The beginnings

Garlando S.p.A. of Pozzolo Formigaro, one of the historic companies of Alexandria, was officially founded in 1954.

To discover its deepest roots, however, it is necessary to go back in time a few decades, in the Spinetta Marengo of the twenties, where a carpentry shop was in operation. The owner's name was Giovanni Garlando, and he was the grandfather of the current owner. In that small workshop, which many in the village still remember because their old men had worked there, various wooden items were produced, including wine barrels, flutes and even crates for the dead. The footballs were still beyond to come, but it is precisely at those times that the ability to process the raw material is refined.

The events that will make the province of Alexandria one of the world capitals in the production of football are set in motion one evening in December 1949 when, from a train coming from France, an enigmatic character descends. His name is Marcel Zosso and he comes from Marseille. He is rumored to be fleeing his country. What is certain is that the Frenchman, for Garlando, will be the man of destiny.

The idea of Zosso

Zosso has an idea in mind. He smelled the possibility of doing business producing football. A couple of years before coming to Italy he also tried to build some prototypes from his parts. The Sportfoot, so they are called those first specimens, in the south of France they immediately liked.

The idea of building tables that reproduced the game of football had initially come to the Germans in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Although the French and English, in turn, claim paternity, this remains the most accredited hypothesis, for the name by which the game is still called in the United States: foosball, of obvious derivation from the German fussball. In Italy a craftsman from Poggibonsi had tried in 1936, but he had limited himself to building some prototypes. 

The Marseillais, on the other hand, have clear ideas. He knows exactly what kind of product it takes to be successful. However, it lacks the expertise required to process wood at a good level, and it lacks the equipment to produce several specimens. Find out who can offer both.

Renato Garlando, at the helm of the carpentry inherited from his father Giovanni, has a long eye and immediately senses the potential of the game. Zosso finds in him what he was looking for. A handshake and it is the beginning of a collaboration destined to make an epoch in the history of football.

Once the project is completed, manufacturing begins. The first models produced in Italy on a large scale are released. Success is both immediate and unexpected in its proportions. The 42 employees of Garlando are not enough to meet the demands and the inmates of the local prison, who collaborate in the production, are also put to work.

The 1950s and the Official Foundation

Between 1951 and 1954 Garlando built about 12,000 table footballs: 6,000 are sold and 6,000 rented. A number that seems incredible, if you think about what the equipment of the time was like: numerical control and automation machines were beyond to come, the work was almost all done by hand. It was necessary a painstaking effort even just to drill the holes in the sides of the cabinet, those to insert the rods! A job that required a high degree of precision. 

A sure indicator of the success of the product is the fact that, in 1952, the word football is inserted for the first time in a dictionary of the Italian language. Incidentally, the term derives from the Genoese dialect, where it has the meaning of small. So the word football would indicate a small football, small in size compared to that played in stadiums.

A few years later there was a momentary setback: in 1954 football was banned from the Rome police station, but it was reintroduced the following year. 

But meanwhile, just in 1954, Renato Garlando together with his wife Francesca Romana, parents of the current owner, officially constitute the company.

In the following years the product is modified and perfected. Garlando relies a lot on innovation and continuous research to offer better and better solutions. In the meantime, look ahead to new horizons.

The conquest of the American market

The turning point in this regard came in 1969. At a fair in Milan Renato Garlando meets the American Joe Robbins, vice president of Empire Distributing in Chicago. Robbins is impressed by its products, decides to bet on it and gets the exclusive to import them into the United States. The first footballs had been introduced to America around 1955 by Larry Patterson of  L.T. Patterson Distributors of Cincinnati, Ohio, but the market was not ready to welcome them and the game had not been successful.

Even Robbins isn't doing any better in the beginning. For the first year the renters install Garlando footballs in the premises, but people do not know the game and do not get passionate. An event that lasted six days, organized in Chicago to make the most people try football, is not successful. Only in Wisconsin does the game take off quickly. 
But Robbins does not give up and begins to promote with patience and perseverance. He and his team tell people how to play the game. These are the crucial elements that will make the public accept a game that it still considers “strange”, in the words of Alan Zeidman, the top seller of the Empire. 

