Exclusive: From Pro Patria to the World: Estrella's new model for running football clubs
This past July, Pro Patria became the first Italian club Estrella Football Group acquired: Football Italia sits down with Estrella's co-founder and President, David Dwinger, to learn more about the group's plans for the club and how the project reflects its wider vision for football. Success in football can take many forms.
It can mean lifting trophies on the pitch, building a sustainable club, or developing a thriving youth academy that nurtures the next generation of talent. Coming from a family of Dutch champions and Olympians, David Dwinger understands the dedication and sacrifice required to compete at the highest level.
Through Estrella Football Group, his goal is to create the environment and foundations that allow that potential to flourish. In July,Estrella Football Group acquired Pro Patria,its third club after Portugal-based Cascais SAD and Carvoeiro United.
"We started off buying Cascais because it was just a childhood dream to have a football club," Dwinger says in an exclusive interview withFootball Italia. David Dwinger, Co-founder & President of Estrella Football Group, inside Pro Patria's stadium.
Estrella Football Group is a European football investment company developing a horizontal multi-club ownership model. Rather than imposing a rigid hierarchy, the model lets clubs remain independent while benefiting from shared knowledge, operational resources, and long-term planning.
The ultimate mission is to create an environment where their clubs can compete at a higher level while strengthening their foundations for long-term growth. With a strong background in sport tech companies, David and Estrella Group have been looking for the next standard, the next club, since they bought Cascais in 2024.
"In digital worlds everything is scalable. You just add more servers, and you can scale to the next 100,000 customers.
In football, that's different," he says. When the company announced it was looking to buy another club after Cascais, about 100 signed up, so Estrella started to set its own criteria: "We started looking at the country, the city, the catchment area and of course, the finance, a big part of it," David says.
"Then the people who work there and the history. We effectively started building our first set of criteria, which I think now contains 45 criteria, and we built a tool."