President James Pallotta admitted managing Roma is 'way more challenging' than he expected: 'But the project is coming along'.
The hedge fund investor picked up the Giallorossi in 2012, but in spite of some impressive runs, he has not been able to return the coveted Scudetto to the capital yet.
In an extensive interview with NBC Sports, Pallotta admitted the journey he'd embarked on was more challenging than he'd originally anticipated.
President James Pallotta admitted managing Roma is 'way more challenging' than he expected: 'But the project is coming along'.
The hedge fund investor picked up the Giallorossi in 2012, but in spite of some impressive runs, he has not been able to return the coveted Scudetto to the capital yet.
In an extensive interview with NBC Sports, Pallotta admitted the journey he'd embarked on was more challenging than he'd originally anticipated.
“Way more," he said. "And it still is challenging, frankly. It’s just a very different sport in Europe, as you know, in how things are done than being a partner in the Celtics or any other sport in the U.S.
“At the end of the day it’s rewarding but some things we’ve done pretty well, some things we’ve made mistakes on, some things we’re doing resets on. Net-net, from the outside, most people would think we’re doing a really good job but I don’t have a lot of patience.
“I tend to dwell more on the mistakes and the things that we still have to do than any of the things we’ve done that’ve been successful. It’s the way I managed hedge fund money for 25 years. I could have five stocks having a great day and one that wasn’t and I’d be angry with myself.
“There are five or six levers that we haven’t even begun to pull in terms of the revenue side that gets us up there. We’re one of the top if not the fastest growing team in social media and digital media. We’re certainly leading the charge in terms of technology and things that we’re doing that no other club have done yet.
“We streamed a game live on Facebook, first team to do that. Periscope, Twitter chats, Facebook chats, Medium and long format stories for our players and coaches. Using Google glasses and streaming it on YouTube and probably a dozen other things. We’re doing a lot of interesting stuff but we’ve got a long way to go, on merchandise, on the stadium, on the entertainment district, I could go on and on, but the plan’s coming together.
“We had an investment in his company Tag, but it’s one we use once in a while. We’ve built-in our own internal data analytics, both in Rome and Boston. We have some pretty sophisticated stuff that we’ve built on players, on performance on training. We just hired a couple more senior, not really data scientists, but higher-end professors from a couple of schools where we respect what they’ve done.”
Pallotta then compared Serie A with the Premier League, which he believes is much more sound as a business model.
“What they do well, the Premier League, is the league is run well as a league. First and foremost they figured it out a dozen years ago or so. They run it well, more in line with U.S. leagues. Not quite the same but it’s 100 times better at the league level. That’s changing at the league level in Serie A and La Liga. It just has to.
“On the domestic TV front, Serie A has a really good TV deal. It’s the international one that’s not been a good one and La Liga just went up to $600 million and that’s way below the Premier League. There’s a massive opportunity in the next 10 years, let’s say, in Serie A, for the league TV rights to go up 10 times.
“I’ll give you an example. There’ve been some studies that say the Roma colors are the most recognized colors in football in the world. Our designs we’ve been doing with Nike, we’ve been getting votes as one of the Top 100 uniforms. Copa 90 yesterday voted our away uniform the No. 1 uniform this year.
“I made us put on that wolf logo versus Romulus and Remus and people were going crazy. When I walk around a lot in the United States, if I’m playing golf and wearing a baseball hat, I’m either wearing a Roma hat with the colors or the one with just the wolf and everybody asks me, ‘What is that? The wolf head?’ ”
Roma have been relatively quiet on the market, particularly when compared to the massive €90m signing of Gonzalo Higuain by Juventus.
“There are clearly some clubs that have decided that spending is okay with them in large amounts. In the case of Juventus, it looks like they’ll sell [Paul] Pogba. Net-net, a neutral trade.
“I don’t think Juventus would’ve spent that much on a striker if they didn’t have Pogba behind it. Some teams have done a good job of putting together a really good team without spending stupid amounts of money.
“We won the scudetto in the U-18. I went and saw our 9 and 10 year olds and I was blown away at their potential. They are playing Barca-type passing styles at 9 and 10. The real goal is to build out a good internal program on one side to find a number of 16, 17 and 18 year olds who can play with you.
“And we’re spending a lot more time in building our data capabilities and our relationships on finding these players young here and a bunch of other places. Not just on the data side, but people with 30 years of football experience.
“Look at this year’s team, we’ve got Umar Sadiq and Ezequiel Ponce who are 19-year-olds. We’ve got an 20-year-old from Senegal [Moustapha Seck] who we think is gonna be unbelievable. We’ve got an 18-year-old right back [Abdullahi Nura] that unfortunately tore his knee up a little but in a year or two has a big career.
“We have a 22-year-old Federico Ricci that’s gonna get time at right forward, Leandro Paredes who we loaned out and now will fight Daniele De Rossi for starting time. Gerson who we took from Brazil, at 19 looks really good. You have to have that combination of experience, both externally and internally, and you’ll have some players who would be worth a lot.”