Napoli Basketball’s Owner Wants to Buy Soccer ‘King’ and Build an Empire

On a Thursday morning in October, Matt Rizzetta isn’t showing any signs of jet lag, which was a bit of a surprise. The founder of investment firm Underdog Global Partners hadn’t been back in New York City for more than a month, and you could forgive him some travel fatigue after the roughly 17 back-and-forth trips he’s made to Italy this year alone. But sitting inside a Midtown Manhattan studio, he’s overflowing with enthusiasm as he prepares to talk his book, which begins and ends with one word these days—Napoli.

“Napoli is exploding with tourism,” Rizzetta said. “The Amalfi Coast is there. Hotels, hospitality, the restaurant business, infrastructure. There’s just so much opportunity for growth over the next decade or so.”

That fixation is a relatively new development for the 44-year-old former marketing executive. When Rizzetta decided to give sports investing a go six years ago, the Italian American started by looking at opportunities in his ancestral homeland and led a group that bought the then-fifth-tier Campobasso FC in 2022. Yet it wasn’t until Rizzetta branched out to European basketball a few years later that Napoli came into focus.

Now, he’s rethinking his firm’s entire strategy. Instead of seeking out small, high-upside investments—underdogs, if you will—wherever they might be, Rizzetta wants to focus his attention on the Southern Italian city, which he believes could be the “El Dorado” of sports markets. Over the past two years, Underdog has purchased control of both the men’s and women’s Napoli Basket clubs, struck a deal in principle for the city’s volleyball teams and held other conversations around motorsports, rugby, water polo and real estate.

Rizzetta wants to consolidate all these assets under one roof, building a “multi-sport juggernaut under the Napoli umbrella,” comparing the project to some of the most valuable soccer clubs in the world that own teams in other sports, like Real Madrid, FC Barcelona and Bayern Munich. In some ways, his aspirations line up more closely with the empires assembled by some American sports owners, like Ted Leonsis, who united the Washington Wizards, Capitals and Mystics under Monumental Sports, or Ryan Smith, who did so with the Utah Jazz and Mammoth.

But it’s hard to imagine Rizzetta achieving his vision without what he described as the city’s “king asset”—SSC Napoli. The Serie A club is one of the most historic sides in Italy, a four-time domestic league champion that was the home of soccer legend Diego Maradona for seven seasons. And, unlike many of its European counterparts that share a city’s spotlight with another club, it’s the only show in town.

“Behind the club is a city with one of the most passionate fan bases in football, both in Italy and across its community abroad,” Luigi De Siervo, the CEO of Serie A, said in an email.

At the end of 2025, Underdog began a push to buy SSC Napoli from the De Laurentiis family, which purchased the club out of bankruptcy in 2004 and returned it to glory with two of the last four Serie A titles. As of this month, Rizzetta said those talks were ongoing. Yet after the Italian press caught wind of a meeting about a week ago between him and club president Aurelio De Laurentiis, the latter vehemently denied Napoli was for sale.

If there is room to get a deal done, the two sides are said to be far apart on a price, according to a person familiar with the matter. De Laurentiis is asking for roughly $2.2 billion (€2 billion) and Underdog is between $1.1 billion (€1 billion) and $1.5 billion (€1.3 billion) strictly for the club, said the person, who was granted anonymity because the matter is private. Napoli ranked 30th on Sportico’s most recent list of the 50 most valuable global soccer teams at $795 million on 2025 revenues of $204 million.

Rizzetta is “confident” an agreement can be reached, though he wouldn’t want the process to run too far into 2027 before considering alternatives.

Meanwhile, he’s keeping with his plan: building his sports teams, working on real estate (like the arena Underdog is building for its basketball team) and adding any other deals to the pot that make sense. Then, Rizzetta wants to open his Napoli-centered vision to other investors, creating a diversified fund that he ambitiously believes could be worth more than $20 billion over the next 15 to 20 years.

“It took a lot of years of sweat and tears and blood to build these relationships and put our group in a position where we can execute on this,” Rizzetta said. “But now we have nobody to blame but ourselves if we don’t do this.”

A new challenge

Sports ownership was an unexpected second act for Rizzetta. Four years after graduating from Iona University in 2005, he launched a marketing and communications firm out of his basement—the North 6th Agency. Just over a decade later, in 2020, Rizzetta decided to sell a majority stake in the business to private equity investors and family office types.

But at 37 years old, Rizzetta didn’t have much interest in retiring. He didn’t play golf, nor did he like black tie events. The push toward sports came from his wife, Daniela, who asked him, “Why don’t you go do something that you love to do?”

