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Hangin' With ... Serie B Side Bologna President Joe Tacopina

JOE TACOPINA is the president of Serie B club Bologna, which he and a group of North Americans purchased in October. It was reported at the time that Tacopina and Major League Soccer club Montreal Impact President JOEY SAPUTO planned to make an initial investment of $16.5M and provide a €7M buyout to the club's previous owners. Bologna's strong history, which includes seven Serie A titles, was cited by Tacopina as one of the main reasons he remained drawn to the club, even after an attempt he made with partners from Goldman Sachs to take over the club in '08 eventually failed. The team is currently tied for third place in Serie B with 65 points and following Friday's regular season finale vs. Lanciano, the club will compete in a playoff for a chance at promotion to Serie A. Tacopina talked with SBD Global about his acquisition of the club, his plans for stadium renovations and his long-term goals for Bologna.

On his attraction to Italian football...
Joe Tacopina: I have a passion for Italian soccer. My parents were born in Italy, I have dual citizenship, I own a restaurant in Italy and I get over there as often as possible. I try and always capture a weekend game, I make sure my trips overlap with a game, some way, somehow. It was just something to me that, as a sports fan and someone who really appreciates the entertainment value of the sport and the cultural value of the sport, when I went to my first Italian soccer game, the level of passion there was something that I had never experienced in any sporting event in the United States. As important as sports are here, there it is a fiber of the community. I'll never forget sitting in the Olympic Stadium in Rome at one of my first games and feeling the foundation of the stadium actually moving with 20,000 people chanting in unison for an hour and a half. I was like, 'This is unbelievable.' But on the other hand, I also said, 'They're just not doing it right.' It was not a great fan experience. The seats were dirty, the scoreboards didn't work, the fan experience was not a great one. Attendance started dwindling. I wanted to buy stuff for my kids at the stadium, good luck finding anything, a shop in there. Forget about getting food at halftime or a drink, there's one concession stand for 50,000 people. It was not being done right.

On the business potential of football in Italy...
Tacopina: This really was a diamond in the rough. It reminded me of the English Premier League 15 years ago, which was on the verge of bankruptcy, it was being run poorly, there was not a business model in place. ... As the first individual that really tried to push the purchase of an Italian soccer club as a foreigner -- even though I have Italian citizenship, I'm American -- people said to me, 'You can't make money in Italian soccer, you're crazy, you can't make money in Italian soccer.' I said, 'I agree, if you do it like this, you can't make money in Italian soccer.' If you look at the pie chart in the EPL, it's divided equally, basically in thirds: media revenues, gameday revenues -- ticketing and so on and so forth -- and commercial revenues. Those are big umbrellas, but things fall into that. [The EPL] is a healthy league because those three revenue components are split almost equally. In Italy it's like 75 percent media revenues, and then a little bit of this and a little bit of that, and that's it. I was really baffled by the fact that they were sitting on something so precious. It's baseball, football, basketball and hockey rolled up into one in Italy. ... I knew there was something there, I knew this was a special opportunity, and an undervalued sort of distressed asset.

On the three-year project to renovate the club's Renato Dall'Ara stadium…
Tacopina: The Dall'Ara is unique, it's one of the most beautiful stadiums in the world, but it needs a refresher. … [The renovation] is the most important part of our business plan. The outside will look amazing. There will be commercial venues there. We will have hospitality suites. We already have enormous interest from local corporations who want in on the suites before they're sold out. Obviously the pitch will be dropped and the seats will be closer, English Premier League-style. ... We're going to have a stadium that is an English Premier-style stadium, a soccer stadium, where there's no track, your sightline is right there. They're lifted. The pitch is right by the seats. You will feel either the embrace of the crowd if you're the home team or the passion of the crowd if you're the away team. ... Here, another great aspect of this is there's a huge slab of land across the street from the stadium. It's a big, big open lot, there's a soccer field, it's a park, but it's really not used. The city has agreed to give us that while we renovate the stadium. When we do that, it will be basically our L.A. Live. It's going to be a commercial village attached to the stadium where we'll have shops, restaurants, a Bologna Football Club museum. It's going to be a destination location.

On funding stadium renovations...
Tacopina: Here's the great thing about Italy, about doing stadium renovations there. The Italian government is realizing how important soccer was to the country's economy. They passed a law that part-subsidizes stadium renovations. So we have a sport bank there, Credito Sportivo, which is the Italian sporting bank, that is giving us incredible financing rates: a virtual 0 percent interest loan that will cover about 70 percent of the stadium renovations. I think we're in the ballpark, probably, more or less, of about €60 million on the renovations. That's what I think we're going to be at. There's ways to do this, this doesn't mean that we are going into our pockets to pay €60 million. We have stadium financing from the bank, we have naming rights, we have hospitality rights. ... You finance this stuff and then subsidize it with selling different rights and things of that nature.

On the benefit of possibly securing promotion...
Tacopina: It will be a festival. I was there the last time the team was in Serie B and got promoted to Serie A in 2008, and they shut down the city for a day. You would have thought they won the World Cup. Bologna is one of the most important cities in Italy. Bologna Football Club is one of the most important teams in the league, it belongs in the top division. It's better for the league if they're in the top division. Once that happens, it will just be proof of concept that there is a forward-moving momentum. This city is excited. If that happens, it will be a joyous event.

On long-term goals for the club...
Tacopina: We told these fans -- and they're good with this -- that this is a project, this is a long-term project. It's a marathon, it's not a sprint. We're not in here doing this the old-fashioned way, where you just throw good money at the team, buy some players and hope for the best. We're going to build from the bottom up. We're going to build a foundation that's built to last and sustain this club from a healthy business standpoint for decades to come. When you do that, and you have that foundation -- that starts with a good youth sector and a good business model, where you then take those revenues and you put them back into the team and reinvest them into the team -- that's when you start being healthy as a business and start being productive as a football club. This fanbase, as long as they see us moving forward, they'll give us all the room where we need, as long as they know we're doing what we say. So we're not in a rush. We don't have to win the Scudetto next year and the Champions League the year after. This is Bologna Football Club, we have a great fanbase and if they see us making progress, moving forward, at a pace that puts us back in Serie A and then gets us climbing up that table year after year, that's all we need to do and that's what we will do.

Hangin' With runs each Friday in SBD Global.

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