The rich history, the romance, the biennalles, the architecture, the art, the canals, the style…and now, the football.

Venice is culturally rich in countless departments, but for the first time in 19 years, the floating city has risen up to have its very own football team playing in Serie A: Venezia FC.

Despite the brilliance and the beauty of the city itself, Venezia FC haven’t had a conventional route to the top. The club has been through financial chaos and backroom turmoil, through to relegations and takeovers in the last couple of decades – but despite having sink or swim moments, the last few years have seen the club flourish on the world stage in an entirely different light.

The Venetians have truly gone blind in their kit drops in the last few years, gaining virality and a fanbase across the globe due to the sheer levels they’ve brought to the jersey game. We’ve long been advocates of pushing the drip > results narrative, but Venezia FC have had a whole lot of both in good portion in the last few years.

Despite players and fans having to travel to the 11,150 capacity Stadio Pier Luigi Penzo via boat, the club have risen up with a clear Moneyball philosophy and a marketing team that has turned them into a bonafide behemoth when it comes to their style and sartorial prowess.

Following a slew of slick jerseys sponsored by Nike, Venezia blew the game out the water with their Kappa-sponsored kits in 2021/22 – designed in partnership with NYC studio Fly Nowhere. It goes without saying that the kits have been an undisputed success, gaining the sort of hype and headlines more commonly associated with Nigeria and PSG kit releases. On the first day of it going on sale, the home kit sold out. Ever since that drop day, 95% of online sales have all come from outside Italy. Venezia FC have gone global.

Each of the four jerseys released this season were executed with a degree of high art befitting of the Doge’s Palace, with lookbooks that resemble something closer to a Bottega Venetta zine than your bog standard kit roll out. Ted Philipakos, Venezia FC CMO, is one of the masterminds behind the club’s meteoric rise on and off the pitch. With Fly Nowhere leading shirt design for the season, Ted took the creative direction of the shirts from the boardroom to the pitch at breakneck pace – but came up just as clutch as the club’s last minute heroics to earn promotion to Serie A back in May.

While the club began to rise out of the deep, the former NYU sports marketing professor oversaw Venezia’s switch to Kappa from Nike – and nothing has been the same for the club ever since. Venezia’s fairytale journey back to the top has been well documented, but the story less shouted about is how the club has gone from the brink of drowning to dripping expeditiously once again.

Ted has seen Venezia’s incredible ascension in both sporting and stylistic excellence first hand in recent years, with club’s rampant rise since the U.S. ownership takeover in 2015 seeing the 114-year-old club rise up the ranks from Serie D to Serie A in just six seasons.

Ted linked up with Venezia originally back in the 2016-17 season, while the club were fighting for promotion to Serie C. Ted left New York and was tasked with the responsibility of creating a global brand out of a third-tier club that had just gone bust for the third time in 10 years, and hadn't played in top flight since 2001/02. Safe to say, it wasn't going to be an easy ride in the City of Love.

Ted's romantic ambitions quickly gave way to the realisation that he was probably in over his head – so he spent the summer trying to convince his friend Sonya Kondratenko — "an art school nerd turned football culture enthusiast" — to quit her proper job in New York and "make the same mistake I had made." After she agreed to join Ted out in Venice, the first seeds of the club and brand you see today were sown.

The first link the club had to the world of fashion was a scarf made in partnership with the New York collective Nowhere F.C., produced in 2017 with a shoot in NYC. With the art direction of Venezia FC led by Fly Nowhere, the marketing, creative strategies and merch were executed between New York and Venice and gave the club global visibility through a stylistic lens for the first time.

While things continued to look good on the surface – with Fillipo Inzaghi guiding the team back to Serie B for the first time in 12 years – there were several problems at the core. Both Sonya and Ted left in 2017. Pippo left in 2018. In 2018/19, Venezia lost the relegation play-out to Salernitana and were set for Serie C, until Palermo went bankrupt and dropped out of the league.

"Something had to change," Ted says, with a switch up in approach internally at the club helping to shift momentum in the right direction. In February 2020, Duncan Niederauer, former CEO of the NYSE, who had been a passive investor in the club, led an ownership restructuring and took over as president. "That was the turning point. Despite the season being suspended due to the pandemic, a culture shift was slowly taking place."

Ahead of the 2020/21 season, the club was completely reinvigorated with a new coach, new sporting director, new technical director and new analytics director leading an entirely new approach for Venezia. "I would say our success starts with the organisational culture," Ted explained "At once, there was both a seriousness to the work and a sense of family through the club. The team came together and steadily grew in confidence all year, all the way into the playoffs."

Along with a massive player overhaul, Ted was busy in the background overseeing the club’s new visual identity under Kappa for the following season – irrespective of where they would finish. While the Serie B “experts” picked them to finish at or near the bottom of the table, the club had a culture heading to the moon, with the team and management galvanised by a desire to give Venezia’s “players, fans, and city a club and kit they could be proud of, as they deserved better.”

