Marco Simone scored 75 goals for AC Milan, won two European Cups and lifted the Scudetto four times, yet he’s best remembered as the answer to a pub quiz question.

The 56-year-old holds the distinction of being the first player to score a goal in a competitive fixture between two Serie A teams on foreign soil.

And a crucial one it was too, as Simone stabbed home the only goal of the game four minutes into the final of the 1993 edition of the Supercoppa against Torino.

A modest 25,268 fans packed into the RFK Memorial Stadium in Washington D.C. on a sweltering August afternoon, less than half of the venue’s capacity.

Writing in the Corriere della Sera, Alberto Costa noted that Milan and Torino managed to deliver a decent performance “despite the sweltering heat and lingering jet lag”, issues which would rear their head again 12 months later as the US hosted the World Cup.

The Supercoppa was back in the USA in 2003 and has been staged in Libya, China, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, but 32 years ago the prospect of two Serie A teams squaring off in the States was novel.

The game, too, was relatively new to the American audience, at least to those too young to remember the North American Soccer League, which had been defunct for almost a decade by the time Milan and Torino crossed the Atlantic.

It made for a strange spectacle, as Costa wrote, with “the stadium announcer explaining the game’s flow to the American newcomers” against a backdrop of hot-dog stalls and popcorn vendors.

Could calcio succeed in making it big in the USA before the World Cup? The Corriere della Sera verdict left precious little room for optimism.

“The stadium was noticeably empty,” Costa noted. “It highlighted the considerable challenge of the ‘colonisation’ project our football is pursuing, despite promotional and commercial endeavours.”

Fast forward three decades and Serie A has its sights firmly set on US expansion once more as it aims to become the biggest European league in the country behind the Premier League.

“What I want to make sure of is that we get ahead of our continental European competitors,” Andy Mitchell, CEO of Serie A’s north American operation, tells Destination Calcio. 

“I believe that Serie A should absolutely be the most popular continental European league in the US. And that’s really what our goal is.”

As is the case domestically, the Premier League operates on an entirely different level from its competitors when it comes to TV rights in the US.

Its latest deal with NBC, which began in 2022, is worth $450m a season, more than five times the value of the first contract the Premier League signed with the network in 2013.

To put the figure into context, in July CBS and Serie A agreed to a two-year extension, the value of which is understood to be significantly less than the previous three-year deal, which expired in 2024 and was worth in the region of $60m-$70m a season.

Catching the Premier League, however, is not on Mitchell’s radar.

“Clearly today in this market, at least, they are setting the pace,” he explains. 

“They’ve done incredibly well. Hats off to them. They’ve done a great job of marketing, so for me, it’s about keeping pace with the Premier League.”

Like La Liga and the Premier League, Serie A also has offices in New York – Mitchell speaks to Destination Calcio from Manhattan – and teams from the three leagues have regularly featured in pre-season friendlies in the US.

All three leagues have also floated the idea of staging fixtures in the States in the near future.

Back in 2008, the Premier League’s proposal of holding a 39th league game abroad was shot down amid furious backlash from fans, but the picture is changing.

Last year, Jon Miller, a leading executive at NBC Sports, told The Athletic he would “continue to push” for the Premier League to stage games in the USA.

La Liga’s volcanic president Javier Tebas has been open about his desire to take a season game abroad, after plans for Barcelona to face Girona in Miami in 2018 and Atletico Madrid to play Villarreal the following year were kiboshed.

Serie A has now hopped on the bandwagon and aims to become the first European league to stage a fixture in the US within the next three years.

“We would love to do it,” Serie A commercial and marketing director Michele Ciccarese said at a media event at the league’s New York offices last month.

“We are working in order to potentially do it but there are barriers that we need to overcome with the right strategy in place and with the support of the clubs, without forgetting that players are players and they have a lot of competition, when they have to play Serie A, Coppa Italia, Champions League and play in international trophies.”

FIFA had previously opposed regular-season games taking place outside a host country, but it has since changed its stance and effectively fired the starting gun on the race to become the first European league to host a game abroad.

“It would be great for us to have clubs playing on our soil,” Mitchell explains.

“We would obviously love to be first but it’s a complicated formula between the home fans and US soccer.

“There’s a lot of different parties to kind of get on board for this.”

But Serie A’s plans to grow in the US don’t hinge exclusively on staging games across the Atlantic. In fact, they don’t necessarily hinge on football at all, but on the appeal of Italian culture.

The US is home to one of the largest Italian diasporas in the world and Serie A figures estimate over 50million Americans have an affinity for Italian culture, while six million visit the Peninsula every year.

“Americans love Italy,” Mitchell explains. “I’m one of those Americans who loved Italy before having this job. I travelled a number of times, personally and professionally in Italy. 

“I love Italian food. I love Italian culture. And this is really how we can appeal to Americans that differentiate ourselves.”

To do so, Serie A has poured resources into growing its brand and audience across what Mitchell describes as a “five-pillar strategy”.

Serie A matches are broadcast on CBS and Paramount Plus, while the league’s YouTube channel features interviews in English and Italian with some of its biggest stars.

Predictably, social media has a huge role to play too, with the league’s Instagram channel delving deep into an array of topics – from player profiles, to historical rivalries and so on.

As was the case in Washington back in 1993, there is a fine line between appealing to a new audience and keeping long-established Serie A fans.

But it is a challenge Mitchell, who spent 12 years in Facebook’s media division after 15 years at CNN before taking up his current role, relishes.

He says: “One of the challenges we have is how do you appeal to a broader American audience, but at the same time engage the audience that we already have and continue to solidify it.

“​We are a football league, first and foremost, but we’re a media business and we’re trying to grow our audience and monetise our audience.” 

In that respect, it helps that Serie A features some of the best American football has to offer in the likes of Christian Pulisic, Timothy Weah, Yunus Musah and Weston McKennie.

And with the US set to be the centre of football’s attention over the next two summers, the opportunity for growth is enormous.

The playing field has changed dramatically since the World Cup was first held in the States 31 years ago.

Back then, Serie A was at the peak of its powers, while now it is playing catch-up to the commercial behemoth that is the Premier League.

On a more American-centric level, meanwhile, the World Cup shapes as a make-or-break moment for football in the country, where the sport has not made as much inroads as was hoped back in 1994.

USA coach Mauricio Pochettino boldly proclaimed the national team has all it takes to be top of the world rankings in five years, but his assessment seems optimistic at best.

As far as Serie A is concerned, however, the Club World Cup this summer and the World Cup next year are huge opportunities.

“It’s just an incredible opportunity for us because so many eyes will be on the world of football,” Mitchell explains.

“There’s an estimate out there that the interest in the sport grows by tenfold in the home market. And so what we really have to do is think about how we capture an outsized percentage of the market share as it grows.

“So that when people come out of the World Cup and realise that this is an awesome sport and they look for the clubs and the leagues they want to follow I want to make sure we put ourselves in a great position to grab that market share.”

Again, having some of the USMNT’s stars plying their trade in Italy is a major bonus for Serie A.

“My expectation is that Christian Pulisic is going to be on the cover of every magazine, every newspaper, every billboard,” explains Mitchell. 

“And so the fact that he is playing in our league and that we have great personalities [who play for the USMNT and in Serie A], I think that will really help us take those next big steps in this market.”

A lot has changed since that Simone goal against Torino. Serie A is ready to take the next step.