Why you should experience Offside Sports Pub in Milan, Italy.
Offside Sports Pub is an independent sports bar where Cenisio's international character, Maurizio Polenghi's background in sports journalism, a carefully developed beer selection and eleven screens turn major fixtures into shared nights built around football, rugby, American sports and the drinking traditions of a British pub.
Set along Via Losanna near Piazza Gerusalemme and just steps from the M5 metro line, the pub occupies a compact corner of northwestern Milan between Corso Sempione and the former industrial territory extending toward Via Procaccini. Eleven screens, including two facing the street, allow several fixtures to run simultaneously, giving football from different European leagues space beside rugby, Formula 1, MotoGP, NFL and NCAA basketball. Tables remain seated during major broadcasts and reservations govern the busiest fixtures, preserving clear views across a room filled with club pennants and sporting references. The result is a Cenisio pub where Polenghi's twin interests in sport and beer have developed into a distinctly Milanese interpretation of the communal British sports bar.
What you should know about Offside Sports Pub.
Offside Sports Pub is best known for Maurizio Polenghi turning parallel interests in sports journalism and beer into an independent pub built around the communal culture he admired in British drinking houses. Polenghi developed his interest in beer during adolescence, sampling different styles on Saturday evenings long before hospitality became his profession. University took him into sports journalism through almost four years at a press agency covering smaller sports and supplying match reports to local newspapers, followed by a degree in Tourism Sciences. His first direct move into hospitality came in 2007, when he opened a football and sports-oriented venue with partners and spent nearly five years developing the concept. Leaving that partnership gave Polenghi the opportunity to operate independently, and Offside opened in 2013 with sport and beer established as equal foundations. The pub subsequently built an unusually international audience around Milan's growing sports travel market, with visiting supporters contacting Polenghi to arrange broadcasts of Premier League, Bundesliga, Dutch and Portuguese football alongside Milan and Inter fixtures. Eleven screens now allow several competitions to run concurrently, a system Polenghi demonstrated during the final round of the Italian championship by showing Juventus, Milan, Napoli and Inter at the same time. His programming reaches beyond football through rugby, Formula 1, MotoGP, NFL and NCAA basketball, with weekend opening hours extending from midday to accommodate afternoon competitions. Beer developed with equal specificity: Polenghi disclosed that pale lager accounted for 43 percent of beer sales in 2023, led by choices including the Italian Hop Is Back, German Schmucker Pils and Heineken. Twelve years after Offside opened, his 2025 plans had expanded toward a second pub conceived around the same combination of sport, beer and British-style social drinking, extending a project that began with his decision to leave his original partnership and build a venue under his own direction.
Hop Is Back establishes the Italian lager route at 5 percent alcohol before Schmucker Pils shifts the taps toward German brewing and Heineken Extra Cold adds a Dutch lager served through a colder dispense. English beer broadens the selection through Beavertown Neck Oil Session IPA and Gamma Ray American Pale Ale, joined by Lupuloid IPA and Newcastle Brown Ale across contrasting hop, malt and strength profiles. Guinness supplies the Irish stout reference, Lagunitas IPA introduces an American interpretation of hop-forward brewing, and Shelbyville Smooth IPA returns the selection to an Italian producer. Magners apple cider and pear cider sit beside the beer taps, with Snakebite combining cider and beer in a familiar British pub preparation. Whisky extends the drinking program through Irish names including Bushmills, Jameson and Tullamore Dew, with Scottish and Japanese bottles and American bourbons rotating across a separate blackboard near the cashier. Food follows the sporting premise through burgers whose names reference football figures: Wilmots combines pulled pork with double bacon and caramelized onion, Peruzzi uses wild-boar meat with fontina, Gullit pairs venison with brie, and Hubner places buffalo with scamorza and caramelized onion. The combination keeps the sporting references inside the food itself, joining an international beer list with a burger selection written partly through the names of players familiar to European football supporters.
How to fold Offside Sports Pub into your trip.
Offside Sports Pub works as the evening endpoint for an afternoon tracing Cenisio and its surrounding streets from Renaissance aristocratic retreat through post-unification funerary architecture and the tram-building industry that helped mechanize modern Milan.
Begin at Villa Simonetta, whose history started when Ludovico il Moro's chancellor Gualtiero Bascapè acquired agricultural land from Ospedale Maggiore near the end of the fifteenth century and established the residence known as La Gualtiera. Ferrante Gonzaga purchased the property in 1547 and commissioned Domenico Giunti to transform it into a representative suburban villa, adding lateral wings around a U-shaped plan and creating a new principal facade before the Simonetta family acquired the estate in 1555. Continue to Cimitero Monumentale, where Carlo Maciachini won the long effort to create a unified Milanese cemetery and directed construction during the 1860s before its inauguration in 1867. The 245,000-square-meter complex developed into an exceptional concentration of funerary architecture and sculpture, with the Central Famedio becoming the resting place of figures including Alessandro Manzoni, Carlo Cattaneo, Salvatore Quasimodo, Bruno Munari and Carla Fracci. Conclude at Fabbrica del Vapore, the surviving industrial complex created by Carminati, Toselli & C., founded in 1899 by Antonio Carminati, Giuseppe Pozzi and Carlo Toselli for railway and tram construction. Expansion accelerated after reorganization in 1907, employment reached 1,350 workers by 1919, and the company built the first prototype of Milan's model 1928 tram after engineers D'Alòi and Cuccoli developed the design from Peter Witt principles; more than 500 followed before Carminati Toselli ceased operation in 1935. The progression moves from Bascapè, Gonzaga and Giunti's Renaissance country residence through Maciachini's post-unification cemetery into Carminati Toselli and the engineers behind Milan's enduring 1928 tram, tracing the transformation of Cenisio's surrounding territory before Offside Sports Pub brings the evening back to Via Losanna.
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