How to Find Serie A Football Club Commercial Contacts (The 2026 Guide That Actually Works)

Quick Answer: The fastest way to find Serie A football club commercial contacts in 2026 is Origami — describe your ideal prospect in plain English (e.g., “head of sponsorship at top 10 Serie A clubs”) and its AI agent searches the live web, enriches LinkedIn profiles, and delivers a verified list with emails and phone numbers. Unlike static databases that miss niche sports entities, Origami adapts to any ICP and works from a single prompt.

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The biggest lie in sports sponsorship sales is that you need insider connections to reach a Serie A club’s commercial director. That might have been true five years ago. Today, the data is publicly scattered — across press releases, annual reports, LinkedIn posts, sponsorship deal announcements, and club media guides. The real bottleneck isn't access; it's aggregation. Most sales teams burn 15 hours a week manually stitching together that information across four different tools. That’s the problem this post will fix.

Why traditional B2B databases miss Serie A commercial staff

Apollo, ZoomInfo, and similar platforms are built for standard corporate structures — companies with thousands of employees, clear hierarchies, and frequent database updates. Serie A clubs don't fit that mold. They are midsize businesses with 100–300 administrative staff, highly regional operations, and commercial teams that rarely appear in enterprise-grade contact databases. As one SDR manager told us, “Apollo doesn’t have data on local businesses or niche verticals — we had to switch to manual LinkedIn research for sports prospects.”

This architectural mismatch means a rep searching ZoomInfo for “Juventus FC sponsorship director” might get zero results, or worse, outdated contacts from three years ago. The same rep using LinkedIn Sales Navigator can see the person but then needs a second tool — like Lusha or Kaspr — to pull contact details, and even that often returns stale data. This two-tool dance is exactly what sales teams describe as their biggest time sink: “We spend more time researching prospects than actually selling to them.”

Who you actually need to contact inside a Serie A club

Before you build a list, understand the commercial org chart. Most Serie A clubs split revenue-making activities into distinct roles. The person you need depends entirely on what you’re selling.

Sponsorship & partnerships — Head of Partnerships, Sponsorship Manager, Commercial Director. These are the people who sign shirt sponsors, sleeve deals, naming rights, and official partnership agreements. They typically sit in the commercial division, often with a background in brand management or sports marketing.

Merchandising & licensing — Retail Manager, Licensing Director, Head of Merchandising. If you sell product licensing, e-commerce technology, or branded goods, these are your targets. They oversee everything from the club shop to international distribution deals.

Digital & media rights — Head of Digital, Media Rights Manager, Content Partnerships. With Serie A clubs building their own OTT platforms and social media monetization, these roles have exploded. They buy tech, content creation services, and fan engagement tools.

Corporate hospitality — Hospitality Sales Manager, Premium Seating Director. Selling luxury suites, matchday experiences, or corporate event services targets this group. They manage high-margin hospitality inventory for home matches.

Business development — Chief Commercial Officer, Head of Business Development. For strategic partnerships, multi-year deals, or cross-club initiatives, you go to the person who oversees the entire commercial P&L. This is usually a C-suite role reporting directly to the CEO.

Where these contacts actually hide (and how to find them without losing your mind)

The data exists — just not in any single database. It lives across half a dozen public and semi-public sources that most sales teams never think to combine.

1. Club annual reports and investor presentations. Listed clubs like Juventus (Borsa Italiana) and AS Roma (Euronext Paris) publish governance documents with management team sections, often with full names and titles. These are gold but overlooked.

2. Sponsorship announcement press releases. When a club announces a new sleeve sponsor, the quote almost always comes from the Head of Partnerships — by name. Google News search with “Serie A sponsorship deal” plus club name surfaces dozens of these.

3. LinkedIn company pages and staff lists. This is the most obvious but time-intensive. Club LinkedIn pages list staff, but email and phone are missing. Reps typically browse here, then switch to a contact-finding tool. The smarter approach: describe your search to an AI agent that scrapes public LinkedIn profiles and enriches the data.

4. Industry directories and trade show attendee lists. Events like Football Business Awards, Soccerex, and Web Summit’s sports track publish attendee lists with job titles. These are unstructured PDFs or web pages, which makes them hard for traditional databases but easy for live-search AI to parse.

5. Transfer market platform staff sections. Sites like Transfermarkt and official Lega Serie A pages sometimes list administrative staff. They're not always current, but they fill gaps for smaller clubs.

How to automate Serie A commercial prospecting (with what tool for each step)

Manual research works for one or two clubs. For a systematic campaign targeting all 20 Serie A clubs — plus Serie B if you’re ambitious — you need a process. Below is the modern stack I recommend after seeing what works for sports sponsorship sales teams in 2026.

Step 1: Build the initial target list

Origami is purpose-built for this. You type something like: “Find the Head of Sponsorship, Commercial Director, and Partnerships Manager at AC Milan, Inter, Juventus, Roma, Napoli, Lazio, Atalanta, and Fiorentina. Include verified email and phone.” The AI agent searches live web sources, trawls LinkedIn, parses press releases, and cross-references data to build a verified contact list — all from one prompt. There’s no workflow builder, no credit calculations, no data source selection. It just works.

