Style over Substance- The Fashionable Fall of Venezia FC
'Nice looking shirts' and 'funny social media team' do not make you good on the football pitch
Italy has always been a country obsessed with beauty.
Through music, art, architecture, and fashion, the Italian people have always looked to set themselves apart from the rest of the world. And no city embodies this pursuit of perfection more than Venice.
Every image of Venice looks like it came from the brush of Canaletto himself - classical Venetian architecture lines the banks of each of the city’s iconic waterways and instead of roads filled with ‘ugly cars’, the canals are filled with boats and gondolas, weaving in and out of the city like a crystal maze (not the game show).
But if you take a boat to the far eastern edge of the city, past the churches and the galleries, you will find something that isn’t in keeping with the town’s rustic aesthetic.
Before its renovation in 2021, the Stadio Pier Luigi Penzo’s concrete yellow walls looked more in keeping with the coastline of Blackpool than that of Venice, but now it has adopted a much more modern look.
With a capacity of 11,150, it is not an imposing stadium, but its garish orange, green and black colour scheme makes it stand out from the more muted palette that tints the rest of the city.
It’s the home of Venezia FC, but you knew that, because their name, or should I say their football shirts, precede them.
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In 2015, FC Unione Venezia went bankrupt, but from the ashes, and with a new American owner backing them, Venezia FC was born. While getting back to Serie A was an important part of the plan, the new regime took a different approach to their ownership.
Not to sound like Nathan Fielder, but the plan was to create a brand that surpassed the limitations of the football club, and they wanted to do that by distilling the spirit of Venice into every aspect of their new project.
They hired Ted Philipakos to be the club's chief brand officer1; his job was purely focused on crafting the club’s non-footballing image. In an interview with Esquire back in December, he explained the situation he arrived to:
“No Instagram account, no Twitter account. Popularity in Venice was… to say ‘waning’ would be kind. From the beginning, the stylisation of the brand, the importance we’ve given to the brand, it transcended what league we happened to be in.”
So work began to carefully craft the image of a lifestyle brand rather than a sport one.
More people were hired behind the scenes whose backgrounds lay outside of football to help steer the ship. It was clear the perspective they wanted; as Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski once penned in Soccernomics:
”Football clubs have found new ways of making money, however, the ideas almost never came from the clubs themselves. Whether it was branded clothing, or the gambling pools, or television, it was usually people in other industries who first saw there might be profits to be made.”
Venezia partnered with Kappa, who crucially gave creative control over design back to the club, to create fashionable kits, a boutique store was opened not next to the stadium but in the heart of the city and models were hired to front the club’s social media campaigns.
Rather fortuitously, the zenith of the off-the-field project coincided with the team performing well on the pitch and being promoted to Serie A in 2021… and we all know what happened next.
They celebrated their return to the top flight with a massive celebration on the Grand Canal with a parade of boats and gondolas. That was only the beginning.
You could not find a Venezia kit if you tried. All four of their kits (my personal favourite was the red fourth shirt) were sold out as social media went crazy for their designs.
From a marketing standpoint, it was a roaring success, but all this grandeur and spectacle distracted from something very important, a point that you may have already expected this newsletter was leading to.
When it comes to football, Venezia FC aren’t very good.
Now Venezia have never really been a great team. Their golden age spanned two years in the 1940s, where they won the Coppa Italia in the 1941/42 season and then came third in the Serie A in the following campaign.
The club then spent the next 80 years moving up and down the leagues, sometimes making their way back up to the Serie A but other times crashing all the way down to Serie D.
They also were ‘refounded’ several times over the 80 years and went bankrupt three times before their takeover in 2015.
So despite their astronomical rise in reputation, not much was expected from them on the pitch, and Venezia did not disappoint the sceptics by finishing rock-bottom at the end of the 2021/22 campaign (what should be noted is that Salernitana nearly went bankrupt midseason and still finished above them).
To their credit, they did invest heavily in the playing squad. Venezia spent €22.09m in the 2021/22 season, which was nearly ten times more than they spent while in Serie B the previous season.
They also started well beating Roma and Fiorentina while drawing against Juventus, but then the wheels came off and in the 2022 portion of the season they only mustered two wins and manager Paolo Zanetti was sacked with eight games to go.
Their biggest issue was a lack of a goalscorer. Former Manchester United winger Nani came in on a free transfer to try and solve this in January, but he was massively disappointing.
