league, in which clubs are the direct expression of the communities they represent. With zero mediation, precisely.
In reality, this very capillarity – which inevitably becomes geographical, and therefore climatic – represented and still represents an important challenge for Decathlon: the Serie C ball has to guarantee high performance in contexts that are extremely different from one another, think for example of the differences between a pitch in Piedmont and one in Calabria, and at the same time it has to be accessible also to those who live football every day, to those who play it at high intensity, trying to impose themselves with talent, with willpower, with the burning desire to reach the top. In a few words: the new Serie C ball needed to ensure stable trajectories, constant control and a predictable response in every situation, on any pitch and in all weather conditions. And it had to be within fans’ reach.
From both a technical and aesthetic point of view, Decathlon began working from the concept of energy: the energy released by Serie C teams and their community, the energy that can be felt powerfully on the pitches and in the stands of all the territories involved in the championship. The 287 footballers directly involved in the project through their feedback also fuelled this energy, this desire to create the best possible product: thanks also to their contribution, after a research and development period lasting 18 months and leading to the testing of nine different prototypes, a model was created that obtained FIFA Quality Pro certification, characterized by a thermobonded construction (that is, without seams) and a 12-panel geometry; the base colour is highly refractive optical white, while the design is enlivened by dynamic graphics and a chromatic texture that starts from blue and fades into bright red, with neon yellow inserts. These references too draw on the concepts of movement, of intensity. Of energy
This, however, is only a starting point: precisely to respect the principles of transversality and accessibility, the new ball produced by Decathlon for Serie C is available in four different versions, including official and replica, also in seasonal variants, so that it can guarantee excellent performance in every context. All while maintaining aesthetic and functional consistency, so that all 1250 matches of the season are played in exactly the same conditions. So that fans too, the true lifeblood of Serie C, can play with the same ball used by the players of their favourite team. With zero mediation.
As president Matteo Marani also said, the launch of the new ball is part of a shared path between Lega Pro and Decathlon, a path founded on values that are very close to those of the public. Rossella Ruggeri, Marketing and Communication Director of Decathlon Italia, said that «we and Serie C have a common vision, made of responsibility, authenticity and closeness to local areas. Our goal is to make a high-level playing experience increasingly accessible and without compromise». This is the essence of Serie C, a gateway to big football where, however, the game remains more romantic, truer. More accessible to everyone, exactly as Decathlon likes it.