Pricing: Free plan with 1,000 credits, no credit card required. Paid plans start at $29/month for 2,000 credits. Most reps find the Starter plan ($29/mo) covers a full Serie A club list with enrichment.

What makes Origami uniquely effective for sports contacts: it searches the live web every time. That means if a sponsorship director moved from Roma to AC Milan last month, the list reflects that — unlike a static database that might still show the old club. And because it’s ICP-agnostic, you can target not just big clubs but also Serie B teams, league operators, or even specific sports marketing agencies in Italy.

Step 2: Verify and enrich what you find

Once you have names and companies, you want to cross-check email addresses and phone numbers. If you’re using Origami, this step is handled within the same prompt — it enriches contacts as part of the search. But if you’re supplementing with other tools:

• Hunter.io is excellent for email pattern verification if you already have a name and company domain. Revenue teams use it ad hoc when they've identified a specific director but need the email format. Free plan (50 credits/mo), paid from $34/mo. Limitation: it won’t find the director for you; you have to find them first.
• Lusha works as a browser extension while you browse LinkedIn. When you land on a commercial director’s profile, one click reveals phone and email (where available). Free plan with 70 credits/mo. It’s a good lightweight option but credits run out fast if you’re building lists of 50+ contacts.

Step 3: Route to your CRM and enrich over time

If you’re running ongoing campaigns, contacts go stale. People move clubs. Part of a sustainable Serie A prospecting motion is CRM enrichment — otherwise you end up with “contacts outdated, duplicated, and we can't trust the data,” as one sales leader told us. Clay’s CRM sync workflows (available on Growth plan, $446/mo) can enrich and update contacts automatically, but for sports-specific roles, I still find an AI-first approach like Origami more adaptable because it re-crawls the web on demand rather than relying on enrichment data sources that prioritize large enterprises.

Tools for finding Serie A commercial contacts compared

Tool	Free Plan	Starting Price	Best For	Main Limitation
Origami	Yes	Free, then $29/mo	AI-driven list building that adapts to any club or role; live web search catches recent moves	Requires a shift in mindset from filter-based tools — but you can write any ICP in natural language
Apollo	Yes	$49/mo (annual)	Broader B2B contact database for Italian companies	Poor coverage of sports organizations; club staff rarely appear
Lusha	Yes	$49/mo	Quick enrichment of LinkedIn profiles	Credit limits make it expensive for building lists of 20+ contacts at once
Hunter.io	Yes	$34/mo	Email verification once you have names	No list-building; you provide the person, it finds the email
LinkedIn Sales Navigator	No	$99.99/mo	Browsing and discovering who works at a club	No email/phone data; requires a second tool for actual outreach
ZoomInfo	No	~$15,000/year	Database of corporate decision-makers at large companies	Designed for enterprise orgs; limited utility for niche sports bodies with 200 employees

What outreach actually works with commercial directors at football clubs

Landing a meeting with a Serie A commercial director isn’t just about having their email — it’s about timing and relevance. These people get bombarded with generic “we’d love to partner” emails. Here’s what cuts through in 2026.

Reference a specific deal they just announced. If Inter just signed a new sleeve sponsor, mention it: “I noticed the partnership with X — congratulations. We help clubs like Inter increase the ROI on those deals through fan data activation. Open to a 15-minute call?” This signals you’ve done homework, not just scraped a contact list.

Use AI-generated personalization at scale — but only after the list is right. Once you have a clean list of commercial contacts with their club and role, you can use an outreach tool (Outreach, Salesloft, or even a simple mail merge) with a template that pulls in recent news hook per contact. The mistake is doing this before the list is clean. Build the list first, then personalize.

LinkedIn InMail works better than cold email for this vertical. Italian sports executives are highly active on LinkedIn but heavily filter email. If you have Sales Navigator and a verified list, InMail with a short, deal-specific message often gets a 10-15% reply rate compared to sub-5% for cold email. Just don’t send connection requests without a note — it gets ignored.

A contrarian truth: you don’t need a massive database — you need a live search

The sales industry has spent a decade believing bigger databases equal better prospecting. That's completely backwards for sports commercial roles. A static database of 200 million contacts is useless if none of the last 12 Juventus partnership hires appear in it. A live search that hits Google News, LinkedIn, and the club’s press page every time you run a query is far more valuable because it captures the reality of a fluid, relationship-driven industry.

That’s why the most successful sports sponsorship reps I know have abandoned bulk database tools for this vertical. They use a prompt-based AI agent to build a fresh list every quarter, then layer enrichment and outreach on top. They don’t trust a 12-month-old database. They trust what’s on the web right now.

Next steps to start building your list

You have two paths. The manual one: carve out 15 hours, comb through LinkedIn, press releases, Transfermarkt, and club sites, then stitch the data together in a spreadsheet. The efficient one: open Origami, describe the commercial decision-makers you need across whatever clubs you’re targeting, and let the AI agent hand you a verified list with contact data in minutes. Most reps start with the free plan, export their first club list, and never go back to manual prospecting for sports contacts again.