Following Serie A from the United States means watching soccer before noon. The scheduling logic behind that is Italian domestic television, not any consideration of overseas viewers.
The Italian matchday is deliberately spread out
Rather than a single block of simultaneous kickoffs, Serie A splits its round across Saturday, Sunday and Monday with staggered start times.
This exists so that domestic broadcasters can sell each match as a standalone event, with almost no two league fixtures overlapping.
For a viewer abroad the consequence is a long thin schedule rather than a concentrated afternoon, which makes following the whole round difficult but individual matches easy.
The offset does the rest
Italy sits several hours ahead of the eastern United States, and further ahead of the western states, with the gap changing when the two regions shift clocks on different dates.
An Italian lunchtime kickoff is early morning on the American East Coast and the middle of the night further west.
The prime Italian evening slot, the one reserved for the biggest fixture of the round, lands in the American early afternoon, which is the most watchable window of the day.
Italian television shaped the slots first
The early Sunday afternoon kickoff exists because Italian audiences historically watched after lunch, and the schedule was built around that habit.
Monday night fixtures were added to extend the round across more of the week, giving broadcasters an exclusive property on a night with little competition.
None of these decisions considered overseas markets, because the domestic rights deal dwarfs foreign sales for a league of Serie A's size.
Rights sales abroad follow rather than lead
International distribution is sold separately, often to streaming services rather than traditional networks, and those buyers accept whatever schedule Italy sets.
That arrangement is stable because a foreign broadcaster paying a fraction of the domestic fee has no leverage to move kickoff times.
Where leagues have moved times for foreign audiences, it has generally followed a foreign market becoming large enough to matter financially.
How the calendar changes across the season
Winter rounds compress slightly because of the break in the schedule, and European midweek commitments pull some clubs' league fixtures earlier or later in the round.
Toward the end of the season, matches with implications for the title or relegation are increasingly played simultaneously, which briefly turns the spread-out Italian round into something closer to an American slate.
That final-weeks compression is the one point where the American viewer gets a conventional block of soccer, and it comes at the cost of the individual attention each fixture received all season.