Dressed in sleek black jerseys in their picturesque stadium perched on a lagoon, the Venice soccer team was taking a beating.
A defender slipped on the turf, and the opposing team, from Florence, scored an easy goal. A Venice striker sent a kick soaring so high over the crossbar that it seemed aimed at the Adriatic Sea. The team’s captain was forced off with an ankle injury.
When Florence went 4-1 ahead in the game last month, some supporters left the stadium early. “Change the defense, change everything!” Ettore Saramin, 75, shouted. “They are humiliating us!”
Venezia FC lost 4-2.
But as the mood sank at the floating stadium, off the pitch the hype around the club kept soaring.
On Instagram, the team’s promotional rollouts are a gallery of gritty Italian glam. Their kit has become a cult style hit. All sorts of influencers, models and celebrities — the Libertines singer Pete Doherty, the bass player Victoria De Angelis from the Italian rock band Maneskin, the British artist Corbin Shaw — have worn the Venezia FC jersey, turning a provincial soccer team into a fashion sensation.
“It’s really becoming a cool thing,” said Guilherme Torres, who works in an art gallery in São Paulo and was wearing a team jersey at an art fair in Buenos Aires last month.
Fueling this rise is a branding push backed by the team’s American owners that is aimed at propelling Venezia FC past its modest local audience and volatile soccer standing. The effort was rewarded in the last soccer season when the team was promoted to Serie A, Italy’s top league.
But after six straight losses to start the season, the team occupies last place in Serie A, raising the possibility that it could be demoted and one pressing question: Is the Venice soccer team ever going to be as good as it looks?
On a recent evening, aboard a water bus heading to the Venice stadium, a supporter had thoughts.
“It is no use,” said Oliviero Cassará, 44, “to have cool T-shirts if your team sucks.”
The Venice soccer team was founded in 1907 and has played for more than a century at the Pier Luigi Penzo stadium, which is perched on the shore of the Venetian Island of Sant’Elena. Games are frequented by locals who show equal commitment to watching the soccer and to knocking back Aperol Spritzes in the surrounding taverns. Since the 1950s, the team has made only one- or two-year stints in Serie A, tacking back and forth through Italian leagues and financial turmoil.
In 2020, a former chief executive of the New York Stock Exchange, Duncan Niederauer, became the club’s primary owner and president, and the whole club got a thorough polish.
“It got a very stylish and fashionable cut,” said the club’s chief revenue officer, Nicola Boscaro, an effort to link the team “as closely as possible to the city of Venice.”
The German design studio Bureau Borsche was hired to redesign the team’s visual identity. It replaced the traditional crest with a geometric, slightly midcentury modern golden V. Soccer players posing awkwardly in knee-high socks were out; the Greek model Theopisti Pourliotopoulou, lounging on a gondola, was in.
Leaving behind a sartorial tradition of pedestrian sportswear, the team adopted vintage-looking gold and black pieces, all photographed in saturated, fashionable light against the backdrop of Venice’s lagoon.
The Bureau Borsche’s aesthetic did not merely glorify Venice’s ancient past; it also reflected the hip allure that Venice reflects during the opening week of its Biennale, when flocks of Europeans wearing Japanese cotton pants animate the old, and sometimes melancholic, city with fresh talent, a contemporary edge and an infinite supply of canvas bags.
The designers hired trendy French models like Solange Smith, but also Venetian artists like Fabrizio Plessi to pose for the brand, embracing an aesthetic of decadent Italian chic that has spread widely on Instagram.
The team’s Instagram posts feature older Italian women standing on a balcony wrapped in Venice flags, as well as kitschy foulards, gondoliers wearing a blazing red Venice soccer jersey and cinematographic drone footage of Venice. A partnership between Nike and the rapper Drake, NOCTA, designed the most recent collections.
“I really like the colors and the design,” said Shirley Garrier, a French food influencer who wore the Venice jersey in a cooking video.
Many soccer clubs are reinventing themselves as fashion brands to drive revenue, but Venezia FC was different because it was not a famous club. Until it decided to leverage its city’s international prestige.
“Nobody knew that there was a soccer team in Venice,” said Mirko Borsche of the German studio. “But everyone knew Venice.”
The club has also focused on improving the team’s performance. This year, it secured the most expensive signing in its history, the Nigerian striker Akor Adams, for over 16 million euros, about $18 million.
But executives said the team’s success could exist independently of soccer goals. While scoring in games “definitely helps,” said Mr. Boscaro, the revenue officer, “the current model is not built around winning.”
“Victories are more relevant for the Venetian supporter,” he added. They really are.
After the Florence game, Venetian fans nervously clutched their Spritz glasses at the local Vincent Bar.
“It was tough,” said Stefano Lochiatto, 35.
The whole season has been tough. Venice has so far won only one game, against Naples, and has lost against AC Milan, Lecce, Frosinone, Lazio, Atalanta and Genoa, as well as Florence. On Oct. 13, the team announced that its coach would be changed.
Fans are excited about the club’s new fashionable allure, but in the first days of the rebranding some were sorry that the original colors of orange, green and black were in some jerseys changed to golden, or white and burgundy. They have been changed back in this year’s edition.
Many supporters also resent the club’s project to build a new, much larger stadium on the mainland that would be reachable by car. In a city that in recent years had lost many of its residents, and most services catering to them, losing the stadium seemed like a betrayal.
“The butcher, the baker, there is nothing left anymore,” said Matteo Crivellaro, 33. “With the stadium on the mainland you are taking away another piece of identity from Venice and selling it out to tourists.”
The Venice stadium differs from many contemporary commercial soccer arenas. It is relatively small, holding just 10,000 people, and it is reachable only after a long water bus journey.
But to supporters, the ritual of wearing comfortable shoes and walking Venice’s flagstones under the heavy November humidity or the blistering summer heat to watch their team play on the water was what Ultimo Uomo, an Italian soccer magazine, has called “one of the world’s most beautiful walks.”
Mr. Boscaro, the revenue officer, conceded that the Pier Luigi Penzo stadium was “very romantic,” but he said that the new one was critical to broadening the audience, increasing revenue and attracting better players.
A new audience has already started showing up around the stadium; they are influencers who, said Diego Carraro, 50, a longtime Venice supporter, “burn through two phone batteries” taking photos during games.
But die-hard supporters doubt the staying power of the influencer crowd.
“When it rains,” Mr. Crivellaro said, “they will go away.”
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