Steve Pagliuca on Boston Celtics, Atalanta and feeling 'like the Ted Lasso of Italy'

Pep Guardiola bought himself a Boston Celtics hoodie, flipped his baseball cap backwards and took his courtside seat in the TD Garden arena for the opening game in the best-of-seven NBA Finals.

“He sat right by me,” Celtics co-owner Steve Pagliuca says. “I talked to him a lot.”

It wasn’t like pulling teeth, which is how Guardiola describes facing Pagliuca’s Serie A team, Atalanta. The Manchester City manager has likened playing against them to an agonising appointment with the dentist because opposite number Gian Piero Gasperini never allows his opponents to sit comfortably.

Guardiola and Pagliuca could have swapped more stories about Italian football.

The City manager used to play for Brescia, Atalanta’s biggest rivals, and he could have told Pagliuca about the time his Brescia came back from 3-1 down against the Bergamo side to draw 3-3 in 2001; the lore of the Roberto Baggio goals and the sending-off of his old coach Carlo Mazzone, who made a legendary run under the Atalanta end to give some abuse back after Brescia’s equaliser.

“We just had a conversation about Atalanta,” Pagliuca says. “About how he respected the organisation and we respect what he’s done. Our (the Celtics) coach, Joe Mazzulla, is a huge football fan.”

Mazzulla had been Guardiola’s guest at the City Football Academy last spring and was a spectator for a 1-0 win against Brentford at the Etihad. This was him returning the favour. “Joe studies football strategy and applies how it impacts basketball strategy,” Pagliuca says.

In the warm-ups before Game One against the Dallas Mavericks, Mazzulla and Guardiola discussed strategy on the court. Their gestures were classic air-chess. If I move here, what reaction does it provoke? How should our rest defence look when playing this kind of attack?

“Joe has really pushed the up-tempo style, trying to get as many shots off as possible,” Pagliuca elaborates. “We’re getting shots off quicker and we’ve also increased our offensive rebound capabilities.

“Many coaches, as they do in soccer, take a more defensive approach, saying the best thing to do is run back quickly after a shot is missed because you don’t want to give up an easy basket. But we have various guys crashing the boards and that’s been very successful. When we do the math, we come out on top, because every time we get an extra couple of points by crashing the boards, that makes up for some times when we wouldn’t be back on a fast break.”

Covering off those fast breaks and maintaining offensive pressure was one of the learnings Mazzulla took from his conversations with Guardiola. “That’s something Pep has been helping me with: spacing,” Mazzulla explained. “It’s crucial in transitions how you move the players.”

Mazzulla also talks to Gasperini, as much as a Rhode Islander and Piedmontese can make themselves understood. “They met in Boston,” Pagliuca reveals. “The biggest similarities are in their very creative approach to the game.”

The Celtics went on to win their first NBA championship since 2008. No one could say they didn’t deserve it. They had the best regular-season record in the NBA, the best home record and were one game away from the best on-the-road record. They won 12 of 14 games in the first three rounds of post-season play, then saw off Dallas in five in the finals.

When asked about majority owner Wyc Grousbeck’s decision to put the team up for sale shortly after they had won their 18th NBA title, Pagliuca pointed The Athletic to a statement in which he said: “I hope to be part of the Celtics moving forward and will be a proud participant in the bidding process that has been announced today.”

In attendance for Game Three in Dallas was Ademola Lookman, Atalanta’s hat-trick hero from the Europa League final three weeks earlier. “He jumped on a plane and flew out with a friend of his on the Nigeria team,” Pagliuca recalls. “I got him tickets and he sat with us.”

Lookman, right, with Nigeria team-mate Joe Aribo and Celtics player Jayson Tatum (Instagram/Ademola Lookman)

For Pagliuca, also co-chairman of Bain Capital, it hasn’t quite sunk in yet that, within the space of a month, his two sports teams made memories that will last lifetimes. That’s spacing of a different kind; less strategic, more future nostalgic. “I’m still in shock. I still don’t know if it happened,” Pagliuca says, still trying to process it.

It’s poetic in a way: a Celtics co-owner watching his other investment, Atalanta, in Dublin of all places, ending a 61-year wait for a trophy. “It’s magical. I felt like the Ted Lasso of Italy,” he laughs. “I thought I was part of a movie.” A feel-good story.

