The world’s best football teams keep hitting Australian shores and Lou Sticca is the common denominator
Australian football fans have witnessed some European football giants in recent years. With AC Milan taking on AS Roma in Perth in May, SHANNON GILL speaks to the man whose fingerprints are all over the biggest Australian football tours.
Football
Don't miss out on the headlines from Football. Followed categories will be added to My News.
Lou Sticca remembers it clearly.
“I saw Celtic play at the old Olympic Park in Melbourne in 1977, they played against Arsenal, Red Star Belgrade and the Australian national team in a four team tournament tour,” he tells CODE Sports.
“Ever since, Celtic’s always been one of the clubs that I follow religiously because I was impacted when I was a young kid.”
As well as sparking lifelong interest in Celtic, it helped light a flame for Sticca that would come decades later.
Helping bring the best in international football to Australian shores.
For the son of Italian migrants, the current project he’s working on may be the most special. Two Italian giants, AC Milan and AS Roma, are playing at Optus Stadium in Perth on May 31.
“I’m very proud to be involved in this because it has never happened before, two Italian clubs playing each other here. And it’s two clubs that are strong rivals,” he says.
“In AFL terms, it’s like Carlton v Collingwood.”
*****
Sticca and his company Tribal Sports have been accredited FIFA match agents since 2007, so promoters and governments come to him to help bring their events to life.
He’s a ‘football whisperer’ of sorts.
“I bring the football connections,” Sticca says.
“I know everyone in football. And if I don’t know someone, I know how to get to them.”
“But I’m only one cog in a big wheel. You need promoters, you need state governments funding and stadium operators.”
In this case of the upcoming Perth blockbuster it was Ticketmaster/Live Nation, better known as music promoters, who came to Sticca for help for the first sporting event they’ll stage in Australia.
His work on this event started in earnest 12 months ago after Western Australian Deputy Premier and Minister for Tourism Rita Saffioti publicly stated a want to look at an Italian club next after the success of having English Premier League clubs play at Optus Stadium.
“If someone in government wants a particular type of event you try to facilitate that,” Sticca says.
The whiteboard in Sticca’s office fastidiously tracked Italian clubs and their schedules over the next year.
Two clubs stood out as the most likely late in 2023, whereas others would be engaged in the Champions League. However an unexpected early exit from the competition changed all that and added a giant to their revised hitlist.
“That opened up the opportunity to secure AC Milan,” he says.
“So you identify a potential project but that doesn’t mean you know you’re going to secure it, you have to be reasonably flexible in who the ultimate performers are.”
Landing a commitment is not the end of the involvement though, Sticca and his team become the conduit for the clubs when they touch down in Australia.
Both teams will take chartered flights to and from Perth so as they can return players back to home ports for international duty quicker. As the tour is a post-season one rather than a pre-season tour, each team will have about 90 staff on those flights; from the football department to the media department to social media staff.
If it was a pre-season tour, that Sticca has often helped chaperone, that number would swell to 150, with whole in-house marketing teams flying out to coordinate commercial, sponsor and new kit content for the next 12 months.
***
You don’t land these clubs without credibility and Sticca has earned a reputation of helping deliver some of the biggest football tours to land on Australian shores.
Sticca hit the bigtime when he was involved in bringing a then-David Beckham led LA Galaxy to Australia in 2007.
“The star power of David Beckham coming to play in Australia took international club tours to a completely different level here,” he says.
Next it was Celtic and then there was arguably the biggest fish; bringing Liverpool to the MCG in 2013.
“It was crazy. 96,000 people was the single biggest crowd Liverpool has ever played in their 120 year history,” he says.
“The 24 hours leading up to that game was the single biggest 24 hours of merchandise sales in the history of the Liverpool Football Club.
“From an economic impact point of view, you couldn’t get a hotel room in Melbourne for seven days before the game and the government got a return on investment of about 30 times what they put in”
Sticca thinks Arsenal selling out twice to more than 160,000 people in Sydney in 2017 may have even been a bigger achievement.
Chelsea. Manchester United. Tottenham. Leeds. And his true football love, Juventus.
You name the big club, Sticca has been involved in getting them to Australia.
“Over the last 15 years, it would be fair to say that I’ve had my fingerprints over probably 75% of those big football tours.”
****
Sticca says it was “hard yards” in the early days to convince these monolithic clubs to bring their operation down under.
The commercial reasons are obvious; the fees paid by government and promoters are substantial and it always helps to mine a market, despite its comparative small size, they wouldn’t otherwise get near.
Plans were met with enthusiasm from commercial departments of clubs, but often thwarted by the coaching staff. Pre -season is crucial to the way a club starts their season, and whether a manager keeps their job, so the conservative route of going with what you know was de rigueur.
Yet that is changing, crystalised by Manchester United’s successful first tour of Perth in 2019. Their experience gave the tour a wonderful postscript. Executives from the club went back to conferences in Europe raving about Australia as a pre-season destination.
“They said ‘the grounds were perfect, the climate was really good, the hotels are fantastic, the food’s great and the players loved it.’ But most importantly the coaches loved it too, “ Sticca says.
“Clubs in Europe now see Australia as a great destination to prepare for a season.”
****
While football fans of all backgrounds can be excited, two big Italian clubs playing each other promises to engage the Italian community like never before in Australia before.
Yet Sticca says don’t just expect Italians within Australia to travel to Perth. They’ll also come from places you’d never consider.
“AC Milan have had some of the greatest footballers to ever grace the field playing for them and its audience is very international,” he says.
“If you look at the AC Milan and AS Roma teams that are coming out, there’ll be players from England, Holland, Argentina, Brazil, Croatia, France and Iran.”
The biggest sport in Indonesia is football, and it also happens to be a hotbed for AC Milan fans - one particular fan group there numbers 160,000 members. Groups are expected to fly to Perth from there, while last week there were group bookings from Singapore for the game.
“While they are Italian clubs, they are international brands,” Sticca says.
And for someone attending, it may just affect them like it did for young Lou back at Olympic Park in 1977.
Tickets for AC Milan vs AS Roma are available now.
More Coverage
Originally published as The world’s best football teams keep hitting Australian shores and Lou Sticca is the common denominator
Matildas’ most successful coach returns
The Matildas’ most successful coach is back, at least for a short stint, stepping into the void left by Tony Gustavsson after his post-Olympic exit.
Matildas call on familiar name as new coach
As a global search continues for the next full-time coach of the Matildas, Football Australia has turned to a familiar face to take charge for the immediate future.