BACK IN TOP FORM
With the addition of Ronaldo at Juventus and a lucrative TV deal, Italy’s Serie A is again among the best soccer leagues in Europe
When entrepreneur James Pallotta joined three friends to buy Italian soccer club A.S. Roma seven years ago, it had nothing to do with a love for the sport.
“I didn’t even like soccer,” Pallotta says.
The deal was an investment, just like his earlier purchase of a stake in the Boston Celtics or a later decision to buy into eSports franchise Fnatic. But things quickly went sideways in Rome so Pallotta’s partners urged him to take over the team.
And that’s when the change began, the Boston billionaire said.
“Now I can’t watch games without standing up and going from room to room,” he said. “[I’m] watching women’s friendlies at 3 in the morning when I’m in L.A. It’s just completely the opposite.”
Italy’s top league has undergone a similarly large transformation. Once plagued by scandal and dismissed as the most defensive and boring of Europe’s major leagues, Serie A has made a rousing comeback in recent years.
In the seven years since Pallotta’s group purchased Roma, becoming the Italian league’s first foreign owners, international investors have taken over four other teams. And that’s sparked an improvement on the field too.
After reaching the Champions League title game only once between 2008 and 2014, a Serie A team has played in two of the last four finals and the UEFA country coefficient, a mathematical formula used to determine the relative strengths of Europe’s top professional leagues, ranks Italy third on the continent behind Spain and England.
That growth figures to continue: The league kicked off the 2018-19 season this weekend with a new star in Cristiano Ronaldo — who joined seven-time defending champion Juventus last month — and the most lucrative TV contracts in its history, with domestic and international rights selling for more than $4.5 billion combined over the next three seasons, making even more money available for teams to spend on payroll.
(ESPN will carry more 340 Serie A games in the U.S., an average of nine each week on its ESPN+ streaming service in addition to a weekly match on one of its cable outlets.)
“The Italian league is changing a lot,” said Pallotta, whose team has also experienced a renaissance, finishing in the top three in each of the last five seasons and reaching the Champions League semifinals last spring for the first time in 34 years.
“It’s certainly some from new ownership. And it’s certainly from a wakening up from the league governance side; that you can’t keep doing things the way they were doing it.”
And there’s still room for growth. The 2015 bankruptcy of Parma FC, the third Serie A team to be declared insolvent in 13 years, forced reluctant owners to realize Italian soccer had to adopt the business models of teams elsewhere around Europe. Improving the league’s aging infrastructure was one obvious way to do that so eight teams have either built or renovated stadiums since 2011. There are plans to open at least two more — including the Stadio della Roma complex in Rome — within the next two seasons.
“There are some stadiums that are way too big. They’re way too old,” said Pallotta, who hopes to break ground on his team’s new stadium this winter. “When the stadiums come in and we’re getting better deals and sponsorships and you’re getting better coverage, then there’ll be some catch-up.”
Pallotta, 60, born to parents who emigrated from southern Italy, grew up in Boston’s north end, not far from the Boston Garden — which still he pronounces gahden. He was vice chair of the Tudor Investment Corporation, an asset management firm based in Connecticut, before forming the Raptor Group, a private global investment company focusing on sports, technology, media, entertainment and financial services.
His investment in an Italian soccer team had more to do with opportunity than heritage, though, since the league was undervalued and the team, based in a global capital, could be developed into an international brand. His joint purchase of Roma was sandwiched between Red Sox owner John Henry’s takeover of English Premier League club Liverpool and former Dodgers owner Frank McCourt’s decision to buy French club Olympique de Marseille, giving Boston-area businessmen majority stakes in teams from three top-tier European leagues.
Americans also own significant shares in five other EPL teams — including Arsenal, which is run by Rams owner Stan Kroenke — and Serie A’s AC Milan, which was purchased last month by New York hedgefund manager Paul Singer. But Pallotta doesn’t expect many more to follow.
“If you look at opportunities throughout European football today, I find it hard to see in many cases why Americans are looking at it,” he said. “I don’t think there are many opportunities left to create a global brand.”
He remains bullish on Italian soccer, though, counting on the addition of Ronaldo to bring both interest and eyeballs to Serie A. And he’s counting on the rest of the league to hold those viewers there.
“Ronaldo is great for the league but believe me Ronaldo is not the league,” he said. “There’s a lot of talent in the Italian league that can play with anybody in any league. It just hasn’t been shown in the past bunch of years.”
Because if the Italian league could make him a soccer fan, Pallotta figures, it could do the same to anybody.