AC Milan owner Gerry Cardinale has taken aim at private equity firms that are placing their money in sports but making no effort to improve the ecosystem in which they now exist.
Speaking on stage at the IMG x RedBird Summit on Wednesday (via Financial Times), the RedBird Capital Group owner explained that people are parking their money in the sector and leaving it there, rather than actively trying to achieve or create change.
“This is about my crowd coming into sports. The problem with my crowd is they are asset managers. They just want to buy stuff, and that’s not great for intellectual property based businesses,” he said.
There has been a huge amount of investment in different sports and leagues in recent years from businesspeople who see it as a quick way to make money and gain positive brand repetition.
Cardinale claims that these people are too often asking investors to pay “control premium valuations for minority stakes with no governance, no information rights and no exit”.
“What do [the private equity players] bring? They bring liquidity, but there’s a better way of doing it. We’re going to need to soft land this because right now it’s massively inflated,” he said.
“The reason why there’s this demand for sports exposure is because of these facile notions that sports always goes up. It’s not correlated to the macro, it’s outperformed the S&P for the last decade. There’s merit to those arguments, but they’ve just peddling that now and everybody wants exposure to it.”
Clearly Cardinale thinks that he and RedBird are different to the crowd that he is talking about and the reasoning is that he has a genuine interest and desire to bring Milan back to where they were in the past.
“What I’m trying to do there is bring what I’ve learned over 30 years in America to European football. There’s a huge opportunity to return AC Milan back to where it was,” he said.
