AC Milan’s fourth kits for the 2024-25 season were certainly divisive, but the club’s commercial side is only going one way: upwards.
As La Gazzetta dello Sport write, the fourth shirt sold out in a matter of days despite the fact that it received very mixed reviews, with some believing that it showed disrespect towards the sacred colours of Milan.
Launched in mid-February, the kit was purchased 70% by people in the 20-29 age group and 75% outside Italy. Business went so well that February went down in the archives as the best month ever for e-commerce at Milan, surpassing last December when the 125th anniversary shirt was launched.
The uniform contains a far from trivial message: designed in the days of the racist insults in Udine against Maignan, its key element is 1963, the year of Martin Luther King’s famous speech and the first European Cup won by Milan.
It is a jersey that was the result of the collaboration – started in 2022 – with Off-White, a fashion brand with an urban and streetwear style that is loved by young people. It is the symbol of a policy that the American Milan, like it or not, has been stubbornly pursuing for a few years.
RedBird Capital’s aim is positioning the Rossoneri at the intersection of sport, lifestyle, fashion and culture, for a commercial logic. Milan returned to being the Italian club with the highest turnover, around €400m without capital gains, and a good part of the credit goes to the commercial segment.
The commercial department has grown from €57m in revenue in 2018-19 to €143m in 2023-24, andit is also due to the merchandising department (the sale of products), of which 70% is generated by the kits.
A few years ago, the merchandising side had a turnover of €6m and last season generated €32m. In the current financial year, despite the disappointments on the field, it will close with a turnover of over €40m.
Within Milan this is the freshest and most dynamic area, which since 2020 has been led by Valerio Rocchetti and since 2022 has taken over the direct management of online sales of goods, by virtue of the internalisation of e-commerce.
For them, the kid who struggles to keep his eyes glued to the screen for 90 minutes is just as important as the elderly fan who is faithful to tradition. Indeed, if you want to broaden the catchment area, the way forward is through an extension in terms of age and geography.
Already now almost 55% of purchases come from abroad. In the future the club’s global vocation will be increasingly supported, also through the opening of franchise stores, with the aim of reaching €90m in revenues from merchandising-licensing within five years.
It all fits into a vision: making Milan grow in the name of sustainability, increasing organic revenues in order to generate more cash and thus increase investments in the squad.
With TV rights intermediated by UEFA and Serie A, and waiting for the stadium project to take off, the commercial area is where the club can exercise greater control and where it can afford to dare, even at the cost of pushing the rules of marketing to the extreme.
Well I’m sure we can all agree this almost makes the f***ing awful football worth it 👀😆
Another financial Scudetto in AC Milan display cabinet. Shareholders are ecstatic.
Salary raise for all the board members!
But who buys these fourth kits???
Ummm 🫠
Casuals around the world. They wear kits because all the cool kids are doing it and these are also linked with an ridiculously overpriced brand (off-white) which makes the disgusting avocado and watermelon kits even more appealing. They are not fans of Milan, those hipsters would fracture their hip if they even tried to kick a ball.
“For them, the kid who struggles to keep his eyes glued to the screen for 90 minutes is just as important as the elderly fan who is faithful to tradition”
They are targeting Gen Z and younger. Not because of football but because they’re hypsters ready to pay premium price for overpriced garbage. Slap a “limited edition” tag on and they’ll wet it.
“When you go woke you go broke” – unless you’re a football team apparently…
Nah. Winning is still paramount to anything else. It’ll take a little bit but when they aren’t in Europe and are battling for 4th place the money will dry up from merchandise and sponsors.
That kid won’t care about that cool new jersey because they won’t see it on TV.
That faithful fan will already be long gone.
They are going to pull a Disney with how they handled Star Wars.
I’m not sure protesting against racism is “woke”. In any case, “woke” is about fighting against injustice. I think that’s a good thing. Unfortunately the term has been co-opted, like almost everything else that stands up to hateful sh1t, by the same hateful angry people that create the hate. Just like any movement/person that represents economic fairness is “communist”.
What’s the relation between being ‘woke’ and a fourth kit??
Nothing.
But it seems like some folks here are more loyal to their favorite news TV channel than their own critical thinking skills.
But hey, whatever keeps the channel ratings high! 📺😂
Nice. Because being so morally superior is all about critically thinking versus going with the crowd.
However, in this instance, I’ll use my subpar critical thinking skills like this.
When you are so focused on social issues (horrible kits to “fight” racism) that you jeopardize your actual product (on field product), you went woke and could possibly go broke?
This was explained on SempreMilan a couple of days ago: “The club explained that both kits were made ‘with the colours of the Pan-African flag to celebrate black excellence and recall the concepts of unity and progress’.”
We had a yellow fourth kit, a grey and a green kit in the 2000s if I can recall correctly and just prior (I think it was a gold kit that never got worn…stand corrected on that). Had nothing to do with the club colours because IT WAS THE FOURTH KIT! Not to mention the 95/96 blue kit that looked like Inter colours which for some reason we re-released around I wanna say 2022 or 2021 as a collector’s item. We muddling performance with kit colours now and taking it out on the poor kit that has a whole other messaging to it lol 😂. I honestly don’t get it and hope this don’t get deleted either. It’s all true. You can look it up.
Bruh, this 4th kit looks ugly as sh*t. How on earth people spent money on this sh*t?!
There’s redbird’s ‘scudetto’ for you
Unfortunately we don’t perform like this in the field. Our sportive performance are very low. If we are gonna glowing in competitions our sales will be more higher. It’s very good if we perform better in financial departments but we need success in sportive aspects.
This is all RedBird cares about. They are boasting about commercial success while sitting in 9th place.
Those kits are hideous too.
Berlusconi’s ACM teams (1987-99, 2003-07) were the epitome of power, style, intelligence, and supreme success, which is why they captured the imagination of football fans around the world. They were all built on an impressive Italian foundation, augmented by the very best foreign talent (e.g. Van Basten, Gullit, Rijkaard, Kaka, Seedorf, Shevchenko).
Cardinale’s ACM teams, by contrast, have no Italian base or identity, are dysfunctional, mediocre, and inconsistent, and struggling to make any significant impact in Serie A and in Europe. They are, for the most part, a motley crew of rejects and has-beens.
ACM – once the go-to destination for the creme-de-la-creme in the sport – has become a retirement home for aging stars, and a nursery for promising young players who are fed to other clubs. Financial gain has been prioritized over sporting success.
ACM may be making money for the owner off the pitch but that won’t last if it’s not accompanied by achievement on the pitch. “You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time”. Fans will eventually walk away.
The owner’s dumbing down of the team, together with his commodification and commercialization of the club, turning a great Italian football institution into an entertainment company, is a crass betrayal of ACM’s proud sporting inheritance. The club may as well up sticks and move to Las Vegas.