Branford Man Owns Italian Pro Baseball Team

Not only did Branford resident John Genzale create the first Italian commercial sports league, but he also owns one of the baseball teams that will play in it.

Genzale said that came about because he is very well known in the field of sports marketing. He created the Sports Business Journal, the Bible for the sports marketing field, and served for years as its editor-in-chief.

After retiring, he agreed to co-direct the sports marketing program at Columbia University, which allows him to spend more than half the year at his legal residence in Como, Italy, a picturesque town overlooking the Alps across Lake Como.

He is, in fact, an Italian citizen. His son Will Genzale is a senior at East Haven High School, however.

Genzale explained, when baseball was expelled from Olympic competition after the Peking Games in 2008, it meant that baseball could no longer count on funding from the Italian Sports Federation. Italian baseball officials asked him to use his expertise to create a new Italian Baseball League.

That was a first for Europe, not just for Italy, he said.

"Commercial sports doesn’t exist as we know it in Europe," Genzale said. "It’s run on a club basis."

Milan United, the team with the most lucrative sports market in Italy, then asked him to create a business plan for them so they could compete in the new commercial league, and it named him as the owner.

That made him the owner of the most valuable baseball franchise in Italy, although Genzale is quick to point out that the league won’t have its first opening day until next April.

"I’ve done a lot of things in my life and this is by far the best thing I’ve ever done,"he said.

Besides heading up the Sports Business Journal and teaching at Columbia, Genzale has been the editor and managing editor of a number of daily newspapers.

When Columbia University hired him in 2007, Genzale said he and his wife, Jenny, found real estate prices too high in New York City. Then he remembered Branford, where he lived for a few years in the early-1960s and attended Branford High School before his family moved to California.

Surprisingly, he said Branford hasn’t changed from the town he left almost 50 years ago. For example, although all the stores on Main Street have changed, the street still looks very much the same.

"In some ways it’s very much like it was in 1962, and that’s kind of what we like about it," he said. "To me, Branford looks just like it did 50 years ago."