Steve Pagliuca gearing up for second championship parade of the spring

For the second time in a month, Boston Celtics co-owner and Managing General Partner Steve Pagliuca will celebrate a championship parade.

Last month, his soccer team, Atalanta, won the Europa League title, which may not be as prestigious as the Champions League but marked Atalanta’s first major trophy in 61 years.

Earlier this week, his Boston Celtics ended a 16-year championship drought, reclaiming their status as the franchise with the most NBA titles.

“It’s certainly been a good month,” Pagliuca told WEEI’s Gresh and Fauria. “[The parade] was incredible. There are a lot of parallels. In Boston, we have the most passionate fans in the world that support us and live and die by the Celtics, and in Italy, soccer is the dominant game. They don’t have all the other sports that we have here, so it is almost the sole focus.”

“To win that championship, and they hadn’t won anything like that in over 60 years, they just went crazy, and it was an incredible scene of hundreds of thousands of people, flares, and horns. The parade took like five hours because there were so many people.”

Just as Wyc Grousbeck recruited him and other local investors to invest in the Celtics in 2002, Pagliuca brought in some familiar faces to buy a majority stake in Atalanta in 2022, including Grousbeck, Brad Stevens, Mike Zarren, and head coach Joe Mazzulla.

“I didn’t really have to convince him,” Pagliuca said when asked how he got Mazzulla involved with Atalanta. “He’s got some Italian heritage. He actually speaks some Italian, so when he found out we were doing this, he wanted to look at it… It’s been very great for both teams to share things. How we do things medically in soccer versus basketball and statistics in soccer versus basketball, and we’re implementing the best practices of each organization. Joe has been very helpful. He’s had great conversations with our coach. He’s learned from our coach. Our coach has learned from him.”

The two organizations have worked very closely, with a key focus on analytics—an approach that has worked for Pagluica, with both of his teams bringing home championship trophies.