Serie A Made in USA: The rise of foreign owners

The number of overseas owners in Italy’s top division now sits at half of its 20 teams. Giancarlo Rinaldi looks at how Serie A has become more attractive to outsiders and what that means for the game.

Once upon a time they were the “Ricchi Scemi”, the rich fools. Businessmen with perhaps more money than sense drove Italian football to the top of the continental tree in a golden age of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Colourful, controversial and voluble they also had something else in common – they were Italian. But with all three newly-promoted sides from Serie B this summer under foreign ownership, the game of Calcio has started to take on a distinctly Stateside drawl. But why has it happened and does it really matter for the state of the game and its fans?

The answer to the first part is, on the surface at least, pretty obvious. Having snapped up sides in other leagues, many of the top teams in Italy remained open to overseas investors and – slowly but surely – they have started to move in on the biggest names. Juventus might stubbornly cling to its historic links but both Milan and Inter are now in the hands of US investors. Roma, too, have been in American hands for some time while Genoa are a more recent acquisition by 777 Partners. As a nation with a huge number of emigrants from the Bel Paese, it is hardly such a surprise.

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Indeed, there is more than a bit of the local boy made good about the likes of Rocco Commisso at Fiorentina, Stephen Pagliuca at Atalanta and the Canadian Joey Saputo at Bologna. What better way to show your success to your long-lost relatives than taking a top team under your wing? Only a handful can afford the luxury, of course.

Another attraction, without a doubt, can be the beauty of the places involved. Who wouldn’t want to fly out to Parma every other weekend for dinner? Or a trip to Venice for some Cicchetti before kick-off? Or a stroll along the banks of Lake Como to digest your post-match pasta? This is not only what can make the place attractive to buyers but it also sells the product to potential supporters worldwide.

So far, so marketable but it is not always without its difficulties. Big international businessmen are usually used to making things happen and making them happen quickly. The collisions between that can-do attitude and the slow, slow and even slower approach of Italian bureaucracy can be spectacular. More than once there have been hands thrown up in the air and threats to walk away.

The positive for the Italian game is that these big-money owners, like the Indonesian Hartono family at Como, should be able to compete financially with other leagues more equally than they have done for some time. Take a look down the divisions and you will see a string of other sides now in the hands of groups from outside Italy. The City Group at Palermo or Alexander Knaster at Pisa have billions of pounds at their disposal.

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Old-timers, though, might wonder about more intangible matters like the soul of the Italian game. Those old owners might have been eccentric and irascible but they were part of the fabric of the society in which their clubs existed. Romeo Anconetani, Luciano Gaucci and the likes were truly bonkers and often made more headlines than the Pisa and Perugia sides they ran. Will we ever see their likes again? Probably not.

Maybe it doesn’t matter, as long as the proper financial checks are in place and – given Calcio’s past – it would be hard to take any sort of moral high ground. All that fans will care about is whether they have a winning team – not too much about where their owners come from. Only when things are going badly, do you feel, is there much outcry about why they are thousands of miles away when their team is losing on the park.

Nobody seems too fussed about the issue in England, anyway. You have to scroll all the way down to League 2 to find any significant number of home-owned sides in their football set-up. The direction of travel seems a well-worn one.

Indeed, it is surely only a matter of time before the majority of Serie A sides have their finances governed by someone from overseas. If it makes them more competitive in European competition then nobody will be complaining. But Silvio Berlusconi, Gianni Agnelli, Massimo Moratti and the likes have given them quite a lot to live up to.