Gerry Cardinale has spoken about taking over as the owner of AC Milan and has revealed details about his first meeting with technical director Paolo Maldini.
Cardinale spoke during an interview with the Financial Times and spoke about buying the Rossoneri from Elliott Management and the Singer family, as well as other issues such as the new stadium.
Cardinale revealed that his target is to renew Maldini’s contract and move forward with a man who is a legend of the club. When the takeover process was ongoing there were doubts about whether the director would remain as he admitted to feeling disrespected over a lack of renewal talks, but now he appears poised to remain.
“It was very important to me that I did that,” Cardinale said of his lunch with Maldini. “We ended up spending three and a half hours together… it was fantastic.”
The article mentions how Cardinale was ‘surrounded by lemon trees and over a spread of prosciutto crudo and buffalo mozzarella washed down with Aperol spritz’ when he reassured Maldini that he remained central to the future of the Rossoneri.
The Financial Times report mentions how Elliott agreed to lend RedBird €600m at a 7 per cent interest rate to get the deal done, and it is a sum expected to fall to €200m later this year as RedBird raises money from existing investors and partners.
“This enabled us to move on a dime, get a deal done, enable them to continue to participate in a way that they like to participate,” explained Cardinale.
Of course there is time to celebrate the Scudetto and to get plans in place for the years ahead, but Cardinale seems to want to push things even further at Milan given the immense potential that the club has.
“A brand of this scale, like AC Milan, should have infrastructure that is indicative of its football prowess and global potential. We’ve had a lot of experience with stadium projects in the US. Milan and Italy deserve a world-class stadium that houses the best of sports and entertainment on a global scale,” he said.
“There’s a huge opportunity at the macro level with Serie A. There should not be this kind of revenue differential on the media side between Serie A and the English Premier League.”
Football politics and twisted economics? The Arab consortium were denied purchase because they were going to funds the purchase via a loan that has to be repaid?
Now Elliot chose not to sell, and instead chose another buyer to whom they are lending their own money to fund the purchase?
How is that different? Both are loans, both buyers are not liquid enough to fund the deal, only difference is: for redbird the seller is the lender, for invest corp, we do not know the lender.
genius right?