Atalanta

Boston Celtics co-owner Stephen Pagliuca is among the American investors who've purchased a 55-percent ownership stake in Italian soccer club Atalanta.

Susy Campanale of Football Italia reported Saturday the agreement allows the Percassi family to remain the single largest shareholder with its 45-percent stake.

"Antonio and Luca Percassi will retain their respective roles of chairman and CEO of the club, while Stephen Pagliuca will be appointed co-chairman of the club," the Serie A team said in a statement.

Atalanta finished third in the 20-team top flight of Italian soccer last season. La Dea sit fifth in the Serie A table and will spend the remainder of the 2021-22 campaign trying to fight for a spot in the top four, which leads to a berth in next season's UEFA Champions League.

The club finished third in its group in this season's UCL behind England's Manchester United and Spain's Villarreal, sending it out of the competition and into the Europa League knockout playoffs.

Atalanta was founded in 1907, and the Percassi family said its goal with the sale to American investors is to help broaden the global appeal of the club, per Campanale.

Pagliuca also released a statement as part of the sale, saying the Italian side and the Celtics share a lot in common:

"We are thrilled to partner with the Percassi family and to support the future development of the club. Atalanta and Boston Celtics share the common sports values: teamwork and an extraordinary relationship with the fans and the community. We believe that the Percassi family has built very solid foundations on which to work together to strengthen the brand globally, with the aim of encouraging further diversification and growth of revenues, allowing the club to become more and more competitive on Italian and international scene."

Pagliuca, a 67-year-old New York City native who's made his fortune through the Bain Capital investment firm, serves as the managing partner and alternate governor of the Celtics.

No other members of the investment group were mentioned by name in the announcement.

Atalanta's next match is scheduled for Sunday when it visits Stadio Artemio Franchi to take on Fiorentina in Serie A.

Matteo Scarpellini attended his first Atalanta game when he was only 10 months old. Carried by an uncle who wanted to "baptise" him in the club's traditions, he was part of a crowd that saw them defeat Catanzaro 1-0 on the opening day of the 1975-76 Serie B season. He has followed the club devotedly ever since.

"If you're born in Bergamo, you have to be Atalantino," Scarpellini tells Bleacher Report. 

"My family is Atalanta, every one of the family. We live in an area where there are a lot of Inter and AC Milan fans, because Milan is pretty close. Also Juventus. But we teach the kids when they're born to follow Atalanta. You have no choice—you have to be an Atalanta fan."

They start them young in Bergamo, the northern Italian city that Atalanta call home. In an initiative launched by president Antonio Percassi following his return to the club in 2010, every infant born in the Lombardy city is sent a mini Atalanta replica kit along with two bottles of locally produced baby milk.

Now THIS is how you connect with your local community.@Atalanta_BC send every newborn a club shirt and milk produced in the area 👕🥛

In the modern football age this is something quite special.#AtalantaLife #GoAtalantaGo pic.twitter.com/PAdsWrs1hu

— Guess the Ground ⚽️ (@Club_Calcio_) August 31, 2018

Hailing from a city with a population of only 122,000, Atalanta prides itself on being a family club, but it is also welcoming to outsiders, as the legion of overseas supporters who have fallen for the rustic charms of the Stadio Atleti Azzurri d'Italia over the years can testify.

"We have a really good network of international fans," says Nigel Mannering, an Atalanta fan from Portsmouth in southern England. "There's all the Italians and the guys in Bergamo, but we have fans in Norway, we have fans in Poland, in Ireland, there's French fans, there's a couple of Germans, there's Dutch. We've all kind of mingled and got to know each other."

Conor Clancy, an Irish football journalist and Atalanta supporter who lives in Parma, recalls seeing his bewildered father being embraced by a couple of jubilant locals on the Curva Nord following a late winner against Inter Milan in October 2016.

"It's one of those experiences that sticks with you," Clancy says. "There's a real family feel."

Since Gian Piero Gasperini took over as head coach in the summer of 2016, Atalanta's homely charms have given way to something altogether more spectacular. Despite operating on a shoestring budget compared to Serie A's biggest clubs, La Dea ("The Goddess") qualified for the UEFA Champions League last season for the first time in the club's history, having previously ended a 27-year wait for European football by making it into the UEFA Europa League in 2017.

In their maiden Champions League campaign, they became the first team since Newcastle United in 2002-03 to progress from the competition's group phase after losing their first three matches. Gasperini's free-scoring side face Valencia in the first leg of their last 16 tie on Wednesday, and for supporters raised on a steady diet of relegation scraps and early cup exits, it is all taking a bit of getting used to.

"It is really hard to explain just how much this run means," says Clancy. "With every game, the fans are pinching themselves and going, 'Is this really happening?' The way they managed to go through just adds to the dream-like nature of it. It doesn't quite seem real and it hasn't seemed real for the last three or four years."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l-xJhekB-Sg

Atalanta secured their place in this season's competition with a 3-1 win over Sassuolo on the final day of last season. For a club that has been relegated to Serie B and promoted back three times in the 21st century, it was a scarcely believable achievement. For Scarpellini, it had even deeper meaning.

