Menu
Download the app

SBJ subscribers – Enhance your experience with the revamped iOS app

Franchises

Tacopina brings turnaround plan to Venice

Amid the wave of foreign investment into Italian soccer, Joe Tacopina still believes there’s upside ahead.

“It’s bittersweet for me,” said Brooklyn-born Tacopina, now into his third venture in the country. “It’s good in a way that my ideas have been vindicated, but on the other hand I suppose I let the cat out of the bag.”

His latest project, in Venice, is perhaps his most ambitious yet, but one that he says has even more potential than his short but successful stops in both Rome and Bologna.

The stadium of Venezia FC, built in 1913, seats 7,500 and is accessible to most only by boat.
Photo by: GETTY IMAGES
“Our club has the only stadium in the world that you have to get to by boat,” he said. “Either swim or buy a boat. Quite a barrier to entry right there.”

Last November, Tacopina acquired Venezia FC, a 110-year-old club that recently went through its third bankruptcy, for roughly $7 million in league fees and operating costs. As part of the deal, he acquired the club debt free.

As in his other stops, Tacopina’s business plan is simple: Bring a North American sports approach to the commercial business of the club, as well as update the stadium.

Over the last two decades, Italian soccer clubs have slipped well behind rivals in England, Germany and Spain as those areas of their organizations have fallen behind. Only three clubs in Serie A, Italy’s top league, own their stadiums. Most of the rest are publicly owned and have fallen into disrepair.

That leaves most clubs relying heavily on national media-rights deals. A Deloitte report found that 61 percent of all Italian club revenue in the 2014-15 season came from media-rights deals, with 27 percent coming from match day and 12 percent from sponsorship and other commercial efforts. By comparison, English clubs saw 53 percent of their revenue from media rights, 18 percent from match day and 29 percent from commercial activity.

“Football is still clearly the No. 1 sport in Italy and the country is quite passionate about it, but if you haven’t got a solution to the stadium problem, a lot of the other stuff becomes very difficult,” said Dan Jones, head of Deloitte’s sports business group. “If you compare and contrast where England has succeeded, you see exactly where Italy has fallen behind.”

From Tacopina’s perspective, those stadium issues are at the core of the problem for Italian clubs. “Take a loop around Yankee Stadium once and see how many opportunities there are to buy something. You need a map at [Inter Milan’s] San Siro to find a store. It’s a mind-boggling amount of money being left on the table,” he said.

Stadio Pierluigi Penzo, Venice’s stadium, was built in 1913 and is the country’s second oldest. While it has picturesque views worthy of a postcard, Tacopina said, it also can hold only about 7,500 fans, slightly below average compared with the rest of Lega Pro, the Italian third division, in which it plays.

The club is working on a mixed-development project on the mainland near Marco Polo Airport that will include a 25,000-seat stadium. Detroit-based architectural firm Rossetti delivered a site plan and concept design earlier this year. Tacopina said that Milan-based asset management firm Accademia SGR will raise a private investment fund, with grant funding and low-rate financing potentially being provided by Istituto per il Credito Sportivo, which extended similar agreements to Juventus and Udinese for similar projects. The club hopes to complete the acquisition of the site and funding by the end of the year, and break ground potentially in 2017.

With that project targeted to finish in 2019, the club is aiming to build toward Tacopina’s other goals — optimizing its operations and commercial side, as well as continuing with its on-field success.

While the club has spent most of its history in Serie A and Serie B, its on-field instability as well as its bankruptcies saw it free fall down to the top nonprofessional league in Italy, Serie D. Following Tacopina’s investment last fall, it won its division title in that league, bringing it promotion to the third tier, or Lega Pro. Currently, the club is in seventh place in its group of 20, which would qualify it for the promotional playoffs. Tacopina said the goal is to be promoted to Serie B, the next tier and second in Italian soccer, in the next two seasons at the most.

