The day after the derby victory, the founder of RedBird and owner of Milan, Gerry Cardinale, spoke in New York at the event ‘Italian Sports Day in the World. Many topics were addressed by the number one of the Rossoneri club during the debate focused on the growth of Serie A: “Today when you talk about football globally and you think about the highest quality, you talk about England, about the Premier League. And one of the things I would like to do as an administrator of Milan and as a participant in Serie A is to work with it and with all the members of the Italian ecosystem to bring Italy back to what it was in terms of global European football. I think this is fundamental. I consider Serie A as one of Italy’s greatest exports”, his words reported by ‘Calcio&Finanza’.
For Cardinale, it is not possible to make the movement grow if everyone continues to look only at their own little garden. “If we only focus on winning games we won’t grow. We can’t do that if we don’t innovate, if we don’t change this paradigm throughout European football where there seems to be this implicit notion that you have to spend whatever it takes to win, as if there was a direct correlation between spending and winning.”
On the different concept that fans have of the clubs they support, this is Cardinale’s thought: “In America, the people who spend the money to buy the teams are the owners of the team. In Italy, I think the fans believe that the team is their property and we have a job to do to satisfy this concept.”
Then on the stadium issue: “What I’m trying to do, and I’m not getting much help in the Italian ecosystem, is a partnership between all the participants in the value chain: the fans, the local government, the national government, the capital to build our infrastructure. We have the Euros coming up in 2032. I’m trying to do a stadium in Milan.”
Finally, Cardinale was asked if he wanted to send a message to the fans. This was his answer: “My message to the fans doesn’t seem to be working, so I would say the message to the fans is that I’m not going to give you any message until we win. Because I understand that’s all you care about. But I’m going to do my job and we’re going to do everything we can to win. But win smart. And if I do that, we’re going to have longevity. And we’re going to help grow the entire ecosystem, which I think is our duty.”