Atalanta had lost their previous three cup finals under Gasperini, including the Coppa Italia just the week before. It was, in some respects, a little like the Celtics not getting it done in the 2017, 2018, 2020 and 2023 Eastern Conference finals (the NBA semi-finals). People wondered whether this core set of players could run it back and go that extra mile or whether they were destined to remain unfulfilled. After all, Atalanta were playing the team of the moment, Xabi Alonso’s Bundesliga-winning Bayer Leverkusen, a team then undefeated all season across 51 games in three competitions.

But, in the end, Gasperini got his due, as did veterans such as Berat Djimsiti, Hans Hateboer and the injured Marten de Roon, as did the doubted Charles de Ketelaere, Gianluca Scamacca and Lookman, whose hat-trick was the first in any European final since 1975.

Lookman was determined not to be on the losing side this time around. Pagliuca asked Celtics shooting guard Jaylen Brown to send him a video before Nigeria’s Africa Cup of Nations final appearance in February to put him in the right mindset. But the Ivory Coast prevailed that day. In Dublin, however, it was a different story for Lookman and for Atalanta.

“You don’t often get to be a part of a movie with a happy ending like that,” Pagliuca appreciates. “After that, we went back to the hotel, sang songs and had meals with the families. I don’t think the players went to bed until…” Pagliuca pauses. “They didn’t go to bed. They just got on the plane at 8am the next morning…”

Pagliuca, far left, celebrates with the Atalanta squad and staff after their win against Leverkusen in Dublin (Jonathan Moscrop/Getty Images)

Also on the flight home was the Percassi family.

Pagliuca would not have bought Atalanta without them.

Antonio Percassi, Atalanta’s snowy-haired president, played for the club in the 1970s. He then became a very successful entrepreneur, working on the franchising of brands including Starbucks in Italy as well as building e-commerce platforms for the likes of Gucci. His son, Luca, Atalanta’s chief executive, was briefly a footballer, too, moving to Chelsea in the 1990s along with Sam Dalla Bona, before going into the family business. Pagliuca compares leaning on their expertise to hiring former Celtics player Danny Ainge as that team’s general manager in 2003.

“They had sought us out actually, because they felt like the Celtics-NBA-global experience could help them,” Pagliuca says. He flew to Bergamo and got working on a deal to buy a majority stake in the club. Pagliuca felt it vital to retain the Percassis’ know-how. They took him out to dinner at Da Vittorio, the three-Michelin-star restaurant in nearby Brusaporto, and the rest is history.

“I have pictures of me sitting behind a huge vat of the special spaghetti (the legendary Paccheri) in the copper pan,” Pagliuca recalls.

Most new owners want to put their own stamp on a team. Look at Chelsea, a club Pagliuca bid for shortly after taking over Atalanta. The executive leadership team, coach and squad are completely different from what Todd Boehly and Clearlake inherited just over two years ago. Today’s Chelsea is unrecognisable from the version that won the Champions League in May 2021. Results have, unsurprisingly, deteriorated.

Pagliuca took a different approach at Atalanta. He leaned on the Percassis and stood by the in-demand Gasperini, who attracted interest from Napoli this summer but has stayed. Gasperini recently didn’t deny rumours that one of the reasons he is the longest-serving coach in Serie A is the percentage he gets at Atalanta from the sales of players he develops.

(Chris Ricco/Getty Images)

“We didn’t want to tweak things too much because, as they say, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Just add to it. And we’ve stuck to that,” Pagliuca says.

Atalanta seemed at their zenith when Pagliuca bought in. They’d finished third three times in a row and came within minutes of reaching a Champions League semi-final. Revenue from that competition, a fertile academy and a brilliantly executed player-trading model were allowing the Percassis to invest further in Atalanta’s youth system and turn the Stadio Atleti Azzurri d’Italia into the Gewiss Stadium, a football ground that increasingly has the feel of a leafy villa or long-life spa.

“A big reason to do the investment is you really want to pick (a) fantastic management team and partners, so it made sense to do the deal because the Percassis were incredible operators and really shared the same kind of philosophy that we had about trying to win and doing it sustainably,” Pagliuca says, “because if you don’t do it in a sustainable way, you see many of these clubs fall by the wayside.”

