After more than 20 years, American ownership has returned to the highest level of professional basketball in Italy, the “Serie A”. Cotogna Sports Group (CSG), a company founded in 2022 by a group of students of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, has purchased 90% of Pallacanestro Trieste, a professional basketball team based in Trieste, a city that sits on the most north-eastern Italian border and with strong ties with the USA in its past.

The only previous American ownership in Italian basketball was the acquisition of Olimpia Milano by the Italian-American entrepreneur Pasquale Caputo back in 1999. An endeavor that had among its partners a very young Kobe Bryant, just 21 years old at the time.