Back in the 2000/01 season, five Serie A clubs featured in the Top 10 of the Deloitte Football Money List.

Fast forward to 2015/16 and AC Milan, Inter, AS Roma and Lazio have slipped out, leaving Juventus as the sole Italian representative in the revenue table and only in 10th place at that.

The decline of Italian football especially when it comes to the Milan clubs has been well documented but this week on Team 33, we looked into the business and infrastructural environment that caused issues for the Serie A clubs with Steven G Mandis, an adjunct associate professor in finance and economics at Columbia Business School and author of Whatever Happened To Serie A: The Rise, Fall and Signs of Revival.

In putting together the book, Mandis has had behind the scenes access to Italian clubs, including through AS Roma's American owner Jim Pallotta, where he's been able to study the off-the-field environment within Serie A.

He spoke to me on this week's show about the issues unique to Italy that fuelled that nation's rise as a football league power into the 1990s and how some of those same idiosyncrasies helped propel a decline.

But through his work, Mandis sees many signs of optimism that some Italian clubs - Juventus, AS Roma and Napoli in particular and in very different ways - are making developments behind the scenes that is helping those sides close the revenue gap to the financial giants of the Premier League and La Liga. 

You can listen to the full interview on the podcast player below or on iTunes as well as the video player above:  

Also on the show, the weekly chat section saw Joe Coffey, Derek Ryan, Enda Coll, Jonathan Higgins and I chatting Arsenal, Man United, Matt Doherty and Ireland: