The Pozzo Family: succession, football and the transmission of a business model

Succession in family businesses is often discussed through the lens of ownership transfer. Who will inherit the quotas? Who will receive the shares? How will the estate or corporate reorganisation be structured? Will there be lifetime gifts, a will, a shareholders’ agreement, a family holding company or a family protocol?

These questions are relevant, but they do not exhaust the succession issue. In many family businesses, especially those built upon the founder’s strategic experience, the true asset is not limited to shareholdings.

It lies in the way decisions are made, in the ability to read the market, in relationship networks, in the capacity to identify opportunities before competitors, and in the way the family transforms accumulated knowledge into competitive advantage.

The case of the Pozzo family, in European football, illustrates this point particularly well.

The Pozzo family and the construction of a business model in football

Gianpaolo Pozzo became the majority shareholder of Udinese on 28 July 1986, succeeding Lamberto Mazza in the management of the club. Decades later, Udinese came to be analysed in the management literature as a singular case of balance between sporting performance, financial constraints and a business model based on the identification, development and valorisation of young players.

In a study published in the European Management Journal, Di Minin et al. describe Udinese as a kind of “talent factory”, with a model based on investment, development and the rapid rotation of promising young players, while simultaneously maintaining financial discipline and competitive performance (DI MININ et al., 2014).

The most relevant aspect, from a family governance perspective, is not only Udinese’s sporting or economic success. It is the fact that this model did not depend exclusively on formal ownership of the club.

It depended on specific knowledge of the football market: where to find players, how to assess potential, when to buy, when to sell, how to balance sporting risk and financial need, and how to manage clubs operating in different national environments.

This kind of asset is much harder to transfer than formal ownership.

Shareholdings can be transferred by contracts, gifts, wills or estate and corporate reorganisations. Experience, judgement, networks of trust and accumulated knowledge, however, do not automatically pass from one generation to the next.

A successor may receive legal control of the company and still not receive the competencies required to manage the business with the same strategic coherence.

Ownership succession is not the same as business succession

In the literature on family businesses, succession is not treated merely as an act of replacing one person with another, but as a process. Handler notes that family succession involves multiple dimensions, including the role of the founder, the perspective of the next generation, the levels of interaction between family and business, and the characteristics of successful succession processes (HANDLER, 1994).

Cabrera-Suárez, De Saá-Pérez and García-Almeida analyse succession from a resource- and knowledge-based view, emphasising that one of the central challenges of the family firm lies in the successor’s ability to acquire adequately the essential knowledge and skills of the predecessor (CABRERA-SUÁREZ; DE SAÁ-PÉREZ; GARCÍA-ALMEIDA, 2001).

This distinction is decisive. There is ownership succession when control over assets is transferred. But there is business succession only when the organisation is able to preserve, adapt and renew the capabilities that sustain its business model.

In the Pozzo case, Gino Pozzo’s entry into the family’s sports business is particularly noteworthy in this respect. According to Udinese itself, Gino began to collaborate more actively with his father from 1994 onwards. Subsequently, the Pozzo family began investing in Watford, in England, from 2012 onwards, and Gino Pozzo is currently listed as the club’s owner in its institutional structure.

Through this movement, the family model ceased to be restricted to the Italian context of Udinese and began to be tested in another market, with a different sporting culture, a different regulatory structure, a different revenue dynamic and a different relationship with supporters, the press and institutions.

This does not mean asserting, without direct evidence, that there was a perfectly planned internal transmission between father and son. The publicly available information does not allow for that conclusion.

What can be stated, as an analytical inference based on the literature on family businesses, is that the Pozzo case highlights a recurrent issue in succession processes: when a family business expands into different markets, continuity does not depend only on who holds the capital, but on the ability to transform personal knowledge into organisational capability.

This is the central question raised by the case: how can what was born from the founder’s experience cease to depend exclusively on the founder?

The challenge of transmitting tacit knowledge

In family businesses, the founder often accumulates functions that do not appear in the articles of association.

The founder knows the clients, understands the risks, perceives weak market signals, negotiates with suppliers, interprets internal conflicts and makes decisions based on a combination of data, memory and intuition. Part of this knowledge can be documented. Another part is tacit: it results from years of practice, mistakes, observation and relationships of trust.

The theory of organisational knowledge creation helps to explain this challenge. Nonaka distinguishes tacit knowledge from explicit knowledge and demonstrates that an organisation must create mechanisms to convert individual experiences into shared knowledge through socialisation, externalisation, combination and internalisation (NONAKA, 1994).

In practical terms, this means that the family business cannot depend solely on informal coexistence between founder and successor. It must create processes, criteria, decision-making forums and learning structures that make knowledge less personal and more institutional.

In football, this is particularly sensitive. Player evaluation cannot be reduced to numbers. Performance data matter, but they do not eliminate judgement. The value of a player depends on age, position, competitive context, adaptability, physical history, development potential, behaviour, agent networks, market timing and the club’s strategic needs.

