Atalanta and Celtics co-owner Pagliuca wants more clubs on his roster
Atalanta and Boston Celtics co-owner Steve Pagliuca has said he plans to acquire more clubs and form a multi-club football model.
Football’s modern hot trend is for firms and companies to acquire a number of clubs across a number of countries.
Potential Everton owners 777 Partners are well established with the likes of Hertha Berlin and Genoa, while Fenway Sports Group have stakes in both Liverpool and Toulouse, who played one another on Thursday.
Atalanta not enough?
And Pagliuca, chair of Bain Capital, who failed in an attempt to buy Chelsea in 2022, wants to add further clubs to his roster.
“[The multi-club model] is evolving but it is easier said than done,” he told the Leaders in Sport conference this month.
“There are different models: Manchester City owns multiple clubs but they don’t really integrate them at all and Red Bull has some integration.
“We’re looking at multi-club and we would be highly integrated and Uefa has been open to having that because it is rare these clubs will compete, they’d have to be in the Champions League, and there are all sorts of safeguards because players don’t want to lose the games, coaches don’t want to lose the game. If you’re an owner of both of these teams you have very little control over these games.
“Allowing that is a good thing because we found with the [Boston] Celtics and Atalanta we brought over our statisticians and we put stats in they didn’t have before. We’ve gone back and forth on training facilities and nutrition, on health care, so although it is a different sport we’ve had some synergy.”
Questions
There have been questions surrounding whether multi-club businesses are good for football and whether they allow clubs to manipulate the player valuation and sponsorship markets.
“You have even more synergy if you buy a division two team and you have a club in division one where you can take advantage of the same step base,” Pagliuca added.
“The division two team probably buys players for less money and you have an opportunity to loan players and have players with better careers.
“But it is hard work and it hasn’t been proven to work yet but at least we have a model for both the fans, players and clubs and I applaud Uefa for letting that happen and that will be good for football.”
Pagliuca was one of a number of investors that acquired 55 per cent of Serie A club Atalanta.