"I have a very strong memory, even a bit sad, because it was the last time I saw my close friend Tito," he says. "Eleven days later, he died of a heart attack aged 53. I remember hugging him after the game. We were crying—almost everyone was crying. It was a dream come true. I was hugging him and saying, 'We're in the Champions League, Tito! I can't believe it!'

"That feeling, supporters of the top teams can't realise how beautiful it is. Because they are used to it. When you are a supporter of a small club and for some reason you achieve something big like this, you lose yourself. If you support a small club, all the terraces become your friends. More than friends—they're family."

                  

Matchday 1: Dinamo Zagreb 4-0 Atalanta

Drawn alongside Manchester City, Shakhtar Donetsk and Dinamo Zagreb, Atalanta were the only team in Group C not to have won their national championship the previous season. Few teams relish a visit to Dinamo's intimidating Stadion Maksimir, but none of the Atalanta fans who made the trip to the Croatian capital for their team's first-ever Champions League game could have anticipated quite how uncomfortable an evening it would prove to be.

The visitors were 3-0 down at half-time and conceded a fourth goal when Mislav Orsic tucked away his hat-trick goal in the 68th minute. After the dizzy highs of the previous three years, their maiden Champions League campaign began with a brutal reality check.

"Atalanta got stage fright," says Eirik Stangnes, an Atalanta fan from northern Norway who has come to consider Bergamo his "second home". "They weren't prepared for it. They got absolutely battered."

                   

Matchday 2: Atalanta 1-2 Shakhtar Donetsk

Obliged to play their home games at San Siro because of renovation work at their own stadium, Atalanta scored their first Champions League goal courtesy of Duvan Zapata's 28th-minute header, only for things to fall apart again.

Junior Moraes equalised for Shakhtar before half-time and then, with Atalanta flooding forward in search of a winner, Gasperini's men were hit with a sucker punch in the fifth minute of stoppage time when Dodo played in fellow substitute Manor Solomon to smuggle home the winner.

"It was an absolute sickener," recalls English fan Mannering. "Given the way the first game had gone, then you concede a goal with literally the last kick of the game to lose the second game. Knowing that we'd got Man City home and away to come after that, I basically felt that was it. We were out."

                    

Matchday 3: Manchester City 5-1 Atalanta

Ruslan Malinovskyi's 28th-minute penalty fleetingly nourished hope of an upset among the Atalanta supporters at the Etihad Stadium, but a quickfire Sergio Aguero brace allowed the home side go in 2-1 up at half-time, and Raheem Sterling's second-half hat-trick put the game to bed in emphatic fashion.

At the halfway stage in the group, Atalanta were rock bottom with no points from their first three matches, only two goals scored and no fewer than 11 conceded. Since the Champions League's second group phase was scrapped in 2003, no team had ever progressed to the knockout phase after losing their first three matches. But the remarkable durability that Atalanta have displayed under Gasperini meant that not all of their supporters were prepared to abandon hope just yet.

"Given what's happened in the last few years, there's never the feeling that anything's dead with this team," says Clancy. "You can never write them off."

                  

Matchday 4: Atalanta 1-1 Manchester City

With 42 minutes on the clock in Atalanta's return fixture against City, their Champions League goose looked well and truly cooked. Sterling had given City an early lead and after Josip Ilicic was penalised for handball, Gabriel Jesus stood poised to double the visitors' lead from the penalty spot.

But the Brazilian fluffed his lines, hopelessly scuffing his spot-kick wide of the left-hand post, and four minutes into the second half, Mario Pasalic headed in an equaliser from Papu Gomez's cross. With Shakhtar scoring twice in stoppage time to snatch a 3-3 draw at Dinamo in the other group game, it gave Atalanta a fighting chance of squeezing into the last 16.

"When Gabriel Jesus missed the penalty was a very important moment," says Andrea Mastrovito, a Bergamo-born artist and Atalanta die-hard who regularly flies in from New York to watch his team's matches. "Maybe the most important moment. The whole stadium felt that we could do it. Everything changed in that moment."

                      

Matchday 5: Atalanta 2-0 Dinamo Zagreb

Atalanta had to beat Dinamo in their penultimate match and hope Shakhtar failed to win at City to stand any chance of going through to the knockout phase. They claimed their first Champions League victory thanks to goals in each half from Luis Muriel and Gomez, while Shakhtar came away from the Etihad with a 1-1 draw. Against all probability, it was still on.

"With the 2-0 win against Dinamo Zagreb, it was like Europe was really seeing what Atalanta were about," says Clancy. "They had big momentum going away to Ukraine for the last game. That's when the belief really took off."

                   

Matchday 6: Shakhtar Donetsk 0-3 Atalanta

Half an hour from the end of their final group game in Kharkiv, with the score goalless, Atalanta were heading out and Shakhtar were going through. The fates seemed to be conspiring against the away side when Timothy Castagne's close-range effort in the 66th minute was ruled out for offside, but a millimetric VAR review overturned the decision, sparking delirium among the visiting supporters.

