Bologna, Fenucci raises the bar. "On par with the big teams, well done Italiano. But we must not stop now"

Bologna, 7 February 2025 – "We are doing well and today after a long journey we have arrived to compete with the big ones. But now we must not stop". As Claudio Fenucci he knows well, whoever stops is lost. Even if he at the beginning of his adventure in football he stopped for 15 years in Salento, as CEO of Lecce owned by the Semeraro family, and on Sunday at the Stadium in Via del Mare he will symbolically close the circle. It was October 96' when on the threshold of his Fenucci's thirty-sixth birthday he was making the leap from Banca del Salento to football: in a year the rossoblù CEO will be able to blow out thirty candles in the world of football.

Instead, he landed in Casteldebole in 2014, after his experience at Roma, to act as helmsman at Bologna di Saputo. "With Saputo we started from Serie B and arrived in Champions", the rossoblù CEO recalled yesterday to the microphones of Radio TV Serie A, photographing the long journey that brought Bologna from Tombolato to Anfield, or more simply to regularly conquer the Gewiss Stadium, as Gasperini's Atalanta knows well. The Semeraros? "A wonderful experience at the service of a family in love with football", is his personal memory. Saputo instead "represents the synthesis between the approach of an Italian president and the mentality of someone who, having an American education, is attentive to the dynamics of the sports business".

La Champions, Fenucci notes, "had an impact of 40 million on our revenues and this will also allow us to close the balance sheet with a profit at the end of the year". Not only that: "Participation in such a prestigious competition is a surplus value that increases the economic evaluation of the players' cards and since sometimes it may be necessary to sell some of our players, we will have to be good at finding a balance between sporting growth and the valorization of the squad".

But beware of thinking about the much vaunted Atalanta model. Fenucci's position on the matter has almost set a precedent: "Atalanta represents a unique and non-replicable model, because it was born from the valorization of a youth sector cultivated over the years and which had enormous returns from the market when the market conditions were different from today". Conclusion: "There is no Atalanta model just as there is no Bologna model". However, there is Sartori ("I knew he could be the right person") and there is a youth system that in the Saputo era did not grow at the same pace as the first team. "The results so far have not been exciting - he admits -. We have increased the budget, but the returns will not be immediate". Vincenzo Italiano's accounts, however, add up: "He has found the alchemy". It is difficult, however, that without a helping hand from Rome, the Bolognese will be able to find a 'new' Dall'Ara. "It is an investment that for the shareholder today does not present profit margins. This is why I maintain that in Italy, to have stadiums up to par, new financial instruments and a partnership between the public and private sectors are needed."