Udinese, for instance, have seen platforms such as Wyscout blunt their edge in scouting and Red Bull’s multi-club network eclipse what they tried to do with Watford in England and Spain’s Granada as sister teams. They were never able to extend two-to-three-year cycles of punching above their weight into the prolonged seven/eight-year stretch Atalanta are now on.

And here’s the thing, this is Atalanta’s weight now.

Between Europa League prize-winning money, Champions League qualification and new partners coming on board, the club brought in close to €200million last year. Divyank Turakhia, an Indian billionaire, has followed Arctos, who have a stake in Paris Saint-Germain, in joining the ownership group. Mazzulla, according to Pagliuca, “is actually an investor in Atalanta”. They are a big club disguised by the history and tradition of a small one.

“In terms of the sustainability of Atalanta, I think that with the way we are capitalised and the success we’ve had, and now Champions League and the increased revenues, you can see us holding onto players longer than in the past,” Pagliuca says.

(Richard Heathcote/Getty Images)

He’s talking about the likes of Teun Koopmeiners, who is in the middle of a stand-off over his desire to leave for Juventus at a time when Atalanta are financially stronger than ever. Atalanta are not the Celtics of Italian football (that’s Juventus). They’re big-city adjacent (Milan is less than an hour’s drive away) in an ever more congested football region (Lombardy), which has upwardly mobile clubs in Monza (still owned by the Berlusconi family) and Como (controlled by the Hartonos, billionaire brothers from Indonesia). And yet Atalanta have positioned themselves firmly in Italian football’s elite.

As work on the Gewiss Stadium reaches completion, Atalanta are able, in Pagliuca’s words, “to focus on the football operation”. They don’t need to budget, like the Milan clubs or Roma do, for a new ground.

The bigger, more modern Gewiss won’t be transformative like a new San Siro or Olimpico, but “it’s another piece and it helps in all aspects with getting promotions, with our fan amenities, ticket retention, so it ratchets through every aspect of the organisation. Sponsors love to come. We have the relationship with Da Vittorio (that three-Michelin-star restaurant nearby). It’s a lot better food than in any other stadium in the United States and probably in Italy as well.”

As for Serie A’s faltering domestic TV deal, once the main driver of revenue growth and now the biggest lagging differentiator between it and England’s Premier League, Pagliuca points out: “The league is getting more sophisticated. The international rights are up with the exception of the U.S. and the deal that they cut with some revenue-sharing could be as good as the last deal… If you take the long-term view and the streaming wars are over, the technology is going to increase the amount of money that goes through television, the amount of viewers, the amount of fans, which increases the revenues for all these teams.”

In the meantime, Atalanta just have to keep doing what they do best and optimise it, starting with the European Super Cup tomorrow (Wednesday) against Real Madrid in Polish capital Warsaw, where they’ll be without Scamacca, Giorgio Scalvini, Nicolo Zaniolo and Koopmeiners.

Every year, Gasperini gets asked if this could be the year Atalanta challenge for the Serie A title. He then reminds his interlocutors that they’ve lost context. But is it so outlandish to suggest as much in a league that’s had four different winners in five seasons and in light of the scale of investment Atalanta have received and the winning feeling a new trophy brings?

“That’s a tricky question,” Pagliuca says. “The goal is always to maximise the potential. Winning the Europa League and being in the Champions League, that’s all part of that. And if you take your eye off the ball, that can go away very quickly. So we have to perform and we do that through the academy, the scouting, the stats, the investing and an incredible management team in the Percassis.

“That’s the basic strategy and beyond that, you know, you’re always one injury away from losing an NBA championship or Serie A. Even the best teams are never a lock to win it in Serie A. Look at Napoli. I thought they would dominate this year (the reigning champions finished 10th, 41 points off the title). So the philosophy is similar to the Celtics. It’s to field a team that can win and hopefully you take advantage of that when the breaks come our way.”

That’s what happened for him since May in the Europa League and then the NBA; that rare unbottleable synergy of simultaneous success.

“I don’t know if it’ll ever happen again,” Pagliuca acknowledges. “I just have to be grateful that I was able to be a part of that with all the great people at the Celtics and all the great people at Atalanta.”

(Top photo: Nicolo Campo/LightRocket via Getty Images)