Serie A Draft

The era

For a stretch of the 1990s Serie A was simply the best league in the world, and it bought accordingly: Capello's Milan, an Inter side built around Ronaldo at his absolute peak, a Parma team with Buffon, Cannavaro, Thuram and Crespo in the same squad, and a Fiorentina built around Batistuta and Rui Costa. The 2000s brought two more Milan European titles and Juventus at their most ruthless, and the Inter treble closed the era. Napoli's 2022-23 title is the modern coda.

Among the squads you can land on: AC Milan 2006-07, Inter Milan 1997-98 and AC Milan 1988-89.

How it drafts

Level with the 90s as the hardest pool in the game, and the one with the widest gap between its best players and its worst — measurably so: no pool leaves more holes in a drafted XI, and a hole costs you more than the star beside it gains. Italian squads in the database skew defensive, so you will draft a back line most pools can't match — Baresi, Maldini, Nesta, Cannavaro and Buffon all live here. The catch is that the great attackers are concentrated in two or three squads, so whether the wheel offers you one decides the run.

The wheel only ever serves squads from this pool, so all 12 of them come up often enough to matter — the whole point of narrowing it. The strongest player you can land on is Kaká (95), and the best XI the pool could theoretically assemble averages 91.5. You will not get that XI: you get whatever the wheel gives you, one squad at a time, and you have to build around it.

Runs in this pool count on the global leaderboard exactly like any other — there is no scoring penalty for narrowing the wheel. See how a run works if you haven't played before, or start from the top of the football draft game.