OFFICIALLY OFFICIAL: The Serie A Femminile season won’t be resumed

The hammer has fallen on the 2019-20 Serie A Femminile season, and the final verdict wasn’t one that those wanting to see Juventus Women win a third consecutive Scudetto were hoping for.

Shortly after the players of Serie A Femminile voiced their concern about the process of how things have gone in Italy regarding the potential restart as well as the overall progress of the ongoing push to make them professionals, the FIGC announced that the women’s season in Italy won’t be restarted. It is a disappointing end to what had been a long, drawn-out process where a final decision had been pushed back a handful of times while clubs truly wondered if they would be able to meet the financial demand that would have come with constant testing of their players amid the coronavirus pandemic.

Juventus Women will not be assigned the Scudetto for the 2019-20 season, per the FIGC’s decision, despite the fact that they held a nine-point lead over Fiorentina with six games to play at the time of play being suspended. One of the biggest storylines that would have been there if play was resumed, the race for Europe between Fiorentina and AC Milan, will now be determined by an algorithm. As a result, Fiorentina will get Serie A Femminile’s second Women’s Champions League spot.

One of the biggest sticking points that the players brought up in their joint statement sent to the league earlier in the day was that they did not agree with the way the playoff and playout scenarios were structured.

Seeing as how things ended up playing out over the course of the time, the timing of the players’ statement made a whole lot of sense. So did the tone. So did just about everything else that they said in it and how unified they appear to be after being held in a time of complete uncertainty — while, I might add, either being in lockdown in Italy or back in their home country since the last Serie A Femminile games were played just before an international break — when it comes to the potential of play being resumed.

Following the Federal Council’s meeting, the head of Women’s Football for the FIGC, Ludovica Mantovani, was pretty damn honest about her disappointment in the final decision. If there was a different outcome of Monday’s meeting, Serie A Femminile would have been one of the few women’s leagues in Europe that actually resumed play.

One of the biggest takeaways from the players’ statement was that it’s time to push things forward and the current system upward. It starts with making the players themselves professionals, which was something that seemed to be coming in short order after all of the momentum the game had in Italy following the Women’s World Cup last summer.

And you know with somebody like Sara Gama leading the charge, they won’t stop fighting.