Venezia FC kick ball in a city overflowing with history and tradition. It was vital for the club to channel that through its visual output – whether it be the kits, the social media content or the overall aesthetic. "Venice is at the heart of the brand,' Ted explains, "It informs the overall aesthetic. It informs the look, feel, and nature of essentially everything we do. That’s probably most obvious on Instagram, where we share nearly as much city photography as football photography. But it goes much deeper than that."

That much is clear in the elements that have gone into Fly Nowhere's jersey design this season. All four of this season’s shirts weave in Venetian history, culture, and iconography into the tapestry of the fabric you see on the pitch and streets around the world. The home kit is truly something special, though. One of the standout shirts of the season, the design features the gold stars of the Basilica di San Marco, a trompe l’oeil texture designed in the style of Venetian church façade, gold stars that emulate the ceiling of the St. Mark’s Basilica and finished off with a regal, gold-leaf lion crest.

The rest of the designs bring a similar level of high-end quality to their ethos. Venezia's away shirt references the tradition of Venetian mosaics, while the Venetian lagoon-themed third shirt funds a donation to We Are Here Venice, an NGO focused on ensuring Venice’s future.

The most recently-released kit is the Venetian flag-themed fourth shirt, which funds a donation to Save Venice, a non-profit focused on preserving Venice’s artistic heritage through art conservation and educational initiatives. "All of the jerseys connect to the mission of the club, which is to serve as an ambassador of Venice," Ted says.

Venezia's visual approach to their Kappa collection lookbooks has also set the bar this season, and it's clear they've been informed by high fashion shoots over streetwear due to the fashion heritage associated with the city. Venice is inherently more high fashion than it is streetwear, but for Ted, that doesn't mean it's a permanent choice.

"Venice is a fashion-focussed city, and it definitely felt that way in the summer with D&G, Saint Laurent and Valentino choosing to put their shows here. But the visual identity isn't a distinct or permanent choice – it’s more fluid than that. With each shirt, you sense a mood to capture, you sense a story to tell. We just did what felt right, that’s really it. The entire process is very DIY."

Unlike other viral kit releases in the last few years from the likes of PSG and Nigeria, Venezia don't have a huge marketing agency to rely on, or the budgets that big brands like Nike have to blow on campaigns. "We produce and direct everything ourselves," Ted asserts. "We try to identify and collaborate with models, photographers, and stylists who are young and still coming up, or in some cases more established people who just really want to work with us."

The process is a lot more personal than it is corporate, which adds to the intimacy and identity apparent in their collection roll-outs from 2021/22. "Venezia just isn’t Inter or Milan. But in the end, we have a very high standard for how things should look. It’s partly about the aesthetic point of view and it’s partly about paying the highest respect to the club and the city."

So what does Ted put the rampant, worldwide success of the jerseys down to? "It’s a lot of things coming together. We’ve been good in all phases, from our design and production partners to our presentation and communication."

As more people have appreciate the club and the brand, there’s clearly been a halo effect involved for Venezia. "It’s good to be something new and different in an environment where there is fatigue over seeing the same elite clubs over and over again," Ted says. "Especially when so many of those clubs demonstrate that they’re out of touch."

Venezia won't be switching up their approach in the near future, either – despite their audience growing bigger, day by day. "We still have to be creative on a budget – we’re still a small club in so many ways," Ted says.

Even though his role is CMO at the club, Ted will often head out onto the winding streets and stunning canals surrounding the Stadio Penzo carrying his Canon Sure Shot and capture shots for the club's Instagram. “The overwhelming majority of people that follow us might not even plan on coming to Venice, or watch the club play live," Ted says, "But through social media or the shirts themselves, there’s a community developing here now."

While Venezia arrived in Serie A ahead of schedule, the fact the club didn't lose sight of the long term plan has meant that they've enjoyed some great moments in the limelight of Italian football so far. The club made 19-year-old Gianluca Busio one of their most expensive signings, who has gone on to become one of their top players this season, while Ethan Amapdu has performed well following his loan from Chelsea, and it's this youthful energy is the key force driving the club forwards on and off the pitch.

"All things considered this season — including several key injuries, three consecutive away matches to start the season, two heart-breaking losses in stoppage time, and one match altered by a controversial red card, with a very young and inexperienced squad — I think we’ve done quite well," Ted says. The wins over Fiorentina and Jose Mourinho’s Roma were huge highlights for the club, with Busio’s late equalizer at Cagliari another special moment crystallising the club's spirit.

No matter where the club finish this season, the creative direction will remain at a very, very high level. With Ted having co-founded Fly Nowhere in the period between his departure from and return to Venezia – and used the agency to lead their design on the 21/22 kit collection – a new studio will be taking the club forward from next season onwards.

The club will be working with renowned Munich-based Bureau Borsche going forwards, in a move that will see Mirko Borsche's design studio "lead design on Venezia's 22/23 collection" next season. Borsche's work with Inter's re-brand from last time around still stands out as one of highlights of recent seasons in terms of football clubs operating in a more stylistic lens, and this new partnership is due to deliver more statements of intent from a football and fashion standpoint.

The fact that Borsche are linking up with a club with a more up-and-coming stature prove that Venezia have become one of the most fashion-forward clubs in the game, against all the odds. No matter what the results, Venezia FC's drip is going to be on spill for the foreseeable future.

@jacobdavey