After Dodo was sent off for catching Remo Freuler in the face with his hand, Atalanta rubberstamped their wholly improbable passage to the last 16 with late goals from Pasalic and Robin Gosens. Back home in Bergamo, thousands of fans streamed to the airport to await their returning heroes.

"Everybody who was in Bergamo went to the airport to wait for the players to come back," says Scarpellini. "You can imagine: fireworks everywhere, smoke. It was amazing. It was a night you had to be there."

Having travelled to Ukraine to watch the match among Atalanta's ultras, Mastrovito arrived back in Bergamo a couple of hours after the squad had passed through the airport.

"We arrived in Bergamo at five in the morning," he says. "I also had jet lag, so I didn't want to go to sleep. I was so excited. I waited for the newspaper store to open and I bought all of the newspapers. I had a very big, beautiful breakfast in the most beautiful bar in town and then I went to bed at 10 in the morning. I put all of the newspapers on the floor in my room so that when I woke up, I'd understand that it hadn't just been a dream."

                   

Round of 16: Atalanta v Valencia

The draw for the round of 16 could have provided Atalanta with more glamorous opposition than a hit-and-miss Valencia side, but the feeling among the club's fans is that it offered their team the best possible chance of continuing their Champions League adventure. "Valencia are a very good side, but we can do something," says Scarpellini.

Yet while Gasperini and his players can harbour realistic ambitions of reaching the quarter-finals, there seems little danger of anybody within their fanbase losing perspective.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2dPgXJFCNBY

"Over the last few years, we must have had 10 of those games where you go, 'This is the best game in the history of the club.' It's just absolutely amazing," says Norwegian fan Stangnes. "Everyone in Bergamo knows the bubble will burst someday. The fans don't think we're going to be up there every year. When you're a small club, you've just got to enjoy it while it lasts."

As Mastrovito explains: "Whatever happens, everybody will love this team forever."

The agent of rising Atalanta star Dejan Kulusevski has discussed the youngster's future, saying he will only leave his current cub in January if a massive opportunity presents itself.

Kulusevski has been strongly linked with Manchester United and Inter Milan, and is in the midst of a breakout season on loan at Parma. The agent of the 19-year-old told Radio Punto Nuovo (h/t Football Italia) the growth of parent club Atalanta means any January move would have to be to a massive side:

"He would like to play for a big club, like any player. At the same time, Atalanta have grown and now only 3-4 clubs are ahead of them. Therefore, what Dejan wants is a big jump, one that’s reasoned and studied, with everything in agreement.

"For now we’ve decided not to unbalance the clubs as a matter of respect for the fans, with Parma having to play Brescia first.

"If we have to interrupt a journey in January, it must be for the opportunity of a lifetime and not so much financially as it is in terms of sporting project. Clubs abroad, in the Premier League, have tracked him and he could go there in the summer, but right now he’s on a great journey with Parma."

The Swedish attacking midfielder made his Serie A debut in January and was sent to Parma for the 2019-20 season to increase his playing time. He has impressed Serie A expert Carlo Garganese since:

Kulusevski is a frightening talent. Another goal and assist today to kill Napoli on Gattuso’s debut. Pace, dribbling, a lovely left foot, eye for a pass. He has to be worth over €50m now. #NAPPAR

— Carlo Garganese (@carlogarganese) December 14, 2019

Here are his stats after he dominated in the 2-1 win over Napoli:

Dejan Kulusevski with a goal and assist against Napoli!

Kulusevski in Serie A this season:

✅16 games
⚽️4 goals
🅰️6 assists

19 years of age. World-class talent. pic.twitter.com/VLr7qap8Ts

— Football Talent Scout - Jacek Kulig (@FTalentScout) December 14, 2019

The highlights from the Napoli match:

A physical and athletic attacking midfielder, Kulusevski stands out for his tremendous vision and passing range. While he has the body type to lean on opponents, much of his play is built around his quick feet, and the combination of brute strength and technique has proven highly effective in Serie A.

He has already made his debut for the Swedish national team and appears to have a massive future ahead of him. He's in the ideal place to develop right now, but the question is whether Atalanta can resist the temptation of cashing in when he returns in the summer.

The club from Bergamo has a tiny budget compared to the other sides that have qualified for the knockout stages of the UEFA Champions League:

Atalanta have already made €27m from the Champions League this season. Those Castagne and Pasalic goals are worth another €12.5m. That’s €39.5m. Their wage bill is €36m

— James Horncastle OMRI (@JamesHorncastle) December 11, 2019

United have relied heavily on youngsters this season―Marcus Rashford, Aaron Wan-Bissaka and Daniel James are but a few examples―and Kulusevski would fit in perfectly as a rising star with tremendous potential. He would also fill a need in midfield, where creativity has been hard to come by at times.

A January transfer seems unlikely, with Parma relying heavily on their on-loan star, but it will be hard for Atalanta to keep hold of him next summer if top teams like United get involved.