AC Milan owner wants to sit down with Meloni

The founder of RedBird Capital Partners, Gerry Cadinale, bought AC Milan in 2022.

A year ago, when the team was trailing in the Italian league and ultimately failed to qualify for European competitions, many of the 75,000 fans at San Siro regularly chanted “Cardinale devi vendere” — Cardinale must sell. Off the pitch, plans for a new stadium kept being stalled by Italy’s notorious bureaucracy. In the media, reporters speculated that Elliott Investment Management was the real power behind the throne at the club since the US hedge fund sold AC Milan to RedBird while also lending Cardinale’s firm money to finance the purchase.

He quickly notes in a lunch interview with the Financial Times that he’s already made progress. Since he took charge, AC Milan has posted three consecutive years of record profits after decades of losses — though, as in politics, fiscal responsibility rarely wins applause from fans.

He thinks, everybody expects him to come in with a ton of money to buy top players. “The last thing I’m going to do is come here because I’m a wealthy guy and I just want to be a fanboy.” In sports, he says, it’s impossible to compete against sovereign wealth funds on cash, a reference to the influx of Middle Eastern state-backed money at clubs such as Manchester City and Newcastle in the English Premier League.

Cardinale wishes he had greater support from Italy’s government, including its Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, as he tries to help put Italian football back on the map as well as modernise live entertainment. “I’m building a stadium and I want it to be an Italian product. Italian banks financing it, Italian companies competing for the naming rights, Italian retail and hospitality around it.” In practice, that’s proved harder than expected. “In the US I could do this in my sleep. Here it’s not my ecosystem — there are language, political and cultural barriers,”

He told the Pink ‘Un: “I would like to get to a point where, if I’ve established enough credibility, I could go to Rome and sit down with Meloni or whoever and say: look, let’s have a plan for how we re-underwrite Serie A. Let’s make Serie A one of Italy’s greatest exports.”