A few weeks ago, I had the unique privilege of going to
Italy as a part of Drexel’s first sport management study abroad trip. During
our stay in Italy, we travelled to Milan, Parma, Florence, and Rome for varying
amounts of time. Most our days were filled with tours and presentations
highlighting the prominent aspects of Italian sport and what makes Italy’s
culture unique.
Like most countries in Europe and around the world, soccer
is king. It’s arguable that the American sport climate is filled with parity,
with several popular sports taking a piece of the popularity pie. In terms of
participation, fandom, success, and cultural relevance, soccer stands above all
other sports in Italy by a very wide margin. During our first stop in Milan we
got to see just how big soccer is when we visited the epic 80,000 seat San Siro
stadium, home to two of Italy’s most popular professional teams, Inter and AC
Milan. The next day, we got to tour AC Milan’s Youth Academy complex, where Filippo
Galli (head of the youth department) told us about the team’s detailed process for
developing players. At AC Milan, they utilize a system called Milan Lab,
which is a system by which the team tests and measures all of its youth players
to see how they are developing in incredible detail. Coaches monitor
their player’s development in person and with this computer data to help make
decisions as to whether the team should keep a given player. Milan Lab also
does an incredible job of tracking future growth, and actually predicting what
physical size kids will develop into when they get older. This is certainly something
unique to European soccer and something I’ve never seen in American sport, at
least in this amount of detail and financial investment. 
We also had the opportunity to visit the beautiful
state-of-the-art FICG technical center where all of Italy’s national teams
practice and train. The money and passion generated by soccer certainly pays
for the best facilities, which was clear when we saw the technical center. This
was also the home of the FIGC soccer museum, which is home to almost every
piece of Italian soccer memorabilia that you could think of. After touring both
of these places, it’s very apparent how important and impactful soccer is in
Italy. It’s a relationship that can’t really be paralleled in the US, even with
American Football.
During our trip, we also went to see a few basketball-related
venues, including two professional teams as well as the Italian basketball
federation. They’ll be the first to tell you that’s in incredibly difficult to
compete with soccer. They can’t generate nearly the same level of fanfare, but basketball
is still are considered by many to be Italy’s second most popular sport. On
these tours, it was driven home to us my multiple people, including the GM of
the Virtus Roma basketball team, that European sports teams are not businesses. In
the US, teams are owned and managed in a way to generate profits and build on
their brand. In Italy, they’re focused on promoting and growing their sports,
which are agendas both soccer and basketball federations help enforce. All
revenue generated is secondary to many clubs in Italy. Many owners decide to
own teams simply because they can, and they know that there’s a lot of prestige and community impact to putting your name on a sports franchise.
Probably our most unique experience while in Italy was
getting to meet and talk to the coach and a few players of the Parma Panthers,
an American Football club in Italy. If basketball is a distant second to soccer
in terms of popularity and participation, imagine how much small American
football teams struggle to gain recognition. Coach Andrew Papoccia, a former
American college player from Chicago, spoke to us about how he transitioned
from American to Italian culture, as well as how he gets Italian athletes to
play American football instead of several other popular sports. For Italian
youth, there aren’t a lot of alternatives to soccer in terms of contact sports.
Rugby is marginally popular in Italy, so Coach Papoccia uses rugby as a
starting point when talking to kids about American football. As the coach told
us, they’re getting more and more kids involved every year because it’s so
different and distinctive from every other sport in the area. 
Italian sports are clearly very different than American
sport, from which ones are most popular to how they’re managed and beyond. I
would have never known how sports in Europe operated on such a detailed level
if I hadn’t chosen to go on this trip. It certainly helped to broaden my sport
horizons and taught me that countries around the world treat sports very
differently than they do in the US. I strongly encourage anyone in our field to
take a similar opportunity if it’s presented to you. I hope to carry the things
I learned overseas to future situations, professional or otherwise. If nothing
else, this experience was certainly something not a lot of people can put on
their resume.
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