The former manager of Milan, Inter, Juve and Napoli, Marco Fassone, gave a long interview to Tuttosport in which he analyzed the moment of world football.
NEWCASTLE AS CITY AND PSG – “In Europe we have already seen the parable of Manchester City and Paris Saint-Germain, that is, clubs that had not won in their respective leagues for a very long time and, after being acquired by very rich Middle Eastern state properties, were transformed into perfect “football machines” thanks to the enormous possibilities of injecting money. A similar thing happened in Newcastle, the surprise is rather the fact that they did so quickly to bring the team back to the top. This is because the Arabs have probably metabolised some “youthful mistakes” made by those who arrived before them and for this reason, despite injecting a lot of money, they did not make a transfer of stars but took functional and prospective players”.
ARABIA – “The plan of the country Arabia is much clearer and less nebulous than, for example, that of China. The aim is to transform a country isolated politically and touristically into a nation “friendly” towards the Western world and has identified sport as one of the vectors for Having said that, it was explained to me by them that the fact that the four clubs are owned by the State is a way of creating a useful synergy to transport a certain number of coaches and players from Europe with the idea of building a strong local football that can compete with Western football in the future”.
TONALI SHOT – “In the first years, certainly yes. At the moment they have no pressure as a club from an economic point of view as they have an almost unlimited budget and can therefore invest what they want with the aim of bringing all the best talents there. But not the ones who have arrived, unless they are very big names like Cristiano Ronaldo, but players who can express themselves at the top for at least 4-5 years. This project, in the Government’s mind, is not unlimited, therefore it will not always be a celebration: the chosen mechanism has been judged as the fastest way to raise the level of competitiveness of their championship. Then, in a second phase, the clubs will have to have sustainability, given by the increase in sponsorships and television rights whose revenues are non-existent today. They, in the long game, they want to imitate our model of playing football.”
THE END OF FOOTBALL? – “It seems to me to be an apocalyptic and wrong scenario. On the contrary, fortunately, we have found a player, which is Arabia, which has decided to invest part of its wealth in the football system, injecting a lot of fresh money into a system, that of European football, which no longer had great margins for growth, as underlined several times by Andrea Agnelli in his many battles. The fifteen-sixteen big clubs in Europe, including the Italian ones, will get rich thanks to Arab money. And this will allow them to improve the things that don’t work, for example, as far as our country is concerned, the infrastructure. As long as we don’t repeat the mistakes made when, at the time, money rained in from TV rights…”.
US FUNDS – “The big American funds, in some cases even the big families, are looking at European football with interest because the costs of the American franchises, including the MLS, are very high. In Europe, however, they find clubs, even important ones, at prices, comparing the costs, extremely favourable. This is even more true in Italy where we are still very behind in terms of infrastructure and therefore there is even more opportunity to do business. In this sense, the Milan case is emblematic”.
