Milano American Football Company is building a platform designed to support the long-term growth of American football in Italy — spanning team operations, talent development, brand activation, and media into a single vertically integrated business. Backed by decades of Italian football history and NFL experience, MAFCo brings the structure, network, and vision to scale the sport and become the cultural and commercial bridge between the United States and Italy.
Our Vision
A home for the game — The core platform consolidating fragmented assets across the Italian American football ecosystem
The next generation of players — A grassroots-to-pro pipeline that develops players through structured youth programs and creates real opportunities at the next level.
Milano American Football Company is led by operators who understand both sides of the equation: the structure of American football at its highest level, and the realities of building it in emerging markets.
The company was founded by Justin Pugh in 2025, alongside a team with experience across professional sport, media, and international business development.
This is not an advisory project or a licensing play. MAFC is built by people who have operated inside the NFL system and are now applying that understanding to build infrastructure from the ground up in Italy.
11-year veteran leadership with firsthand knowledge of how the game operates at the highest level
Operator-Led
Built by people who have executed inside the system, not advised from the outside
Why Italy
An established market, structurally underserved
Italy has one of the longest-standing American football communities outside the United States, with decades of league history, athletes, and fan engagement already in place. The foundation exists, but it has never been fully connected into a modern commercial or developmental system.
At the same time, Italy sits at a unique intersection of culture, tourism, and sport. It is one of the most visited countries in the world, with global media visibility and a deep connection to international audiences.
What’s missing is structure: a unified platform that connects youth development, teams, events, and commercial partners into one ecosystem.
That combination of existing passion and untapped infrastructure makes Italy one of the most logical long-term growth markets for American football outside the United States.
MAFC is built as a connected system across six core pillars: professional teams, youth development, stadium infrastructure, NFL activations, technology, and tourism.
Each pillar is designed to function independently, but also reinforce the broader ecosystem. Youth development creates participation and talent flow. Professional teams anchor visibility and competition. Stadiums provide physical infrastructure and event scalability. NFL activations bring global relevance and commercial leverage. Technology enables distribution and operational scale. Tourism connects the sport to one of Italy’s strongest economic drivers.
Together, these components form a multi-layered sports platform, not dependent on a single team or season, but structured to generate activity, partnerships, and revenue year-round.
Justin Pugh spent 11 years in the NFL, first as a first-round pick of the New York Giants, then with the Arizona Cardinals, before turning his attention to what comes after the career ends. His instinct wasn't retirement. It was construction.
His connection to Italy is both personal and strategic. His wife is Italian. They vacation there. On one of those trips, they found something unexpected: a community with genuine, deep passion for American football. Not a novelty crowd. Real fans, real players, real hunger for the game to be taken seriously.
That discovery led to the IFL Commissionership, and once inside the league, it became clear that the infrastructure gap was enormous. Italy had the demand. It didn't have the business. Justin decided to build it.
The New York Giants, the franchise he played for, is a team with proud Italian-American heritage and Syracuse University, Justin’s alma mater, has a campus in Florence. The northeast US, where he built his career, has the largest Italian-American population in the country. Milan and New York have always been connected. MAFC is the organization that turns that connection into a business.
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