Milan CEO Giorgio Furlani on battling Premier League spending and the future of San Siro

May 20, 2024

Giorgio Furlani had left Milan, but Milan had never left him. He was in Salamanca studying abroad, working on his language skills when Milan last played Inter in the Champions League semi-finals.

He found a bar, ordered a glass of something cold — probably a Chupito (a shot) — and watched Andriy Shevchenko score the away goal that decided the tie and sent Milan to a Champions League final.

“Spanish came in handy that night — and in 2007,” Furlani laughs. “I was in the Atacama desert in Chile looking for a place with a TV. I couldn’t miss Milan-Liverpool.”

Little did he know that 20 years later, he’d be CEO of the club he supported as a boy and Milan would be on the cusp of another final.

Furlani grew up in the neighbourhood around Milan’s grandiose Stazione Centrale. He attended the same school as Silvio Berlusconi (at different times, of course) and was a season ticket holder at San Siro during the Fabio Capello years.

It was the age of the Invincibles, when Milan went a whole season undefeated (a record 58 games in total) and upset Johan Cruyff’s Barcelona — aka the Dream Team — 4-0 in the Champions League final. Milan’s CEO at the time, Adriano Galliani, famously took the Champions League trophy to bed with him in Athens. One of his iconic mustard-coloured ties is now encased in the museum at Milan’s Casa Milan offices.

A young Furlani could never have imagined Galliani’s job would one day be his. “People say being the CEO of the club you support must be the dream job,” he winks. “I always said: ‘Look, the dream job was striker’.” After all, he grew up watching Ballon d’Or winners play the position like Marco van Basten, Jean Pierre-Papin, George Weah and Shevchenko.

Milan won 29 trophies during Galliani’s time (Photo: Filippo Monteforte/AFP via Getty Images)

All jokes aside, Furlani adds: “It’s very special and a bit hard to describe. It’s an honour and a responsibility.” A call-up to serve his people, il popolo rossonero. Furlani could not turn it down. Besides, arguably nobody knew the inner workings of the club better than him.

Furlani worked for Elliott, the hedge fund that rescued Milan from insolvency in 2018 when the mysterious Chinese businessman Li Yonghong defaulted on his debt. “The situation was catastrophic,” Furlani recalls. Without intervention, Milan could have suffered the same fate as Parma, Fiorentina and Napoli who were all, at one stage in their lives, wound up and forced to start over in the lower rungs of Italian football.

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The structure put in place with Ivan Gazidis as CEO, club legend Paolo Maldini as technical director, Geoffrey Moncada as chief scout and Casper Stylsvig as chief revenue officer fixed up the club and made Milan Milan again.

“Historically,” Furlani observes, “football is an industry of emotional decisions, driven by instinct. ‘What are the media saying? What do the fans want?’. Clubs have tended to follow that instinct and then backwards-rationalise it, creating a logic for it when the logic isn’t sound.”

Milan endeavoured to do the opposite, incorporating data and analytics into recruitment, trusting their numbers and acumen over sentiment and adrenaline. It meant taking tough decisions and trusting the processes put in place.

In 2021, instead of re-signing goalkeeper and boyhood Milan fan Gigio Donnarumma, who they inherited as the highest-paid player in Serie A, Milan decided against doubling his wages and backed the recruitment department to find better value instead. Milan let Donnarumma go to Paris Saint-Germain to the astonishment of the local media in Italy. The consternation only grew when, later that summer, Donnarumma was Italy’s penalty shootout hero, winning the Euros and the award for Player of the Tournament.

But Milan were comfortable with the decision they made. They had already replaced Donnarumma with Mike Maignan from Lille for a fraction of the signing-on fee, not to mention the salary, that Donnarumma’s entourage demanded. To say it worked out is an understatement. Maignan played a pivotal role in Milan’s first Scudetto since 2011, not to mention their current Champions League run. He now has a case to be considered the best in the world in his position.

As a deal, it exemplifies what Milan are all about.

Counter-intuitively, they became champions despite cutting the wage bill by 20 per cent and a net spend of only €75million. “Elliott did what they’re great at, which is the turnaround phase,” Furlani says. It’s why the fund felt it would be a good partner either for the Glazer family or one of the bidders for Manchester United.

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RedBird Capital bought Milan for €1.2billion last summer and took the opposite approach of Clearlake Capital and Todd Boehly at Chelsea. They could have thought: “We know better. We’ll take it from here”. After all, RedBird are investors in Liverpool’s ownership group Fenway Sports Group and developed the confidence to take on a club as big as Milan by running Toulouse, who earned promotion to Ligue 1 in the same year as Milan’s Scudetto.

But rather than radically change everything, RedBird liked what they bought and settled on continuity. Gerry Cardinale, RedBird’s founder, retained the senior leadership team, including Maldini, and when Gazidis departed at the end of his deal, Furlani came forward for the role of CEO. He left Elliott to lead the “growth phase” at Milan. “RedBird are a serial investor in media, sports and entertainment,” Furlani explains. “The convergence of these three things can take the club to the next level.”