In a family organisation that has built competitive advantage around this kind of reading, succession requires more than handing over shares to the successor. It requires the formation of decision-making capability.

What the Pozzo case teaches business families

The Pozzo case is relevant beyond football. In business families, it is common to find sophisticated estate planning, but limited attention to the transmission of the business model.

The family organises holding companies, defines rules for gifts, structures asset-protection clauses, adjusts wills and considers tax efficiency. All of this may be necessary. But if the company depends on the vision of a single person, estate reorganisation does not solve the problem of continuity.

The company may be legally transferred and, at the same time, remain commercially fragile.

Proper succession requires the family to formulate more difficult questions. Who truly knows the business? Who has legitimacy before executives, shareholders, clients and other stakeholders? Which decisions still depend exclusively on the founder? Which criteria for investment, hiring, expansion or sale are documented? Has the next generation been exposed to real decision-making experiences or merely received generic information about the company? Are there governance bodies capable of compensating for the founder’s gradual withdrawal? Is critical knowledge concentrated in individuals or distributed across the organisation?

These questions are especially important when the family operates in different markets. International expansion, or even activity in regulated and highly competitive sectors, increases the complexity of succession. A model that worked in one country may not work in the same way in another.

In European football, this complexity also has a regulatory dimension. UEFA rules on the integrity of competitions and multi-club ownership show that participation or influence over more than one club may raise specific concerns when related clubs participate in the same competitions.

This is not a discussion about the regularity of any specific case, but rather a demonstration that transnational family models require governance compatible with different institutional environments.

Continuity of control and continuity of capability

The great lesson of the Pozzo case is that succession is not merely continuity of control. It is continuity of capability.

When the family transmits only ownership, the successor receives the asset. When it also transmits knowledge, criteria and governance, the successor receives real conditions to preserve and develop the business. The difference between one and the other may determine whether the family business will continue as a living organisation or become merely an asset managed without the intelligence that created it.

In complex family businesses, the greatest risk is not only the absence of heirs. It is the existence of heirs who are formally prepared to receive the wealth, but insufficiently prepared to understand the system that sustains that wealth.

The Pozzo case shows that the true succession challenge lies in transforming the founder’s knowledge into a competence of the organisation itself. This transformation does not happen automatically. It requires time, structured coexistence, preparation of the next generation, professionalisation, governance and the ability to separate the transmission of ownership from the transmission of management.

Ultimately, the question every business family should ask is not only who will keep the shares.

The more important question is, who will be capable of preserving, adapting and renewing the model that made those shares valuable?

References

CABRERA-SUÁREZ, Katiuska; DE SAÁ-PÉREZ, Petra; GARCÍA-ALMEIDA, Desiderio. The succession process from a resource- and knowledge-based view of the family firm.

Family Business Review, v. 14, n. 1, p. 37-46, 2001. DOI: 10.1111/j.1741-6248.2001.00037.x.

DI MININ, Alberto; FRATTINI, Federico; BIANCHI, Mattia; BORTOLUZZI, Guido;

PICCALUGA, Andrea. Udinese Calcio soccer club as a talents factory: strategic agility, diverging objectives, and resource constraints. European Management Journal, v. 32, n. 2, p. 319-336, 2014. DOI: 10.1016/j.emj.2013.04.001.

HANDLER, Wendy C. Succession in family business: a review of the research. Family Business Review, v. 7, n. 2, p. 133-157, 1994. DOI: 10.1111/j.1741-6248.1994.00133.x.

NONAKA, Ikujiro. A dynamic theory of organizational knowledge creation. Organization Science, v. 5, n. 1, p. 14-37, 1994. DOI: 10.1287/orsc.5.1.14.

UDINESE CALCIO. On this day – the start of the Pozzo era. Udine, 28 jul. 2022. Disponível em: https://www.udinese.it/news/club/on-this-day-the-start-of-the-pozzo-era. Acesso em: 7 jul. 2026.

UDINESE CALCIO. 38 anni fa Gianpaolo Pozzo acquistava l’Udinese. Udine, 28 jul. 2024. Disponível em: https://www.udinese.it/news/societa/38-anni-fa-gianpaolo-pozzo-acquistava-ludinese. Acesso em: 7 jul. 2026.

UEFA. Regulations of the UEFA Champions League 2026/27: Article 5 – Integrity of the competition/multi-club ownership. Nyon: UEFA, 2026. Disponível em: https://documents.uefa.com/r/Regulations-of-the-UEFA-Champions-League-2026/27-Online. Acesso em: 7 jul. 2026.

WATFORD FOOTBALL CLUB. Owner statement: Gino Pozzo. Watford, 7 maio 2025. Disponível em: https://www.watfordfc.com/news/owner-statement-gino-pozzo. Acesso em: 7 jul. 2026.

WATFORD FOOTBALL CLUB. Ownership. Watford, [s.d.]. Disponível em: https://www.watfordfc.com/club/ownership. Acesso em: 7 jul. 2026.