Small City, Great Success

Фото: Small City, Great Success

After all these years at the helm of the Mens Sana Siena (Italy) basketball club (Mens Sana is a multisport club, with a basketball section), what I mainly remember are all of the difficulties that we faced, how we overcame them, grew the team, and became better and stronger. At the beginning, the team aspect of the business was almost secondary to our other goals. In some ways we could build the team for each season, but there were always question marks: there was a chance to buy great players, but they could always trigger disillusionment if they failed to produce. The main worry was the management of the club. My biggest concern was to collect sufficient advertising monies to cover the budget and carry us through the end of the season, and then stay within that budget during the season.

To help achieve our management aims to carry us over the next five to ten years, we started the “Mens Sana Project,” and assembled a core group of key people, who would serve as the foundation of the club. Olga Finetti, now Secretary General of the club and Jacopo Menghetti, Sport Director, were part of this group. Simone Pianigiani, the head coach, who had been the coach of the youth teams that won many national titles, has always worked with me. Thanks to these people and the constant support of my wife, Rosanna, and my daughter, Federica, as well as also some friends, we have been able to achieve some pretty remarkable results in Siena.

I started to work for Mens Sana Siena, an historic and picturesque Tuscan town of only 55,000 people, during the 1992-93 season. It was a difficult situation to take on. The team was just fallen to A2 league and everyone was disappointed. Still, I had the feeling that we could grow, improve, and get back to the top league. We had tough seasons, but we continued to work hard. Our advertising agency came through for us and collected more money than the main sponsor was paying. This is not to say that I did not get rejected by many people, when I asked for their financial support. I quickly developed a thick skin. When one door was slammed in my face, I put a smile back on my face and knocked on the next door.

The good news is that our persistance paid off. Granted we initially struggled, but we held firm to our belief that we could, and would, create a top-notch club. It was this overriding belief that carried us through the lean years and helped us to get stronger. It soon became clear to me that the path to ultimate success depended on creating a strong base of local support. This meant we had to become the team for the city of Siena and its territory. I waived my ownership, turned over my shares to the club, and began to solicit the businesses of the city of Siena and its territory to support the team and become, in effect, the team owners. In this way, we slowly, but steadily climbed the ladder, going from a local, provincial club to becoming a top European club.

A winning team is certainly the goal of any sports organization, but if proper team management is not in place, with a set plan on how to achieve and maintain success, they will not be able to sustain a winning tradition. Right after winning our first Italian title, we underwent a real attack by the most powerful European clubs and we were forced to surrender our best players to a bidding war for their services: Andersen and Vanterpool signed with CSKA Moscow, and Thornton and Kakiouzis went to Barcelona. We could not match the contract offers, and when players are offered such large sums, you cannot force them to stay with your team.

The loss of these key players, however, taught us a valuable lesson, and we started over again, changing direction and strategies so we would have a successful club model. We would be self-sufficient and strong, but always a micro-cosmos when compared to the powerful European clubs, which we would face on our road to reaching success.

Our "Mens Sana Project" springs from that ambitious idea created in the 1990s to take our club to the 21st century. So ambitious were our goals that many people told us we would never accomplish them. I was called a visionary by some, but I believed in this project. I was sure that I had the strong backing of the city of Siena, and I knew that the bond with the Tuscan region would be the key to open apparently armoured-plated doors. The involvement of the city government, the Province, the Monte dei Paschi Foundation, and the Mens Sana multisport club all played key roles in moving us forward. We created a “Public Company,” the oldest in Italy, at that time, an innovation, a diffused property, which tied more and more the club to the city and to the people.

In short, we wanted to create a solid base on which we could work. We divided up tasks, and had well-defined roles and specific duties that had to be performed, all within a structure that had common roots. After 15 years of working on our model, now we have a complete staff, a club that has been created and is now run by people of Siena, people who have been educated and grown inside the club.

Our road to the Euroleague Final Four has been long and arduous, but thanks to the sponsorship of the Monte dei Paschi, the great bank of Siena and one of the most successful in Italy, we have been able to achieve our short and long-term goals. In 2000, when our visionary project became reality, we were able to build, thanks to the accumulated experience, a team destined for winning, but always with total attention paid to our operating budget. This has been the priority of our club.

At the Euroleague meeting last December, many people in the audience thought I was joking when I said that we had a profit of 6,000 euros for the 2007/2008 season. However, this was the truth. If, at the base you need to have a solid club, you cannot prescind from the financial aspect.

Our team and our operating philosophy is quite different from that of the rich owners, such as Olympiacos and Panathinaikos of Greece, CSKA Moscow, but also Rome and Milan in Italy. And then there are teams with virtually unlimited budgets, including the European giants, such as Barcelona and Real Madrid in Spain, Efes Pilsen Istanbul in Turkey, and Maccabi Tel Aviv, in Israel.

The difference between us and those teams is not on the quantity of economic resources, but on how the resources are managed. Our underlying goal is to always respect our budget and stay within our means.

This is the first “must” we impose on ourselves from the beginning. We do not allow any extra budgeting during the season, something that often happens when the president is also the owner and the financer of the club, or when the budget is so huge that a club can make any moves without problem at any time during the season.

Starting from this basic premise, our players know that they will receive their money every month, at the same date, and without any problem. We are proud of this sound financial heritage, which serves as an example to other European clubs, especially during this present economic crisis.

Budgeting is critical, but certainly not the whole picture in running a successful team. The “Euroleague Gold Devotion Award,” which was given to our club in recognition for having made the most investments in communication and promotion of our image in 2007/2008. This award shows how much we pride ourselves in creating fan interest throughout Italy and Europe.

Our Internet site ("http://www.menssanabasket.it) is the portal through which anyone can enter and become part of the “Mens Sana planet.” It’s possible to download and send photos, watch videos, read all the news about the team, and take part in all the events organized for the “Basketball Generation,” our youth project that is enjoying great success throughout Italy. The goal is not just to collect new fans, but, why not, to discover new talent for our youth teams.

Naturally, you need to have a good team to win, because when a club is solid, wealthy, and ready to work, you must be able to achieve the results that justify the great care that has been taken. In the last few years, we not only achieved great successes, such as three Italian titles and playing in the Euroleague Final Four three times, but we built a technical staff that is among the tops in Europe. This is led by Simone Pianigiani, a young coach, who is also from Siena, a common characteristic of all the Mens Sana club members. And take a look at our players: Bootsy Thornton came back to Siena, after two years as a reserve in Barcelona. Last year he earned second team honors for Euroleague, and then signed a very good contract with Istanbul. Players such as Terrell McIntyre, Romain Sato, Shaun Stonerook, Rimantas Kaukenas, Benjamin Eze, and Ksistof Lavrinovic were not on the wish lists of the big European clubs before playing with us, but now they have been noted because of the great results they achieved in Siena. We will keep them, however, because we are again ready to win, always playing within our “Siena system.”