What Would Chinese Investment Mean for AC Milan's Future?
He’s as much a part of the AC Milan furniture as the San Siro itself, but as one of the grand old names of Italian football comes to the end of another underwhelming season, it is understandable that another one, Silvio Berlusconi, should be considering his position.
The former Italian Prime Minister celebrated 30 years in charge of his beloved Rossoneri in February, but in the year he turns 80 years old, he has to realise that both the games of football and football ownership have changed, especially in Italy.
Serie A is not the coveted destination for footballers that it once was, and nor is it the same league that was responsible for breaking the world-football transfer record 18 times out of 23 between 1952 and 2000 (via MyFootballFacts).
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The money and the glamour is elsewhere these days, and Berlusconi—who has presided over 28 trophies, with eight Serie A titles and five European Cups in 1989, 1990, 1994, 2003 and 2007, must realise that. As a man with a fairly active life, he probably deserves some down-time anyway.
Enter China, and the possibility to bring AC Milan up to speed with the elite of European football once more.
Per Reuters (h/t Yahoo Sports), Berlusconi has entered into exclusive talks with a group of Chinese investors over the possibility of selling his majority stake in the club, with a memorandum of understanding between his company Fininvest and the consortium reportedly already signed.
The article goes on to quote a source claiming that the Chinese will take an initial 70 per cent of the Italian giants, with the rest to follow over the next 12 to 18 months, thereby relinquishing Berlusconi’s control of a club which means so much to him.
It’ll be a wrench for him to do that, but surely even he must admit that the time is right to move on for Milan to progress both off the pitch and on it.
A failure to better Sassuolo’s result on Saturday and a subsequent loss to heavy favourites Juventus in next weekend’s Coppa Italia final will leave Milan without European football for a third successive season, leaving them light years behind their celebrated status as the continent’s second-most successful club with seven European Cups to their name.
Change is needed, and with China making ambitious waves in world football for the past few years, getting them on board would be a huge coup for Milan at the exact time they need one.
As stated in the Reuters report, Chinese investors have been making slow but steady inroads into European football recently, with consortiums snapping up 13 per cent of the City Football Group behind Manchester City and New York City FC, and another taking 20 per cent of UEFA Champions League finalists Atletico Madrid.
But it is their own state-funded Chinese Super League which has taken most of the headlines, as its clubs have been able to prise away high-profile European-based players such as Gervinho, Ramires, Jackson Martinez and Alex Teixeira—previously of AS Roma, Chelsea, Atletico Madrid and Shakhtar Donetsk respectively.
Plenty claimed that those players and others like them only moved to China for the money, but if some of that finance could make its way to one of Europe’s most-celebrated clubs, then perhaps the Chinese exodus wouldn’t be quite as dramatic.
Of course we’re not expecting to see the kind of wealth enjoyed by a whole league, but Berlusconi wouldn’t be selling what he calls “my Milan” to a consortium who would run it into the ground.
The former Italian Prime Minister might be many things, but he is certainly a determined, driven character, and he’d see this investment as crucial to taking Milan back to where they once belonged at the top table of European football. He wouldn’t be going ahead with it if he didn’t.
One of the key things about the investment is that the Chinese would be writing off the huge debts that the club have built up during the Berlusconi era, with Paul Nicholson from Inside World Football reporting that the club reported a loss of 93.5 million Euros last year, and that Berlusconi himself reckoned that he had pumped in over one billion Euros during his time in charge.
The the elite level that Milan used to operate at and would regard as their birthright needs more than just one man backing the club, and the Chinese investment would ensure that that wasn't the case.
In addition, with football booming China as mentioned above, this union would allow for Milan to gain an increased presence there.
Football academies could be set up to produce the next, or perhaps the first, Chinese superstar, with the club benefiting from that in a commercial sense just as they have with Japan's Keisuke Honda.
Berlusconi, who would of course have impeccable contacts within the football and business worlds, would surely have realised that this is the way the game is headed now, and although whilst he might have hoped for Milan to stay in Italian hands, he'll see that this move is a logical one.
As far as he is concerned all good things must come to an end, and Milan can look forward to a long and successful era in the hands of people who are now right at the cutting edge of the global game.
Just as they themselves used to be.
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