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In an interview with Front Office Sports last June, Ted Leonsis—whose Monumental Sports & Entertainment houses an NHL, NBA, and WNBA team—talked up the advantage of having a portfolio of multiple teams: “Don’t sell short these conglomerates.”
Matt Rizzetta appears to agree.
The 42-year-old Italian American investor on Thursday launched Underdog Global Partners, a corporate entity to house his sports assets. Those are Napoli Basketball, which plays in Italy’s top league; Campobasso, which plays in Italy’s third-highest division of soccer; Donna Roma, an Italian women’s soccer team that plays in the country’s second-highest level; and his latest investment, CPL Quebec, an expansion men’s soccer team that will play in the Canadian Premier League.
Rizzetta says he’s always felt like an underdog (hence the name). Yet he’s built an empire of Italian sports teams, intends to develop surrounding real estate, and one of his teams, Campobasso, is the subject of a four-part ESPN documentary, Running with the Wolves, that premiered in July; celebrity couple Kelly Ripa and Mark Consuelos are Campobasso co-owners.
“We’re doing all this against the backdrop of sports as an asset class, which has just exploded,” Rizzetta tells FOS.
He has watched as billionaires like Josh Harris and David Blitzer as well as John Henry set up sprawling sports empires through corporate entities—Harris Blitzer Sports & Entertainment and Fenway Sports Group, respectively—and is well aware that private-equity giants like Apollo Global Management and CVC Capital are diving into the pro sports realm with billions of dollars at their disposal.
Underdog is his attempt to prove he can “play in the same sports-asset sandbox,” Rizzetta tells FOS.
“I’m not a billionaire; I’m an entrepreneur who has worked my ass off for 16 years since I started my first business,” Rizzetta says. “This is a mission to prove I can play on a very large stage with amazing partners I’ve been blessed to have around me.”
Rizzetta’s general partners at Underdog include veteran fintech executive Dan Doyle, Angelo Pasto, a Montreal-based real estate pro, and financial services entrepreneur Joseph Greco.
Down the road, Rizzetta sees three ways for additional investors to get involved: owning a slice of a single team, taking a stake in an entire vertical like sports or real estate, or buying into Underdog itself.
On the real estate front, Underdog has plans to develop a new arena for Napoli near the Amalfi Coast (the team currently plays in the PalaBarbuto arena, which was built in 2003 and is more than an hour away from the Amalfi Coast). Rizzetta says the company is in discussions with investors, including private-equity firms and international family offices, to get that built.
“This is a potential multihundred-million-dollar real estate project for an arena near the Amalfi Coast,” he says.
Rizzetta also envisions setting up something similar to IMG Academy—which is a combo prep school, training facility, and professional development hub for young athletes—although that’s just one example of the potential deals in his pipeline.
“I’m living my dream, and trying to prove we can turn this into a viable enterprise model,” he tells FOS. “The next chapter is going all in and building at scale.”
