Why Mark Consuelos and Kelly Ripa Bought an Italian Soccer Team, And Brought a Doc Crew Along for the Ride
Soccer docs are all the rage, ever since Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney (sorry, Rob Mac) welcomed FX viewers to Wrexham in 2022. But Reynolds isn’t the only star to invest in the space. Consider Mark Consuelos and Kelly Ripa, the couple and co-hosts of ABC’s Live with Kelly and Mark. The pair were part of an ownership group that acquired the distressed Italian team Campobasso in 2022, and it has since been promoted to Serie C.
And, sure enough, there has been a documentary crew along for the ride, capturing not only the drama in the stadiums and locker rooms, but at home with Kelly and Mark, as they figure out coaching changes, transfer windows, and picking up some new Italian real estate in the ESPN original series Running with the Wolves, which will debut July 29.
The Hollywood Reporter caught up with Consuelos earlier this week to discuss the series.
Why did you want to invest in an Italian soccer team in the first place?
It’s the million dollar question. Listen, I have deep ties to my Italian heritage. I grew up in Italy. I spent the first about five years of my life there, and we go back every summer. I grew up with Italian football. I had those guys, their posters, on my wall. And so just through a community here in New York City, someone approached me and said, would you like to be part of this? And I said, Okay.
So this team has a storied past of really rich history in football. It’s in a region where nobody really goes as much, in the Molise region of Italy, and they were in the third division, and the ownership went bankrupt, and the Italian Federation kicked them out of the third division and sent them all the way back down to start in the fifth division. I said to my partner, well, do we have a coach? He said no. Do we have players? He said no. I said, Do we have a stadium? He said, I think we can manage to get the stadium back if we mow the grass in time. I said, well, when does the season start? And my partner said, in 10 days. And I said, sounds like a plan. I love it. Let’s go do it. And we ended up winning the league and got promoted to the fourth division. And then the following year, we won the fourth division and got promoted up to the third division. The opportunity to invest in a community to help rebuild something that they were about to lose. I think it has so much potential, and it was too special to pass up.
Where did the idea to work on a docuseries come from? The first episode begins with Ryan Reynolds on your ABC how, you know, and he’s got a docuseries of his own obviously [FX’s Welcome to Wrexham]. So where did you come up with the idea to have cameras follow the team, follow you?
We had the idea when we were in the fifth division, but no one would really get interested enough, you know, we’re playing on what resembles high school fields in the fifth division. You’re playing in these small parks. And so we already formulated that idea. The plan once we reached the higher divisions was to pitch this idea, and I thought it was unique because, you know, we’ve done some sports docs. We did one for ESPN about a high school wrestling team years ago. We’ve done a basketball documentary for sports. For us its kind of like I would say, a metaphor for life. There’s something connective about this journey. It felt bigger than just us. We thought it was just the ultimate underdog story, rooted, I guess, in the passion of the people in this town that really, in my estimation, didn’t have too much to root for, but this soccer project, and I felt it was a compelling story, and so through a lot of hard work and begging and pleading, we were able to get it sold.
One of the things that I found really fascinating about the doc is that it does take you kind of behind the scenes of the team itself, and what goes into running a team, transfer windows, coaching changes. But also you’ve got the personal element, you’ve got, you and Kelly talking about the challenges of buying a team, looking at houses, it switches the focus a little bit in a way that a lot of other behind the scenes docs don’t necessarily do.
That was by design. And when we pitched it, especially to ESPN, they loved the idea of getting a window in not only to our lives, what our lives are like, not on the talk show every day, because that’s what people see. And the idea of Kelly and I doing a reality show, we would never do a reality show, but this is kind of the closest thing to it, because it is against the backdrop of Italian football. Kelly and I had been working together for years before the talk show. We started out on a soap opera together. We’re a great team, and I knew that that in my estimation, there’s no one more competitive than my wife.
She doesn’t know much about Italian football, but I knew once we got her over there and got her involved in the project, I thought that, she’s magic on camera and that her excitement in the project would be infectious. And ESPN loved the idea of us doing it together.
Obviously you are public figures, but this is, as you alluded to. this is a different side that you don’t normally get to see.
Yeah, and unlike Wrexham — I mean, I love that show so, so much — but I think the food in Italy is much better than the food in Wales.
You’re also introducing a lot of Americans to the Italian leagues and how they work, and some of the players. So how did you hope to not only follow you and the team, but also help introduce this team, to introduce the league in many ways, to Americans who might not be as familiar with it as they are some of the other European leagues?
I think that the the advent of the show Ted Lasso did a tremendous amount of the heavy lifting for for us. There is no relegation in American professional football, in any of the professional leagues, and in the European leagues, there’s something about being relegated and being promoted that makes it just that much more exciting, when teams are fighting for their life. But I would say that show in particular put it in the zeitgeist of the the American psyche, of how that stuff works. And I think in particular, anything Italian is absolutely that much more dramatic. It’s a soap opera. It’s an Italian soap opera. And we knew that would be really, really interesting, where the fans, the agents, the players, have a lot more influence than any other league.
Would you consider doing future episodes?
For us this last season was about getting the players comfortable with the cameras behind the scenes, because that was a big consideration for us, these guys aren’t Messi or Ronaldo, how would they react? How long would it take them to get comfortable? They took to it really quickly. We would love to do another season.
Michael LaHaie is director and showrunner of Running with the Wolves. Banks Tarver, Ken Druckerman, Anneka Jones and Pete Ross serve as executive producers for Left/Right. Kelly Ripa, Mark Consuelos, and Albert Bianchini executive produce under their Milojo Productions banner, along with Matt Rizzetta. Heather Anderson, Marsha Cooke, Brian Lockhart, Burke Magnus and Lindsay Rovegno serve as executive producers for ESPN.