To accomplish that, the club hired Filippo Inzaghi, one of Italy’s most accomplished soccer players and who previously coached AC Milan. Giorgio Perinetti, who has worked at a number of Serie A clubs, including Juventus, Napoli and Roma, is the club’s technical director. The club signed a number of players with experience across Italy’s top leagues, and Tacopina said the club is spending more money on its roster than any other club in its division.

On the business side, Tacopina hired Ted Philipakos, a soccer agent and sports business professor at NYU, as the club’s CEO in June. Venezia also hired Sonya Kondratenko as its head of social media. She worked for KickTV in a similar role.

Philipakos, who moved to Venice not long after his hiring, pointed to the city itself as one of its key competitive advantages.

“You have to look really hard to find a city of this importance that doesn’t have a major professional soccer club in Italy, or even Europe for that matter,” he said. “There’s a very significant local market here as it’s Italy’s fifth-largest region, and then there’s the estimates that say 20 million tourists come into Venice every year. It’s a pretty significant base to serve.”

Since his investment last year, Tacopina said, close to $10 million has gone into improving the club’s operations, everything from the hires to a new office to a merchandise shop near the famous Rialto Bridge.

Venzia likely will lose somewhere in the range of $7.7 million to $11 million this season, but Tacopina said he and his investment group are comfortable with the progress made toward further league promotions.

In many ways, Tacopina hopes Venezia can accomplish what Napoli has. In 2004, the club was bankrupt and was in the third tier of Italian soccer, where Venezia is now, and was acquired by Italian filmmaker Aurelio De Laurentiis. With additional investments, Napoli reached Serie A, or the top tier, in year four, and was listed by Deloitte as the 28th highest revenue club in the world by year five. It has been profitable for more than nine consecutive seasons. Napoli is now valued at more than $400 million, the 19th highest in the world, according to analysis by Forbes.

Promotion to Serie A likely would mean more than $83.3 million in revenue, and if the new stadium is finished at the same time, likely more than $111.1 million, Tacopina said. The club will be self-sufficient once it is promoted to Serie B, he said.

“We’re spending a little more money, or maybe a lot more, than anyone else at our level, but we’re preparing for the ascent,” Tacopina said.

SBJ Morning Buzzcast: March 25, 2024

NFL meeting preview; MLB's opening week ad effort and remembering Peter Angelos.

Big Get Jay Wright, March Madness is upon us and ESPN locks up CFP

On this week’s pod, our Big Get is CBS Sports college basketball analyst Jay Wright. The NCAA Championship-winning coach shares his insight with SBJ’s Austin Karp on key hoops issues and why being well dressed is an important part of his success. Also on the show, Poynter Institute senior writer Tom Jones shares who he has up and who is down in sports media. Later, SBJ’s Ben Portnoy talks the latest on ESPN’s CFP extension and who CBS, TNT Sports and ESPN need to make deep runs in the men’s and women's NCAA basketball tournaments.

SBJ I Factor: Nana-Yaw Asamoah

SBJ I Factor features an interview with AMB Sports and Entertainment Chief Commercial Office Nana-Yaw Asamoah. Asamoah, who moved over to AMBSE last year after 14 years at the NFL, talks with SBJ’s Ben Fischer about how his role model parents and older sisters pushed him to shrive, how the power of lifelong learning fuels successful people, and why AMBSE was an opportunity he could not pass up. Asamoah is 2021 SBJ Forty Under 40 honoree. SBJ I Factor is a monthly podcast offering interviews with sports executives who have been recipients of one of the magazine’s awards.

Shareable URL copied to clipboard!

https://www.sportsbusinessjournal.com/Journal/Issues/2016/11/07/Franchises/Venezia-FC-Joe-Tacopina.aspx

Sorry, something went wrong with the copy but here is the link for you.

https://www.sportsbusinessjournal.com/Journal/Issues/2016/11/07/Franchises/Venezia-FC-Joe-Tacopina.aspx

CLOSE