Cardinale: "Italian football used to be what the Premier League is today"

Milan owner and RedBird founder Gerry Cardinale was a guest at the Bloomberg forum in recent days, where he spoke about his next steps in sports. Below are his statements, as relayed via Milan News: If you could buy a sports team today, which one would it be?

Regardless of the money, what would be the best asset? Maybe it's an obvious choice, but I'd sayMilan.

It's one of the most important cities in Europe, and hugely important in the fashion industry. They are the New York Yankees of Italian football, and Italian football used to be what the Premier League is today.

My investment strategy is to go where there is something to 'fix' and fix it, accelerating the process to bring them back to where they were before. European football is a huge opportunity.

I think that, today, everything in America is terribly overpriced. Cardinale added: "The challenge in Europe is that they don't particularly like entertainment; when it comes to sport, they don't accept compromises.

What I am trying to explain in Europe is that entertainment is needed to finance sport. We have bought San Siro, the iconic stadium in Milan, and we will build another venue with a capacity of 80,000 spectators.

Then we hope to bring an NBA team to Milan and build an NBA arena. We will create a Milanese sports and entertainment platform, which should accelerate the growth of Italian football and bring it to levels similar to those of the Premier League."