Abdullah Alabdulhadi
Dear Mark Walter and Guggenheim Partners family,
I have no idea how I should start this message; one I feel responsible for writing. It’s the message of my life; otherwise, I will regret not doing it. I know this message might be a long one, but I am sure that you will find it worth reading.
In my message, I will be addressing many involved parties, starting with you and your company as the main addressee. But I will also address Udinese Fans, the Pozzo family, people who love romance in sport, and the ones who love money from sport.
The goal of this message is both easy and complex. The easy part is I want to give advice to the ones who soon will be living my dream of owning Udinese. The complex part is how can I explain to you why you should read my message and on what ground I built my case to accuse you of stealing my dream, or why I am entitled to talk to you as part of the big Udinese family that you soon will be part of.
They say to understand something fully, “Begin at the beginning.” So, I intend to start with My story of becoming a fan of Udinese and the Pozzo family as the first part of my message.
And they also say, “See the forest for the trees.” So, for the second part of my message, I will talk about Udinese and the Pozzo family business model.
They also say, “Seek first to understand, then to be understood.” And in this third part, I will be talking about Udinese Fans and why fans love football.
In the last part, I will be following the saying, “Look at it from all angles,” where I hope to arrive at the part where I began: Advices to the ones who stall my dream.
I am a 33-year-old Saudi man, and I have been a fan of Udinese since the 2004-2005 season. So, for most of my life – and as you might know, this is something extremely rare for a young Saudi, about 13 years old at the time, to support a team that isn’t famous, doesn’t have many titles, or even a fan base at all in the Arabian Gulf countries.
My love story with Udinese started in an unexpected way, so allow me to give you the context that this message will later be built on. In my room as a small boy, I didn’t have a satellite for TV channels; I only had access to three Saudi terrestrial channels: the Saudi official channel, the Saudi English channel, and the new Saudi sport channel, which was only broadcasting Saudi league and French league matches, plus highlights of Serie A rounds.
At that time, I was addicted to playing PlayStation, specifically one game only: Winning Eleven 9 (later called PES), and one game mode: the Master League, where you become both the coach and the president of a team. You can then start planning who to sell or sign to win the domestic league or cups. I was quite good at the game, to a level where if I played with a strong team like Inter or Madrid, I would win everything easily. So, to avoid getting bored, I started choosing mid-table teams or sometimes weak teams from the second division to try to take them to glory in two or three years, just to feel the challenge of the game. As a general rule, I used to sell most of the players from any team and get players that fit my style of play.
One time, I was watching the Serie A highlights on the Saudi sport channel, which was the only interesting channel I had. That season, Udinese was doing well, so they were talking about Udinese as the “black horse” of Serie A because they were fighting for a Champions League spot with an attractive and attacking style of play. In those highlights, I saw Udinese in a different way – not as a team I sometimes played against if I chose an Italian team, but as a team doing what I loved to do. So, directly after the highlights finished, I turned my PlayStation on and started a new Master League (career mode) with Udinese to test myself and see if I could do what Spalletti was doing. To make it more fun, I promised myself that I would only use their squad players and wouldn’t sell or buy any player for the first season at least, to see if I could compete for 4th place with the same players. It was the most fun I ever had in Master League mode. I started to know every player, and that was my first ever introduction to the legendary Di Natale, who at that time was playing his first season in an Udinese shirt. I had no idea at all that I would fall in love with him and the club forever. It was fun to play with an attack that had Iaquinta, Di Michele, and Di Natale, with Mauri, Pizarro, and my favorite young player at the time, Muntari, in midfield. Also, in defense, I enjoyed the flying wingback Jankulovski and the solid and experienced defenders Bertotto and Sensini, with a good GK behind them like De Sanctis.
It was so much fun to play with them and wait for the next Serie A highlights to see them again. A crazy love was in the making without me understanding it. With time, the wait for the next weekly Serie A highlights was too long for me, so I started to look online for Udinese news in Arabic. To be honest, I didn’t even know how to write “Udinese” in Arabic, but after multiple tries, I was lucky to write it right and start seeing some news about Udinese, which was mostly just score results or an article about how strong their attack was. I just wanted to learn more about them every second while I played PlayStation because, as a young boy who had to entertain himself, I was also the commentator for the match (not only the coach and president). For example, if I was playing against Inter or Juve, I wanted to commentate while I played that “the black horses are playing against the giant team Inter without fear and with hope to get the 3 points,” or say something like, “the first black and white in Italy are showing themselves against the most famous black and white team, the old Lady Juve.” And it was more fun if I could talk more with more info, like Di Natale playing his first season and becoming a nice surprise with coach Spalletti, who knew him best.
