A historic phase begins for Italian soccer, as the the Lega opens a US office to connect with 34 million American fans
Italy’s premier soccer league, the Lega Serie A, landed in the United States on Tuesday night in grand style, launching a new “historic phase” for Italian football, with an inaugural event called “Calcio is back,” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
The stars of the evening were some of Italy’s greatest living soccer players, Alessandro Del Piero, Alessandro Nesta, Andrea Pirlo and Christian Vieri, ‘known as Ambassadors of la Lega, as Serie A is known to most Italians. (Calcio is Italian slang for soccer).
“This is a project that kicked off over two years ago, we believe in it a lot, and it is a 20 years late arriving in the U.S.,” said Lega Serie A chief executive Luigi De Siervo. While his predecessors focused on monetizing the league’s Italian audience, only about 30 million of the half-billion Calcio fans around the world, now Serie A is going global.
From a new office Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood, the Lega and its twenty member clubs, will create new commercial synergies and consolidate relations with American institutions, broadcasters, companies and fans.
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