Venezia FC is minting money, thanks to a high-fashion rebrand of club merchandise.
(Bloomberg) — Greek model Theopisti Pourliotopoulou sits on the edge of the Venice’s Grand Canal, not a hair out of place, wearing bright, gold, Italian-made clothes while reading La Gazzetta dello Sport over breakfast. No, it’s not a Gucci ad, but the 2022-23 campaign for Venezia FC’s football kits. The similarities with Italian high fashion are the point. Most football club kits get launched with a photo of a star player out on the pitch, but the small club took a different approach to reinvent itself and get noticed on the world stage.
It worked. Fashion publication Highsnobiety has called Venezia “football’s most fashionable club,” and SoccerBible has referred to Venezia as “one of the most modern and innovative clubs in world football.” Suddenly its €110 ($129) football kits are an affordable luxury item. The club has opened two retail locations in the last 12 months in addition to the flagship store just off Venice’s famous Rialto Bridge, which bustles with tourists seeking trendy souvenirs to take home—whether or not they’re football fans.
A lot of that success is down to the club’s chief brand officer, Ted Philipakos, a marketing professor at NYU and a sports agent. He rejoined the organization in 2020 at the request of Duncan Niederauer, club president and former chief executive officer of the New York Stock Exchange. (Philipakos had served as CEO in 2016–17 before leaving amid disagreements with the management that preceded Niederauer.)
“We had this 100-year-old club and all the history that came with that, but no place in the modern world and no modern identity,” says Philipakos, pointing out that Venezia FC went bankrupt three times since 2004. The club didn’t have bankable star players or a big stadium. It didn’t even have an Instagram or online store when Philipakos joined. It did have a Unesco World Heritage home city.
“I was tasked with trying to reimagine the brand, and started with the understanding that that the club’s most valuable asset was the city of Venice—the culture and history and beauty. It’s one of the most celebrated cities in the world,” says Philipakos. A strong visual identity linked to this was the way for Venezia FC to gain outsized attention.
Philipakos partnered with the German design studio Bureau Borsche, which did the stripped-back, modern rebranding for Inter Milan in 2021. Borsche switched Venezia’s suppliers from US sportswear giant Nike Inc. to Turin-based Kappa, tying Venezia to brand Italy. The rebrand raised Venezia’s profile far outside its hometown, says Philipakos, with some 96% of all sales now shipping internationally.
Football kits have increasingly become fashion staples. Brands like Balenciaga trotted out garments in recent seasons that wouldn’t look out of place on a pitch. Napoli, a club currently sitting atop Serie A (Italy’s top division), released 15 shirts last season in a bid to capitalize on football kit fervor. When Louis Vuitton enlisted the world’s top football stars, Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi, in an ad campaign connected to last year’s World Cup, the resulting Instagram posts ended up as some of the best-liked of all time.
“The brand can be more impressive than the actual team,” says Kieran Maguire, professor at the University of Liverpool and author of The Price of Football. “The fluctuations of teams of course go up and down, but the brand can transcend that.” Venezia, which got relegated from Serie A last season and is now languishing in Serie B, is a good example of that, says Maguire. So is small Welsh club Wrexham FC, with its TV show Welcome to Wrexham on FX and Hollywood owners Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney, who purchased it in February 2021 for £2 million ($2.4 million).
Football clubs make money from three revenue streams, according to Zal Udwadia, assistant director in the sports business group at Deloitte. Broadcasting rights and match day revenue (e.g., ticket sales, concessions) can both depend a lot on pitch performance; the commercial steam includes merchandising and licensing.
“The only revenue stream clubs can really control [is] commercial revenue—like driving interest in their kits—so for a smaller club, focusing on this makes sense,” says Udwadia. “Venezia has taken a fashion-centric approach to drive value.”
Sales of merchandise went from €730,000 in 2019-20 (the last year with Nike) to surpass €3 million in 2021-22. The club tells Bloomberg that it expects even better figures this year. The next and perhaps larger challenge, Udwadia says, will be to convert fans of the kits into fans of the team.
“When we were in Serie A, we were the smallest club with the smallest stadium from the smallest city,” says Philipakos, noting a marked disadvantage in terms of earning match day revenue. Venezia’s lagoon-side stadium can accommodate 11,150 fans; by comparison, AC Milan and Inter Milan, the previous two winners of Serie A, share a stadium that has a capacity of 80,000.
“Having a brand like this gives us a fighting chance,” says Philipakos. More fans may mean a fuller stadium. More kits sold bring more revenue from merchandising. It could all be reinvested back into players and training to mean more of the one thing football fans really care about: winning.
This is the strategy Philipakos is employing in Athens, where he’s been president of Athens Kallithea FC since 2021, as well as minority owner of the team. Philipakos has grand plans for the organization, including making it one of the top five clubs in Greece within five years.
“Athens has as much cultural importance as Venice but a bit more of a punk sensibility and a quirkiness,” says Philipakos, who’s leaning into that aspect for the branding. The Athens kits are also designed by Bureau Borsche and made by Kappal their bold look is starting to capture international acclaim and fly off shelves. The same photographer shot both campaigns. And so far, the template is working: In January, football magazine Mundial named Athens Kallithea the most stylish club on Instagram.
–With assistance from Ali Asad Zulfiqar.
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