But that’s fine, right? It’s extremely hard to stay in the Serie A as a newly promoted team (as is the case with most leagues) and the current season presents a chance for them to go straight back up.
Well, that would have been the plan, but it seems like that isn’t going to be the case.
Let’s cut straight to the point, Venezia sits 18th in Serie B this season. They bought a goalscorer in Finnish striker Joel Pohjanpolo (fellow Football Manager 15 alumni may remember the name) who has racked up nine goals and four assists in 22 games but the rest of the team has fallen apart.
Mattia Aramu was easily Venezia’s best player in 2021/22, scoring seven goals and assisting five. So of course, you’d expect him to be sold the moment that the Venitian club went down.
Venezia did allow him to leave… for Genoa on loan. A strange decision given that Alexander Blessin’s side is also trying to get out of Serie B this season.
They also sold Thomas Henry to Hellas Verona, who was their top scorer in the same campaign with 9 goals. So despite adding Pohjanpolo they’ve only replaced his goals in the team.
Yes they also signed Aaron Connolly, but he was so bad they terminated his loan after he failed to score even once.
They have conceded 32 goals and sit two points from the bottom of the table (though it should be noticed that between the 20th and 12th-placed teams there are only five points, so a lot could change between now and the end of the season).2
I think the biggest mistake Venezia made though was sacking Zanetti. Despite all the additions the team was still not good enough to compete in the Serie A in 2021/22 but he showed in spells that he could get a result with the players he had.
Zanetti is now in charge of Empoli and under his management, they currently sit 12th in the Serie A. Tommas Baldanzi, an exceptional young midfielder3 who has come to the fore under the 40-year-old manager said of him:
"Zanetti has given me more, he's making me play as a regular starter: he's a great man as well as a very good coach, we prepare matches very well, he has a great way of keeping us on track, we listen to him and the good results are also thanks to him."
Given that Venezia are on their second manager of the season already with no change in fortunes in sight, I think they made an unforced error parting with Zanetti so soon.
What was expected to be a bounce-back now may end up with Venezia dropping even further into Serie C… and nobody wants to be in Serie C.
So what now for Venezia FC?
Well competitively they could be in problems, their team is a bit of a mess and selling key player Domen Crnigoj late in the January transfer window without a replacement won’t help matters.
But what about the brand, have Venezia succeeded in creating an image that ‘transcends the league they happen to be in?’
Well in his interview with Esquire, Philipakos stated that this season the club had sold four times as many shirts as they did in the 2021/22 season, despite their relegation.4
Part of the reason for this might be because they just produced more shirts. Throughout last season, many people wanted to own a Venezia top but you were unable to purchase them; this year they are readily available from the club’s shop.
But some of this may also be due to the club’s rebrand. Prior to the beginning of this campaign, they changed the club’s logo from its classic motif to a new more modern badge in keeping with the more fashion-orientated image they were trying to curate - a golden V with one side integrating the lion.
Some fans were not happy with this change. They already believed the club was ignoring its local and loyal fanbase in favour of going global, and changing the badge without consulting them, just confirming their suspicions.
Protests have been held outside the stadium and while right now this isn’t a problem given how well they are performing as a fashion brand, if the novelty begins to wear off in a few seasons or they fade into semi-obscurity due to not being competitive, they’ll need the support of these fans to get back on track.
Finally, their social media team may be well-liked and incredibly active within the greater footballer community, but this won’t make them better on the field or convert into positivity within the stadium.
Overall Venezia is a case of style over substance; they’re creating what they perceive to be a jewel in the crown but the diamond is set in fools’ gold. Yes, the club want to have their own unique way of generating money, but they shouldn’t lose sight of what they are first and foremost - a football club for the people of Venice to get behind as they take on the rest of Italy.
Ted Philipakos wrote the book ‘On Level Terms: 10 Legal Battles that Tested and Shaped Soccer in the Modern Era’ and has set up a similar project to Venezia with Athens Kallithea FC in 2021
A small sidenote that I found interesting is that of the five teams that currently sit bottom of Serie B, four have been in the Serie A in the last three seasons (Brescia, SPAL, Venezia and Benevento).
If you want to read more about Baldanzi, my friend and fellow writer Danny Corcoran wrote a great piece about him recently which you can find here.
Purely through my own observation, it seems like there has been less hype around Venezia kits this season on social media compared to the coverage they received during the 2021/22 season.
Fair point but very superficial take imo