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In a place like Mexico City, which has a wide range of sports, culture and entertainment, it is not easy to find a place on the agenda of the capital’s residents, let alone become a reference when you see their charismatic mascot, an axolotl. It has nothing to do with the bills that no one wants to give up but with Capitanes, the team that came to reunite basketball fans around the court after a decade.
From the stands they support the rhythm of a big drum and the shout: “Captains, Captains!” There are girls with axolotl decorations on their heads, older adults, women, and excited young people who wear the team’s jersey and wait for the players. to have a ball signed.
Today, Capitanes is part of the G-League, the development division of the NBA, but they dream and work to become a franchise in the most popular basketball league in the world.
For now, the team sells “an NBA experience at a very affordable price” with the added bonus of offering closeness to the team, something that hardly happens with other sports franchises, points out Nuño Pérez-Pla, operations manager of Capitanes, for El Financial.
What is Capitanes, an NBA G-League team?
In September 2017, an electric blue jersey, with yellow details and the Monument to the Revolution in the logo, was the presentation “flag” of the Mexico City basketball team, a franchise promoted entirely with private capital to join. to the National Professional Basketball League of Mexico (LNBP).
The project began in 2016 “because of the dream of two Mexican partners who had the dream of being able to bring professional basketball back to Mexico City,” Pérez-Pla continues.
As great fans of this sport, both partners found inspiration in one of the most memorable games, Kobe Bryant’s farewell in April of that year: “It went from the typical talk of friends to doing something that was a reality,” he adds.
Under the technical direction of the Spanish Ramón Díaz, Capitanes debuted in the LNBP in 2017 and the fans were so eager to have professional basketball so close again that the legendary Juan de la Barrera Olympic Gymnasium had more than 5,000 people in the stands.
Following the success of the first few seasons, the team was invited to partner with the G-League. This is how Capitanes became the first Latin American franchise to be linked to the NBA.
It was presented as the best offer for those who missed the burst sport in the capital, however, the debut in Mexico had to wait and the debut 2021-2022 season took place on American soil due to covid restrictions.
This approach helped them observe the work of other teams and talk about their strategies to achieve success in this business. Already in the 2022-2023 season, with a larger work team to meet the demands of the new challenge with the best league in the world, they took to the field in Mexican territory.
Who owns Captains of Mexico City?
In addition to being the owner of Capitanes, with a bet as ambitious as reaching a place in the NBA, Moisés Cosío is a filmmaker, art collector and heir to a banking and real estate fortune in Mexico.
In interviews, Cosío has reported that even hours before the announcement of the agreement with the NBA to join the G-League, not everything was assured, so that final stretch was full of adrenaline. An emotion that surely relives every time his team steps on the court to continue making history.
He has always witnessed the best basketball in the world on the edge of the court, but his dreams are also on the big screen. Moisés founded Detalle Films and has been a producer of films such as Museum, Endless Poetry, Secret Memories, You Will Know What to Do with Me and Our Time, in addition to the documentaries: 1982: The President’s Decision and Bellas de noche.
Where does the Capitanes CDMX team play?
“It was a very drastic change (going) from what the LNBP was to the G-League,” says Nuño. Capitanes had to move 18 kilometers from Juan de la Barrera, in the Benito Juárez mayor’s office, to settle in his new home, the Arena Ciudad de México, in the Azcapotzalco mayor’s office.
The operations manager adds: “We required a much larger space, we needed to meet certain requirements that the NBA makes that the Arena meets, since they have developed many regular season events.”
The challenge was to “start generating a new consumer base in the north of the city,” a location far from other sports franchises in the south.
How profitable is Capitanes, the CDMX basketball team?
“We are very close to it,” Nuño Pérez-Pla responds to the question about the profitability of the franchise.
“The break even process (balance point in the accounts) is going to be shorter than what we had projected because we have managed to grow at a fairly good rate,” he adds and projects that they could achieve it next season.
The great entry into the NBA G-League also meant a restructuring of brand strategies to be at the level of what the best league in the world offers.
“We made a very good strategy to make a very strong leap in quality in all the merchandising offer we had, all the sponsorship assets and all the experiences we offer within the arena,” says Nuño Pérez-Pla.
The director of operations of Capitanes adds that all this effort was to position itself “as the most premium property that currently exists in the territory because, no matter what the sport, we have the peculiarity of being the only team that is constantly competing in a North American league.” .
This feature of Capitanes presents challenges and at the same time the opportunity to capture two different markets. “We have the possibility of impacting locally and also generating a very close interaction with all Mexicans and Hispanics who live in the United States.”
According to Nuño, Capitanes’ main sources of income are:
- Ticketing
- Marketing of promotional items
- Sponsorships: They have managed to attract new brands such as: La Moderna and Revlon
- Academy: They have nine in Mexico City and one in Pachuca, impacting more than 480 children
Moving to a larger stage with superior amenities represented an advantage for the team because they went from having attendance of 1,200 people at the Juan de la Barrera Gymnasium to averaging 7,000 attendees this year at the Arena, to such a point that the expectation is breaking records in the NBA.
Will Captains become an NBA team?
One of the objectives is to make this a representative team of the country and not just of Mexico City, as Pérez-Pla explains. The NBA has expansion plans to integrate new franchises and Capitanes wants to be “one of the standard bearers of that project and we hope that we can be part of that process.”
However, Nuño recognizes that the decision between the cities that could be candidates does not depend on them: “We have to constantly demonstrate that Mexico is a country with a high demand for basketball, that this is a city with the business structure to come to consume matches.”
“There is a lot of talk about Las Vegas, Miami, as sports capitals that are betting more and more on that, but I think Mexico City is a city that has been attracting all the sports you can imagine in recent years,” highlights Pérez- Pla about the way in which this great capital has been involved in diversifying the entertainment offer.
2024-05-05 13:00:00
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