So, for that reason, my journey to know more details about Udinese started. I wanted to find and read anything about them. At that time, as a 13-year-old boy, my English was very weak, but I was writing Udinese’s name in English and then translating any article to Arabic. Although sometimes the translation wouldn’t make much sense, I even started to translate it one sentence after another to try to understand the most of it if needed.
At the same time, at school, I always enjoyed football talk with my friends, which was mostly about Saudi league teams or famous football clubs with fan bases like Manchester United, Juve, and Madrid. At that time, I found a strong fan base for Serie A, where some friends, who unlike me had a real satellite with a subscription for channels that broadcast Serie A, mostly supported teams like Milan, Inter, Juve, and a few also supported Roma. So, imagine their shock when I, for the first time, introduced myself as an Udinese fan. I don’t really know why I said that at the time since I had never watched a live match for Udinese and only watched weekly highlights, news, and articles, or played with Udinese in Master League mode. They were shocked as they only knew Udinese as an Italian team because they played against them and knew little info about some of Udinese’s players they faced or heard from the real commentators on the TV channels.
I believe that from the feeling I felt as a unique fan who has his own taste in football, I decided three important things without really knowing how this would change a lot in my life. First, I decided to always introduce myself as an Udinese fan. Second, I would fight with my father to get my own satellite with a subscription for channels that broadcast Serie A. Third, I would get more info about Udinese, even if I had to go to Italian websites to get the news and use Google to translate them to English, then from English, I would use Google Translate to render it into Arabic, as I noticed that translating directly from Italian to Arabic wouldn’t get me the best result.
I started to learn more and more about Udinese, and then I found the udineseblog website. You can’t imagine how happy I was to find a website that wrote only about Udinese news, with the latest updates by the hour, and articles or interviews with some ex-players and coaches of Udinese. Here, I started to know more about Zico’s lovely story that showed fans wanting to dream about success at all costs (either Zico or Austria) and got to read more and understand who the real owners of Udinese are: the Pozzo family, with their business model. This made me love the team more because, for a young boy, they became like they were playing Master League (Career Mode) in real life, just like I was doing on my PlayStation. Yes, this is simply the definition I used for many years to try to explain the Udinese and the Pozzo Family business model. I directly added those info to my commentary content, which added more layers of fun for me playing as Udinese owner and manager.
The Pozzo family not only made me fall in love with Udinese more or made playing in Master League mode more fun for me; the Pozzo family actually changed the way I look at football. They made me change my belief that football fun is only about winning trophies. They made me fully understand that football is about winning against the odds and challenging yourself against other teams who have more resources and winning against them, while at the same time making it a stable business and a football project to grow.
The Pozzo Family turned my lonely life of playing a single PlayStation game in one game mode, the Master League, into a real purpose in life and a business dream to replicate what I do on my PlayStation in real life one day. I became more addicted to the game, to a level where I started creating an Excel sheet with all the players’ names, heights, ages, salaries, and market values, so I could aim to reduce the average age and salary cost and increase the average height and market value for my squad, which meant that I had to learn how to use Excel more and more. At that time, I stayed true to my promise not to sell any Udinese player and tried to keep it as real as I could by playing a single game each week before the real start of the actual Udinese game. Also, I started to push my father more for the satellite with a subscription for channels that broadcast Serie A. Then he agreed to allow me to watch the games in his room on his TV, although he didn’t know the name of the team I wanted to watch.
I can remember that almost at the end of the season, I got the chance to see my first ever live match for Udinese vs Siena. In a dramatic game, Udinese won 3-2, a worthy first game: from 1-0 to 1-1, to 2-1 to 2-2, until finally, we scored the third, winning goal. After that, I was also able to watch another win against Atalanta 2-1, then a good win against Lazio 1-0. That was the last game I was able to see that season, as I couldn’t watch the last 3 games, which all ended with the same result, 1-1. And that, for what might seem like a silly young boy, gave me the feeling that I was responsible for Udinese not winning because I didn’t watch the games. Although this now sounds clearly stupid, I have to be honest that’s what I was feeling, which made me angry and more determined to get my own satellite, which my father promised to give me before the start of the next season. I can also remember that because the wait for the new season was long, I decided to continue playing with Udinese and see what squad I could build for the next season to challenge myself against the Pozzo family. Without any doubt, I recall what was a crazy thing: on the same day I decided to sell Jankulovski on my PlayStation to Milan, I was lying down watching the Saudi sport channel, and in the news line at the bottom of the screen, there was the news that shocked me: Jankulovski had been sold to Milan. It was a crazy coincidence that, for the silly boy I was, made me feel responsible for losing a player I liked so much that even in my Master League, it was hard for me to sell him, but I wanted more money to buy good and young players with. I stayed calm and later that week, I decided to sell Pizarro to Inter so I could get some more young players. And as you might know, dear reader, Pizarro was also sold to Inter in the same transfer window, which shocked me more. I was waiting the full summer to see if the Pozzo family would sign any of the players I signed to upgrade the squad, but they didn’t. Yes, they signed some young players, for example, Zapata (Cristián Zapata, presumably), who by the way would later become one of my favorite players, but I was disappointed that we lost important players and didn’t get players of the level I did on my PlayStation. So, for the silly boy I was, and I might still be, the rule was: if I sell an important Udinese player in my Master League, then they will be sold in real life to the same team, but if I signed an important player, that wouldn’t have any effect in real life.