Garlando's success in America begins here, and is so overwhelming that in short, by imitation, a whole series of football builders flourish in the four corners of the country. The 1973 MOA fair dedicates an entire exhibition pavilion to them. According to Alan Zeidman, who is responsible for the success of the Garlando brand in the USA, the credit goes to the construction philosophy of Renato Garlando. Renato - explains Zeidman – offers a long-lasting product, construction quality, reasonable price. He is an innovator. He was the first to propose plastic printed men and to use ant and metal where competitors used chipboard. Garlando patented the first bushings with oiler that allowed the rods to slide more easily. 

Not only that, Renato is able to keep up with the times and make the necessary changes, Zeidman adds. Every year he visits the MOA to keep an eye on competitors and modifies his table footballs to meet the needs of operators and players. 

In the seventies there were at least twelve experimental models that came to life in the Spinetta Marengo warehouse, until the desired football came out. 

The Garlando models are suitable for fast play rather than control, already at the time they have a smooth surface, a ball of hard material and inflatables on the rods. It is the style called "Italian style" or even "on the fly", still practiced by local players. Also in this case Garlando did school.

The esteem that the company enjoys in America  is such that it deserves the nickname of Chevrolet of football. Even today there are many models of that period, splendid objects of modernism, sought after by collectors.

A true work of art – also exhibited at the Tate Modern Gallery in London – is Stadium, from the late seventies. This 7-meter long table football, on which you play in 11 against 11 was born from an idea of the artist Maurizio Cattelan, world-renowned designer, and was built by Garlando.  But it is only the first in a long series of “balloons” – so these extra-wide models are called – that allow the same number of players to play as the grass of the stadiums. Since 2003 one of these welcomes tourists to Cattolica every summer.

The Eighties and Nineties: Market Expansion and Expansion Abroad

In the following decades, under the guidance of the current owner Giuseppe Garlando, the company became a modern industrial reality with the introduction of new machinery and production systems. New markets are opening up, in a geographical and merchandise sense.

Football is flanked by the production of high-level billiards (Paolo Coppo remained famous, named after the player who "signed" him), then ping pong and air hockey.

The sector of choice of Garlando remains, however, until the eighties, that of the automatic entertainment, with arcades, bars and public places as privileged interlocutors. To them are addressed the bar table footballs, those with the coin box for the introduction of the coin.

At that time the company began to focus its eyes on the European market. In fact, Germany had already been conquered a long time ago thanks to the efforts of Rhenania Automaten, a company whose history has crossed history with capital letters. Its founder and owner, Joseph Meurer, had met Renato Garlando in December 1944 when he was a deputy lieutenant in the German army. During the German occupation of Italy, Meurer's ward was installed in the Garlando household in Spinetta Marengo and, on Christmas night, the soldiers had devoured the family's food supplies. But a friendship was also born, that between Meurer and Garlando that, despite the events that involved the two nations of belonging, had continued over the years. Returning to Germany at the end of the war, Meurer began importing football from his Italian friend, founding Rhenania Automaten. In short he had become his main client, sprinkling Germany with football.

The German area is followed by France, Austria and Switzerland, the latter two still  markets where some of the best Garlando customers are located.

In 1986 there was a real boom in sales of football in Turkey. But it is a short-lived success because, only four years later, in 1990, the government blocked the import of football for reasons of public order. Many of Garlando's models are seized. It is curious to note that the blockade still exists today, but concerns only imported products, while the Turks remain free to build their tables.

The 1990s saw the public conquest of families and communities. To them Garlando dedicates its most classic products - table football and billiards - revisited to combine the passion for the game with the style and quality of objects that become part of the furniture for living rooms and tavernettes. The first models mark an era. The Familiare, with walnut root coating, becomes the prototype on which all the following models will be drawn.

The G-1000 and G-3000, initially designed for the American market, have an extravagant and futuristic look. They are due to the creativity of a designer from Tortona, the architect Pierottavio Canegallo, who collaborates with the company.  The two models catch the attention of the international public.