On the pitch, Milan have already made another breakthrough. They are in the Champions League semi-finals for the first time in 16 years and Serie A seems in the midst of a renaissance. “Cousins” Inter lie between them and the final in Istanbul. An all-Italian final in the Europa League between Juventus and Roma is a possibility and Fiorentina are only a couple of games away from the Conference League final.

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On the face of it, Serie A hasn’t been this well represented this late across three UEFA competitions since 1991, but the league can’t get complacent. There’s still a lot of work to do. “As a starting point, the Premier League’s media rights are three times what Serie A’s are,” Furlani observes.

This is why casual fans look at Milan’s and Napoli’s recent title-winning teams and expect them to be broken up by economic forces exerting a gravitational pull towards the Premier League, which is effectively a Super League by another name.

Manchester City may be the only semi-finalist from England this season, but four of the last five finals have featured a team from the Premier League. Two of them have been all-English affairs. Money may not kick a ball around, but it does make a hell of a difference.

“Milan gets out-bid by Bournemouth, Leeds, Brighton and Brentford,” Furlani says, “rather than by Man City and Man United. That’s the reality and that economic power is largely fuelled by broadcasting rights.”

Until it changes, Milan have to be smarter about getting to players before the competition, as they did with Pierre Kalulu, who they signed from Lyon for a compensation fee of less than €500,000 before the French defender had made a first-team appearance. They also have to lean into the club’s history and prestige, which is why Belgium midfielder Charles De Ketelaere chose Milan last summer despite Leeds offering Club Bruges more money.

In order to catch up, Serie A has to help its clubs out. It’s why the biggest showdown in Italian football in May isn’t Wednesday’s Euroderby in the Champions League — it’s the next Serie A TV rights tender, which the league’s chief executive, Luigi De Siervo, has described as “the most difficult ever”.

Serie A’s principal broadcast partner in Italy, DAZN, has been losing a billion a year since its launch in 2016. Sky have extended their coverage of the Champions League, which is a problem for Serie A as a new expanded format for Europe’s top club competition (47 per cent more games will be played from 2024) means even more of Sky’s budget is going to UEFA.

Undermining the whole process is piracy. “It’s a huge problem in Italy,” Furlani says. The league estimates the damage to be worth a billion over the course of the last rights cycle and hopes a new anti-piracy law will soon be passed to protect the value of its content and rights holders.

To maximise its latent potential, Serie A needs to strike while the iron is hot. The league is banging the drum that “calcio is back” on the evidence of one exceptional season in Europe and Serie A having four different champions in four years. The rights can be sold for longer this time, too — five seasons instead of three — giving broadcasters more time to develop and retain an audience.

(Photo: Isabella Bonotto/AFP via Getty Images)

The aim is to bounce back and avoid another contraction like the 12 per cent decrease at the last auction. Otherwise, Serie A’s disparity with the Premier League will only get bigger. There’s a lot riding on the new TV deal, but it isn’t a silver bullet.

“It’s not the only thing,” Furlani adds. “The other issue is stadiums.”

They make Milan’s veteran striker Zlatan Ibrahimovic look like a baby. Many of them were built for the 1938 World Cup. The average age, which falls thanks to Juventus’ Allianz Stadium, Udinese’s remodelled Dacia Arena and new-builds like promoted Frosinone’s Stadio Benito Stirpe, is still over 75.

In Milan’s case, San Siro will celebrate its centenary in two years’ time. “How you think about a stadium, a matchday and construction techniques is different now than it was then,” Furlani says.

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Clubs in Italy are limited in how much money they can make from the places they call home. As if the broadcast gap wasn’t already big enough, Premier League teams make another three times more in matchday revenue than their counterparts in Serie A.

The best way to think about this is what a club like Milan leaves on the table by staying at San Siro in its existing structure. When benchmarked against the teams Milan measures itself against in Europe, the figure oscillates between €60m and €70m in missed revenue every year. Looking at last summer’s transfer window, that’s roughly the cost of one Erling Haaland. Upgrading stadia is a matter of urgency, particularly with Barcelona and Real Madrid modernising the Camp Nou and Santiago Bernabeu, grounds that already rake in more than €100m every year.

“A colleague sent me a presentation from 2018 the other day,” Furlani says. “It said that in 2022, we’ll be playing in a new stadium. It was ambitious, but by 2023, we thought we would be and I haven’t seen a single brick. That’s kind of crazy. You look back and think: ‘Four years! That’s a long time’.”

Not in Italy, it isn’t. One insight from a PricewaterhouseCoopers study claims it takes eight to 10 years for a new stadium to open in Italy compared to two to three years in the rest of Europe.

“This is a very Italian problem,” Furlani says. “In Spain, they build stadiums. In France, they build stadiums. In Portugal, they build stadiums. In Turkey, they build stadiums. Italy needs to figure out how it can make stadiums happen.”