The next season started, and I got my own satellite, but not all Udinese matches were broadcast if they weren’t against big teams or weren’t on at the same time as other more important matches. You can understand my disappointment that season with Udinese’s performance, especially if I was blaming myself for Udinese not winning the games I didn’t watch or blaming myself for losing important players. I felt that my small body and actions at the time had the power to send a message into the universe that caused the transfer of Pizarro and Jankulovski or Udinese losing. Yes, it’s silly now, and you might be more shocked if I tell you that until now, I do get scared from the idea of playing with Udinese and selling an important player. I just don’t believe it’s worth the risk. You can say this is how much I love Udinese, or say this is how much I am still silly.
At that season, or maybe the next one, I was extremely lucky to find an Arabic Internet forum, which is an online discussion platform (for those who are too young to remember it). It was about football and had a blog about Serie A. There, I found a fan association for all big Italian teams, and I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw one for Udinese. It only had a president for the association without any fans as members, but at least I found the first Arabic fan of Udinese, with the name of Hussian. He was writing articles about Udinese, covering their games and player interviews, and sometimes fighting alone against the other clubs’ fans. I was reading everything he ever wrote and every comment he made, and I felt like I was not alone anymore. I directly created an account and called myself (Udinese lover – it sounds much better in Arabic ). Then I decided to reply to the latest article he translated and give my opinion on a player, disagreeing with him about, I believe that player was Zapata, but I am not sure.
He was also surprised that he found another Arab fan of Udinese, and a Saudi one like him. He directly sent me a private message and asked if I was really an Udinese fan for real. I said yes, and before he asked about my name, he wanted to test me and asked me some questions about the players, the Pozzo family, and where I got my news about Udinese from. I was 14 or 15, and I believe he was older than me by just a few years, but we had a common love that made us click directly and talk for hours. Then he offered me my first honorary position: to be the vice president of the Arabic Udinese Association.
I was so proud, and I started translating every piece of news about Udinese to Arabic, competing with Hussain about who would do it first. And 98% of the time, we were the only ones who commented on the news. Although we were the most active Association on the website with news and reports, we continued to translate articles to try to grow more of a fan base for Udinese, which was hard with the lack of results. Instead of giving up on raising awareness about Udinese as a football club, we agreed on two things: one, we would write long articles about Udinese’s history or former players and the Pozzo family business model; two, we would also take a more aggressive path by fighting with other Arabic Fans Associations for Italian teams. For example, we would go to the Juve fan page and challenge them before a match, or we would take the side of any team if their win would help our ranking, just to make more noise. This strategy worked to raise awareness, so some fans of other teams would ask us why we supported Udinese, and an interesting talk could begin, or sometimes they made fun of our team. But for us, we felt satisfied, like we were on a mission of duty to help our team.
Udinese’s results for two seasons weren’t satisfying, and I also felt responsible for most of the games they lost because I wasn’t watching them, as they weren’t broadcast. This made me promise myself that I would never miss a game for Udinese. And from 2005-2006 until today, I can say that I have never missed a game, no matter what. I will see it on TV, a link, or IPTV, in any language or picture quality. With time, Udinese got back to making interesting results and playing an interesting style of football with coaches like my favorite coach, Pasquale Marino, whom I loved for playing attacking football and giving young players chances or discovering new positions for the enjoyable-to-watch D’Agostino, and who also changed, in my opinion, the best player ever, Di Natale, to become a first attacker instead of playing on the wing. There were many stories I could tell, but I don’t want to keep talking about the memories or even the golden years with Guidolin as a coach because I won’t be able to stop. But I feel that I need to mention one point about Guidolin, whom I love so much but at the same time hate because he made us stuck until now with the 3-5-2 formation, which he made effective and fun. But for the last 10 years or so, we have tried to repeat the success he had with the same 3-5-2 until it became so ugly. For some reason, all the coaches we have had since Guidolin felt if they play with 3-5-2 or switch their DNA to try to play with it, they won’t be held responsible for failure, which, in short, also summarizes my feeling for the last few years where the 3-5-1-1 or 3-5-2 tried with all the power it got to make me hate Udinese. If you asked an AI about my account on X (formerly Twitter) and what is the point I repeat over and over, it would be, without doubt, “I hate 3-5-2.”
