Tonight will be a historic occasion for AC Milan as they take on their rivals Inter at San Siro in a Champions League semi-final, but CEO Giorgio Furlani is all too aware of the challenges still to face.
Furlani landed what many would consider to be a dream gig when previous chief executive Ivan Gazidis decided to leave the club, with the boyhood Milanista taking his spot and once again becoming hands on with the club he loves so much.
Tonight Milan will face off against Inter with a spot in the final of the Champions League at stake which in one way shows how far they have come, yet there is still also a lot of work to be done.
Furlani spoke during an interview with The Athletic about the battles Milan still have to face among other topics, beginning with how he watched the 2003 semi-final against Inter from a bar far away.
“Spanish came in handy that night — and in 2007. I was in the Atacama desert in Chile looking for a place with a TV. I couldn’t miss Milan-Liverpool,” he said.
“People say being the CEO of the club you support must be the dream job. I always said: ‘Look, the dream job was striker’. It’s very special and a bit hard to describe. It’s an honour and a responsibility.”
Furlani worked for Elliott Management who took over the club in 2018 when Chinese businessman Li Yonghong defaulted on his debt, and he recalled how scary that was.
“The situation was catastrophic. Historically football is an industry of emotional decisions, driven by instinct. ‘What are the media saying? What do the fans want?’. Clubs have tended to follow that instinct and then backwards-rationalise it, creating a logic for it when the logic isn’t sound.”
RedBird Capital then bought Milan for €1.2bn last summer and their aim is to keep modernising the club, but they will not be spending huge sums like Todd Boehly at Chelsea.
“RedBird are a serial investor in media, sports and entertainment. The convergence of these three things can take the club to the next level,” Furlani adds.
“As a starting point, the Premier League’s media rights are three times what Serie A’s are. Milan gets out-bid by Bournemouth, Leeds, Brighton and Brentford, rather than by Manchester City and Manchester United. That’s the reality and that economic power is largely fuelled by broadcasting rights.
“It’s not the only thing. The other issue is stadiums. A colleague sent me a presentation from 2018 the other day. It said that in 2022, we’ll be playing in a new stadium.
“It was ambitious, but by 2023, we thought we would be and I haven’t seen a single brick. That’s kind of crazy. You look back and think: ‘Four years! That’s a long time’.
“This is a very Italian problem. In Spain, they build stadiums. In France, they build stadiums. In Portugal, they build stadiums. In Turkey, they build stadiums. Italy needs to figure out how it can make stadiums happen.
“There’s a stadium law. The point of it is that if you’re stuck, there’s a way to accelerate and cut through the red tape, but it doesn’t work. There are a number of ownership groups willing to invest money. It’s normally foreign ownership groups, so it’s foreign capital.
“That’s money coming into the country for development, infrastructure, job creation, GDP, branding — and effectively, what the system is saying is: ‘We don’t want your money’. It’s crazy.
“All options are being evaluated, including the old San Siro, which is an open process. It’s not dead.”
