Ing. Calogero Bono
Soccer is undergoing a data renaissance. Every match is a stream of metrics: possession, xG, pressing, distances covered. Top English and Spanish clubs invest millions in proprietary analytics. Meanwhile, China announces ambitious nuclear plans — state-led, building and owning infrastructure. Two unrelated news? Not at all.
Both tell the same truth: whoever controls data (or energy) controls the future. Europe, with its SMEs and bureaucracy, risks falling behind. In Italy we see it daily: companies using Google Analytics without understanding first-party cookies, e-commerce stores renting their storefront on closed platforms, retailers paying for aggregated data they can never export.
Our position is clear
Owning your digital stack is like owning a power plant. You don't rent energy — you produce it. Don't rent your data. Europe's problem isn't lack of regulation — we have plenty. It's lack of technological ownership. While China builds reactors and Premier League clubs hire in-house data scientists, our SMEs rely on prepackaged tools that extract value without returning control. SEO is not a trick: it's an investment in data infrastructure. Ads without proprietary tracking are wasted money. AI amplifies, but only if you have your own data to amplify. Otherwise you amplify others' problems.
For us, coming from accounting and balance sheets, the lesson is clear: a balance sheet is built on real numbers, not third-party estimates. A serious digital business is built on its own data, its own servers, code you can modify.
Italian entrepreneur: stop asking "how much does a website cost" and ask "how much does it cost me not to own my data". Developer: learn to build data pipelines, not just frontends. Europe needs people who can get their hands dirty with data, not just with plugins. Otherwise the renaissance will belong to others.