San Siro was opened in 1926 (Photo: Catherine Ivill/Getty Images)

The Italian Football Federation has bid to host the Euros in 2032 and the promotion of its president Gabriele Gravina to vice-president of UEFA hints at growing political clout. Yet Serie A can’t afford to wait another 10 years. Government legislation designed to facilitate the construction of new infrastructure has not had the desired effect.

“There’s a stadium law,” Furlani explains. “The point of it is that if you’re stuck, there’s a way to accelerate and cut through the red tape, but it doesn’t work.” To date, no blacksmith has been able to forge a machete big enough to cut through Italy’s jungle of red tape. It frustrates Furlani just as it exasperates Fiorentina’s owner, Rocco Commisso, not to mention former Roma owner Jim Pallotta, who spent nearly a decade trying to build a new stadium in Italy’s capital before cashing out in disillusionment.

“There are a number of ownership groups willing to invest money,” Furlani adds. “It’s normally foreign ownership groups, so it’s foreign capital. That’s money coming into the country for development, infrastructure, job creation, GDP, branding — and effectively, what the system is saying is: ‘We don’t want your money’. It’s crazy.”

Projects are mummified and talked about by politicians who want to make a name for themselves. Parole, Parole, Parole, as Mina sang, but talk isn’t cheap in Italy. It’s costing clubs money and competitiveness and makes little sense when a firm like RedBird has a track record of delivering world-class facilities like the Dallas Cowboys’ AT&T Stadium and Yankee Stadium in New York.

As for Milan’s own plans, Furlani says: “All options are being evaluated, including the old San Siro, which is an open process. It’s not dead.”

Milan have spent the past four years working with Inter on a plan to redevelop the existing site. However, the pandemic and mayoral elections have caused it to move at a glacial pace and, frankly, that’s a disservice to glaciers considering global warming is causing them to move faster than ever before.

To an outsider, the existing project known as La Cattedrale looks challenging to pull off. Next year, San Siro will become a listed building as it’ll be 70 years since major works were last completed. Vittorio Sgarbi, an art critic and undersecretary in the Ministry of Culture, is arguing that, on that basis, it can’t even partially be knocked down.

Then, there’s the Winter Olympics in 2026. Milan and Cortina are co-hosting the event and San Siro has been designated as the venue for the opening ceremony. It’s hard to imagine the IOC letting it take place next to a building site. Inter are also in the midst of a sale process and could be under new ownership in the near future if the investment bank Raine manages to find a buyer. The uncertainty has led Milan to look around and consider going it alone.

The sooner Milan are playing in a modern stadium, the more money it can make, which in turn leads to a bigger transfer budget and makes it easier for them to retain players like Rafael Leao. Talks regarding a new deal have been led by Furlani, who continues to work on finding an agreement.

After exceeding expectations in Serie A last season, Milan have repeated the trick in the Champions League this time around. The club’s aura, which Furlani helped reactivate, is sparkling at the kind of intensity last seen in 2007. But their run in Europe has exposed some shallow squad depth in the league, where Stefano Pioli’s team are currently fifth and last week’s 1-1 draw with Cremonese threatens to be a source of regret at the end of the campaign.

FiveThirtyEight’s prediction model gives Milan a 46 per cent chance of making the top four with four games to go. Otherwise, they will need to win the Champions League in Istanbul — yes, Istanbul of all places — in order to qualify. The alternative is the Europa League, a competition for which RedBird’s other club, Toulouse, qualified after obliterating Nantes 5-1 in the Coupe de France final last month.

Multi-club ownership groups have increased fivefold in the last decade, raising concerns about the sporting integrity of UEFA’s competitions. To give one example out of a possible 180, PSG are owned by Qatar Sports Investments (QSi) and presided over by ECA chief, UEFA executive committee member and anti-Super Leaguer Nasser Al-Khelaifi. QSI have a minority stake in Braga, who may play Champions League football next year if they make it through the preliminaries.

Aleksander Ceferin, the UEFA president who was recently re-elected unopposed, has softened his stance on the trend, telling Gary Neville on the Overlap podcast: “We shouldn’t just say no (to) the investments.”

Elaborating on RedBird’s structure, Furlani insists Milan are “operated completely independently” of Toulouse. “There’s no common knowledge-sharing, no working groups,” he adds. Dialogue with UEFA is open and transparent.

Furlani’s mind is instead focused on Milan and Wednesday’s Euroderby. Rolling back the years, he dusts off some of his favourite Madonnina memories. The unexpected heroes. He can see “Cosmin Contra’s amazing goal in the 4-2 in 2002” as if it were yesterday. “Left foot. Top corner.” But one derby above all others stands out. “The 3-2 in 2004, when we were 2-0 down at half-time and then (Jon Dahl) Tomasson, Kaka, (Clarence) Seedorf. We went on to win the league that season.”

Milan were already champions of Europe at the time and Furlani’s aspiration is that one day, maybe sooner than anyone thinks, Milan will be able to call themselves that all over again.

(Top photo: Milan CEO Giorgio Furlani; Photo: AC Milan)

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