AC Milan CEO: U.S. Investment Is ‘Professionalizing’ Euro Soccer

AC Milan is coming soon to an MLB ballpark or NFL stadium near you. 

The 124-year-old Italian soccer club is on a glitzy U.S. tour this week, playing two friendlies in iconic U.S. sports venues and making time for star Christian Pulisic to swing by The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. 

On Saturday, AC Milan will play Manchester City in Yankee Stadium, and on July 31 the “Red and Blacks” will face rival Real Madrid at Soldier Field, home of the NFL’s Bears.

“Obviously the U.S. is a really important market for us,” said AC Milan CEO Giorgio Furlani in an interview with Front Office Sports in our New York studio. “America is the biggest sports market in the world, and we want to be relevant in this market.”

Before last year, when AC Milan did a similar tour on the West Coast, the team had not visited the U.S. for five years. In the near future, Furlani says, “I think we will come here often.” The U.S. is the club’s second-biggest market in the world, and almost 20% of its global jersey sales come from America.

Of course, AC Milan is hardly alone in its recent emphasis on growing in the U.S. Ten years ago, Bayern Munich became the first European soccer club to open a permanent office in New York, and a handful of rival teams followed suit. 

If you ask Furlani, it’s about more than the obvious aims of attracting new fans and building the brand: U.S. private investment is driving the trend. The list of non-American soccer teams now owned by U.S. family offices or private equity groups is long and ever-expanding.

Silvio Berlusconi sold AC Milan to Chinese investors in 2017 and later changed hands once more, to Elliott Management, before RedBird Capital Partners acquired the club in 2022. (RedBird IMI, of which RedBird Capital Partners is a joint venture partner, is an investor in Front Office Sports.) 

Growing Number of U.S. Investors

• Inter Milan: Oaktree Capital Management
• Liverpool: Fenway Sports Group (owners of the Red Sox and Pirates)
• Leeds United: 49ers Enterprises
• Arsenal: Stan Kroenke (owner of the L.A. Rams)
• Chelsea: Clearlake Capital and Todd Boehly (L.A. Dodgers part owner)
• Aston Villa: Group co-led by Wes Edens (Milwaukee Bucks owner)

Furlani says this trend is quietly prompting the professionalization of European clubs in myriad ways. European soccer, Furlani tells FOS, “is an industry that hasn’t really been professionalized over the last many decades.” 

Sophisticated U.S. investor groups have looked at these globally recognized soccer clubs, Furlani says, and “they see that they’re under-managed, under-invested, not professionalized; it’s a very closed system. So there’s a gigantic opportunity to professionalize the industry, leagues, and teams, and grow the value in a similar way to what has happened in American sports.”

AC Milan rival Real Madrid is an exception to the trend: It’s fan-owned by its club members, called “socios.” And after spending $2 billion on stadium upgrades to add a retractable roof and turf, Real Madrid set a single-season revenue record last year for any professional team: $1.16 billion. In the U.S., only the NFL’s Cowboys have topped $1 billion. 

AC Milan, which last year had revenue of around $423 million, is well aware of Real Madrid’s achievement. “We look at what they’ve been able to do, and we look at that as a target,” says Furlani, who notes AC Milan has now had two consecutive years of profitability after decades of losing money. “There’s no underlying reason we cannot get there, but we are very far from that. Which means there’s a great upside for us to achieve.”