AC Milan owner Gerry Cardinale has expressed optimism about the club’s future despite recent challenges. Speaking at the IMG x RedBird summit, Cardinale shared his vision for bringing the Italian giants back to their former prominence.
“What I’m trying to do is bring what I’ve learned in 30 years in America to European football,” Cardinale stated. “There’s a great opportunity to bring Milan back to its former glory.”
The American businessman’s comments come at a crucial time for Milan, as they prepare to face Venezia in Serie A and Liverpool in the Champions League. Cardinale is expected to attend the Venezia match, though notably, Zlatan Ibrahimovic, who has faced recent criticism, will be absent.
During the summit, Cardinale also addressed concerns about private equity funds entering the sports and football world. He criticized the inflated valuations resulting from this trend, stating, “It’s my sector entering sports. The problem with my sector is that they are asset managers. They just want to acquire, and that’s not positive for intellectual property-based companies.”
Cardinale further elaborated on the issues with current investment practices in sports: “Sports asset owners too often ask investors to pay ‘control premiums for minority stakes without governance, without information rights, and without exit.’ It’s like the tech bubble where you just had to put an ‘e’ in front of something and everyone wanted it.”
He expressed concern about the impact of these investments on the sports ecosystem: “What do private equity investors bring? They bring liquidity, but there’s a better way to do it. We’ll need to find a soft landing because right now everything is massively inflated.”
Cardinale concluded by addressing the simplistic notions driving demand for sports investments: “The reason there’s this demand for exposure to sport is because of these simplistic notions that sport always grows. It’s not correlated to macro, it’s outperformed the S&P in the last decade. There’s merit to these statements, but now they’re just pushing it and everyone wants to get into the sector.”
