Last week, Atalanta passed from majority ownership by the Percassi family, whose head Antonio Percassi played for the club as a teenager, into the hands of American investment firm Bain Capital. The consortium, which acquired 55 per cent of the club currently fifth in Serie A, is led by Stephen Pagliuca, co-owner of the Boston Celtics basketball team.
They are not alone. Italian football once existed in its own bubble, its clubs either the centre of local communities, owned by local business magnates or the property of dynastical wealthy families.
While the rest of Europe welcomed foreign ownership (or at least the foreign capital that it provided), Italy resisted. No longer: half of Serie A’s 20 clubs are now majority foreign-owned. Nine of those 10 purchases were completed by North American investors or consortiums. Eight of the nine takeovers occurred since 2018. A reverse gold rush has taken place.
There is no one type of new owner. Genoa were bought by 777 Partners, a Miami-based investment firm. Elliott Management, who now own AC Milan, are a hedge fund. At Roma, Dan Friedkin is a billionaire heir. Fiorentina’s Rocco Commisso is a billionaire. Canadian Joey Saputo, who bought Bologna in 2014, has football experience after founding Montreal Impact (now Club de Foot Montréal); most others do not.
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Covid-19 hit Italy’s economy hard, creating an opportunity for investment to be welcomed. It also reduced the potential sale price of clubs in a league where club value already suffered through the mismanagement of broadcasting deals.
Investors believe that Italian football clubs are available in cut-price deals. Commisso bought Fiorentina for roughly $170m (£127m). Robert Platak was interested in Sunderland but then bought Spezia for $25m, considerably less than the Black Cats’ asking price.
The question “why almost exclusively US investors?” is a little more complicated. It is partly a question of opportunity. There are not that many high-profile, top-tier clubs in major European leagues that are up for sale. The Premier League is already dominated by foreign owners, the Bundesliga has limitative ownership rules and some of Spain’s highest-profile clubs are registered associations with members rather than shareholders.
There are familial ties too. Kyle Krause, Parma’s American owner, was born in Italy. So too was Commisso. Saputo and Pagliuca were born in North America but have Italian heritage. They share that with more than five per cent of US citizens. Given that connection, and Italian football’s historic traditions and fan cultures that Americans find deeply attractive, it becomes an easy sell.
But the business of business is business. Investment firms and hedge funds do not make decisions based on nostalgia or romance. The new wave of North American owners see Serie A as a league with huge growth potential, both in terms of broadcasting revenues and the modernisation of stadiums that might provoke a rise in attendances.
One takeover might not make much of a difference. En masse, they believe that their takeovers could fuel a new era for Italian football that once again allows it to compete for the world’s elite foreign players and coaches. If that allows them to buy low and sell high, everyone wins. At least that’s the plan.
Last year, when Serie A negotiated a new domestic TV rights deal, it targeted a 20 per cent increase but ended up agreeing a contract with DAZN that represented a 13 per cent loss. At $995m per year, that deal is dwarfed by the Premier League and comfortably surpassed by the Bundesliga’s own domestic package.
Foreign broadcasting deals have also taken a hit. “It will definitely go down – a decent amount,” Serie A CEO Luigi De Siervo warned. He was proved right. If potential owners were relying upon immediate growth, they were disappointed. There was also talk of a CVC investment deal with the league as a whole (similar to the one approved in La Liga), but that has not yet materialised.
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One immediate ambition of new owners was to modernise or even rebuild stadiums that had been allowed to crack and crumble. Many were built for the 1990 World Cup and thus remain government-owned and rented out to clubs. Empty seats are plentiful and facilities are usually sparse. But red tape and a lack of infrastructure has blocked attempts at improvements.
“One of the huge negatives in Italy has been the infrastructure situation,” Commisso said last year. “It’s the inability of anyone like myself to be able to say: ‘I want to build a new stadium so I can bring not only comfort to our fans but raise more money out of the stadium investment.’ That’s pretty difficult to do in Italy.”
Despite the difficulties, nobody is giving up. The cabal of North American owners are all keen to stress that their investments are not short-term whims and they never expected the growth to be linear and without setbacks. There is power in their numbers and they may well be joined by compatriots who see value in cheap purchase prices and potential growth.
But it remains a fascinating case study. This is a constant tussle between a new ownership model aiming to alter the landscape of Italian football quicker than it might want to be changed.
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