“Football management”: developing a new professional figure to operate both on the field and in club management

A presentation of the new Football Management course, set up by FIGC’s Technical Sector in partnership with SDA Bocconi School of Management, took place in the “Paolo Rossi” hall at FIGC headquarters in via Allegri in Rome.

Inspired by what happens in other sports and on the other side of the Atlantic, FIGC’s Technical Sector decided to boost their educational offer in order to train the professionals whom sports clubs are progressively more in need of today – managers with a wide technical expertise in football, as well as managerial and administration skills.

“High-quality training is a shared need for the world of football in all its components,” declared FIGC president Gabriele Gravina, “and I am very happy our Technical Sector followed Demetrio Albertini’s input to start cooperating with SDA Bocconi, one of the major business schools in Europe. Our Federation is working to make football more modern and qualified, and we need managers who can navigate the transformations our movement is going through.”

“In partnership with SDA Bocconi, we want to focus on managerial training in the world of football,” confirmed Technical Sector president Demetrio Albertini. “As the Technical Sector, we are the highest expression of training in football and we needed a university dedicated to management to create a modern journey that can adapt to the changing needs of our sport.”

The continual evolution of a “game” encompassing multiple spheres and different areas of knowledge requires practitioners to maintain a high level of training and to update their skills regularly in order to keep up with the times. SDA Bocconi’s Sport Knowledge Center and FIGC’s Technical Sector worked together to design an Executive Program in Football Management, tailored to this sport and based on the knowledge of domestic and international sports management models and on the vision of an increasingly complex football industry, between sports results, and financial and social ones.

“Sport is often used as a metaphor in leadership and management courses, but in turn managerial skills are key in sport as well”, said SDA Bocconi’s Dean Giuseppe Soda. “This learning journey is in a dialogue with the world of football to foster the development of managerial culture and adoption of management best practices. To SDA Bocconi, who has been committed [to contributing] to developing human capital in all sectors of our national system for 50 years, working with FIGC is an important challenge and integrates our experience in the sports sector.”

“Thanks to our Sport Knowledge Center we have been developing field research and expertise for many years, and we have leveraged it in training sports and event managers at all levels, cooperating on an international basis, from the US to the Middle East,” SDA Bocconi’s Sport Knowledge Center director Dino Ruta explained. “Working with FIGC’s Technical Sector is an additional step ahead towards making the Italian sports system sustainable. In order to win, clubs need to know how to build competitive teams both on and off the field, integrating technical and managerial skills.”

SDA Bocconi School of Management.