In the spring of 1996 the British distilleries UDV - owners of the famous whisky brand J&B – contacted the company to have the G-1000 customized with their brand. It will thus be produced in a few dozen specimens to be used in a tournament that will touch several world locations.

Its twin G-3000 remains in the American Sharper Image sales catalog - intended for a high-end audience - for two years in a row between 1997 and 1998.

Meanwhile, from collaboration with US customers, in 1997 the G-500 was born, the first model of the new expanded Casa line. This football, which from the outset will be the best-selling, in 1999 was awarded by the journalists of the British magazine Stuff Magazine the award for best representative in its category. Like the Familiar before it, the G-500 also becomes the model for many other future variants.

In the meantime, the company has made significant strides in foreign markets. It has moved first of all in Europe, also selling in Switzerland, the United Kingdom, Holland, Belgium, Denmark, leading countries where football is particularly appreciated. The countries of the Scandinavian Peninsula will arrive later. At the same time, new perspectives have opened up in North Africa and in the Far East as far as Oceania.

As the economy in Eastern Europe grows, football spreads to Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovenia, Bulgaria, Romania and Russia. Today Garlando has around seventy official retailers in over 40 countries on five continents, including Australia and New Zealand.

The transfer to Pozzolo Formigaro and the early 2000s

At the end of 2002 the company left the historic headquarters of Spinetta Marengo to move into the new Pozzolo Formigaro plant which, with its more than 13,000 square meters, allows it to think even bigger.

That same year Garlando began to maintain relations with associations of football players, contacts that will open new prospects for expansion.

The first is that of Vienna, the Tischfussballbund Österreich (TFBO), which adopts as the official table for tournaments the Deluxe, a classic bar model among the best sellers. The first Austrian national tournament - the Weltmeisterschaft  - will be held thatsummer, attracting the best players from around the world to the Austrian capital. It is played on a competition version of the Deluxe, appropriately revised and named Deluxe World Champion. From the evolution of this prototype, the World Champion was born in 2004, football officially adopted for tournaments by the ITSF. It is precisely in thatyear, in fact, that Garlando joins – as a Manufacturer Partner (Official Manufacturer) - together with four other manufacturers - the International Football Federation. The International Table Football Federation had just been founded in Nantes, France, and already set itself world-class goals. Its objective is the spread of sport, football and its admission to the Olympics as a sports discipline. In fact, he does not want to hear about the ITSF, but about real sports activity.

The World Champion will be reviewed later, in 2007, with the collaboration of the representatives of the main clubs that play on Garlando: the aforementioned TFBO, the British BFA, the Canadian Canada Foos, the Swiss STF, as well as Romanians and Poles, now close collaborators of the company.

Meanwhile, the 2006 World Cup in Germany marked the boom in sales of football on the German and European markets in general. In a single season, spring, as many footballs are produced as the year before in 12 months.

In the same years, the Play & Communicate project gained momentum.  After the success of the collaboration with the UDV, in 1996, Garlando had slowly begun to propose football as an advertising vehicle. Suitable to represent famous and less famous brands, football is placed in bars and included in events of great breath. Since then the sector has grown exponentially, with currently more than 3000 graphic projects carried out (but the number is continuously updated).

In 2014 Garlando celebrates 60 years of activity with the release of a prestigious football, Exclusive, elegantly retro taste, embellished with classy details and with the conception of the Design & Style line: sixteen foosball tables with colors in line with the latest fashion trends, from houndstooth to animal prints, from tartan to decò, passing through various military tones. The Evolution line was born in the same period, characterized by the black and silver hi-tech look, which dresses the leading Garlando models.

Over the years, new wood finishes follow; the beech leaves the step to the most modern maple and the cherry tree is replaced by the refined grey oak. Everyone agrees on the G500 Pure white with an ultra-modern white and silver design that adapts well to any style and furniture.

Latest born, a real living room table football completely covered with mirrors, the Image is perfect to give a touch of luxury to the most modern interiors, as well as to the timeless classics.

Still new models and many projects in the future of the company, to continue a success story that began almost 70 years ago.