While Rizzetta admits he did well, he didn’t quite have the funds to go buy a piece of a team at the scale of his beloved New York Jets, especially since it was mostly just his capital at first. What he did have was the capability to take on an asset worth high seven figures or low eight figures, improve the enterprise on and off the field and take some money off the table a few years later.

He found his first target in a club that played about an hour from where his grandparents came from—Campobasso FC. And because the project involved a team fighting their way back from the amateur tiers, included celebrity investors Kelly Ripa and Mark Consuelos, and had its own documentary series on ESPN, Running With the Wolves, the club has been referred to as the Italian version of Wrexham.

“We then started acquiring other assets all over the world, all with this sort of underdog theme in mind where they were undervalued assets,” Rizzetta said. “Maybe they were mismanaged for one reason or another, maybe they weren’t capitalized on from a commercial standpoint in the right way, but they had tons of potential.”

As Rizzetta deepened his roots in the soccer world, he would sometimes receive calls from American investor groups who wanted to buy into overseas sports teams. In 2025, a Texas-based consortium approached him to help them find a European basketball team to acquire. Rizzetta recommended Napoli’s basketball team. The investors went in another direction.

Rizzetta didn’t waste his due diligence. He bought a controlling stake in the Napoli Basket men’s team in 2025, the same year he established Underdog to consolidate all his sports assets into one centralized structure. Already the club has started to gain momentum. He expects team revenues will be up about 30% this year from an estimated $12 million (€10 million) in the prior period to $18 million (€15 million). That should only climb higher with the $335 million (€300 million) arena the club is planning to build, seating 12,000 for basketball and an additional 3,000 for concerts.

And Rizzetta is plotting an even more prominent trajectory for Napoli Basket. He landed meetings with the NBA, amid its European efforts, and the EuroLeague, which later conditionally approved the club as an expansion franchise as the competition overhauls its structure.

The EuroLeague route is considerably cheaper. The bid itself costs about $90 million (€80 million), and the total investment approaches $450 million (€400 million) when accounting for the stadium development and other expenses. Meanwhile, more than 20 existing basketball and soccer clubs submitted bids in June for NBA Europe that came in at $500 million or higher.

Rizzetta is understandably coy about where his basketball team would land, but he did note that it’s further along with EuroLeague.

“Who knows?” he said. “I think the best move for everyone involved in the NBA and EuroLeague will tell you the same thing is for all sides to come together for the future of European basketball. I think that’ll happen eventually, and hopefully Napoli basketball will be better on the other side of that than we are at the front end of it.”

The top of the table

Synergies come with pairing sports teams, from centralizing operations to selling sponsorships across multiple clubs. But as bright European basketball’s future looks right now, it’s hard to imagine Rizzetta reaching his goal without a soccer team in the fold. AC Milan, for example, this week signed a 20-year, $725 million (€650 million) stadium naming rights deal, setting a record in the category.

“Football is so dominant in Italy in comparison to other sports,” Andrea Sartori, the founder and CEO of advisory firm Football Benchmark, said. “We need to be aware of the fact that in terms of prominence, exposure and also level of investment, what would go into the football team is just incomparable to any other sport.”

If talks with SSC Napoli fizzle, Rizzetta has another plan. Underdog is in discussions to potentially acquire either Juve Stabia in Serie B or Real Aversa 1925 in Serie D, aiming to eventually relocate one of the clubs and rebrand it using the intellectual property of a now-defunct Napoli soccer club the firm bought earlier this year. With roughly $115 million (€100 million) dedicated to the strategy, it would add infrastructure, a youth academy and community initiatives in hopes of getting the club promoted to Serie A, where it would directly compete against SSC Napoli.

There’s precedent for such a big swing. Como 1907 was a third-division club when it changed hands in 2019. Less than a decade later, it has reached Serie A and is playing Champions League soccer this season. “With good management, with good ideas, a proper strategy, and of course the right financial resources, you can grow a club,” Sartori said. “It’s not easy, but it’s not impossible.”

SSC Napoli, of course, is still what Rizzetta called the “logical choice,” and there’s plenty that remains to be done. He’s already lined up funding, a key task since Underdog only has around $335 million (€300 million) in assets under management, and a purchase of Napoli’s size requires significantly more scale. The total spend, accounting for investments beyond the actual club, could top $2.2 billion (€2 billion).

Rizzetta is laying groundwork in case the deal does get over the line. Underdog has had conversations with the city for a public-private partnership that would allocate about $560 million (€500 million) in funding to renovate SSC Napoli’s home venue, Stadio Diego Armando Maradona.

With many of his plans still up in the air, so is Rizzetta. On this day in October, he’s due to fly back to Italy in less than 24 hours. But with each trans-Atlantic trip, his conviction for the project grows.

“If you win in Naples, it’s not a difficult place to build a business,” he said. “The business comes to you.”