[Jack Sparrow]

Just some tidbits that popped up on Football-Italia.

Reports say Silvio Berlusconi has agreed to sell Milan to a Chinese group of investors for €700m.

Tuttosport writes today that Berlusconi has accepted the offer to sell the Rossoneri after a long and intense series of negotiations.

The talks were concluded at a law firm in Rome according to the newspaper, who believe that a preliminary agreement will be signed between Friday and Monday.

There were reports this morning that Jack Ma is leading the Chinese group, but the official identity of the investors is still unknown.

Tuttosport believes that Robin Li, the sixth most powerful man in China according to Forbes, is also a possible investor.

The group will take over 100 per cent of the club’s shares, an initial 70 per cent and then the further 30 per cent over the course of a year.

The Chinese bidders put between €700-720m on the table to buy the San Siro giants, says the report.

The phase of due diligence, where the club’s accounts are analysed, was completed last week according to the paper.

Jack Ma, China’s richest man, is reportedly leading the group interested in Milan and he wants to build a new stadium.

La Repubblica reports today that Ma, founder of the Alibaba group and co-owner of Chinese club Guangzhou Evergrande, is heading the group that are in talks to take over the Rossoneri.

The investors from Peking should get a reply from President Silvio Berlusconi before the end of the week about whether they can enter exclusive negotiations.

If they get the go-ahead, the analysis of Milan’s accounts will begin which could be concluded quite quickly.

Therefore the outlet writes that if everything goes smoothly, a deal could be signed off by mid-June.

One of Ma’s first projects would be to build a new stadium owned by the club, says the report.

Another change that could take place would be the insertion of former Guangzhou Coach Marcello Lippi as technical director, according to the newspaper.

Ma’s Alibaba group includes Taobao (the Chinese Ebay), Aliplay (an electronic payment system), Weibo (the Chinese Twitter) and Alibaba pictures ($3m of investment in the film industry.)

According to Forbes magazine he has an estimated net worth of $24.1 billion and is the 18th richest person in the world.

Milan’s holding company Fininvest has reportedly denied that Silvio Berlusconi has sold the club for €700m.

Reports emerged today that the Rossoneri owner had agreed to sell the club to a group of Chinese investors, possibly led by billionaire Jack Ma.

However, Milan News has reported that they have received a communication from Fininvest denying the rumours that a sale had taken place.

Pier Silvio Berlusconi, son of the Diavolo chief, has also denied any knowledge of a sale taking place today.

More than the takeover going through, I'm interested to see who they bring in as staff. I would be really interested to see how this works out.

[han2503]

I actually think the opposite. Surprisingly. I think Galliani is a good negotiator for a rich club.

That's what I used to think. I thought Galliani was the poor front man who didn't have the resources so he fudged along and begged around for old past it star players.

And let's face it, he's been making terrible decisions for a while now, forget about last summer. How can you explain all the lavish contracts he gave to players who were too old and past it? Players who they had absolutely no clue about (Traore anyone??), players who other clubs still wouldn't have taken on even if we paid them to do it. Player who were happy to sit on their @sses with us because of the previously mentioned huge salaries given to them because Galliani scavenged them for free.

Now let's get back to last summer, as Filippo said, once again, the focus was on the attack while our terrible midfield was left as is with only the addition of a player who had a decent season at Genoa (forget about his price tag for now which is another issue altogether) How many summers can we go through this now, and I blame the fetish for attackers on Silvio, don't get me wrong there, but every summer we have to go through this and we're still paying for those decisions to this day. Let's not forget that Matri will be coming back from his loan. Let's all remember and cry over that one now. How we finance Juve's move for Tevez by taking that lump off their hands and paying them good money for him as well while once again we were told there was no money to fix the midfield.

Let's also not forget all the favours we've done for Genoa and all the other close friends of Galliani's

It's just ridiculous at this point. The amount of mistakes done by this man to bring us to this dire position we're now in is simply a tragic notion to even comprehend.

This man cannot be allowed to run things any longer simply as that really. And if this sale goes through, the first thing on the agenda should be to get the man out of the way ASAP!

Except for Bertolacci all the other transfers were good I thought.

Alex has been good.
Romagnoli has been good.
Antonelli has been good.
Bacca has been good if not spectacular.
Kucka has been a steal.
Bringing back Niang helped a lot. And loaning him out was a wise decision.
Balotelli - was weird. He was injured and then in and out of the team. He never got a consistent run. But it cost us very little.
Luiz Adriano was a coach's decision but he was all of 8 million.

Now Bertolacci - that was the biggest flop. But c'mon. Who saw that coming? I was really excited to see him join. Thought him with Montolivo would finally sort out our midfield. But who knew he was such a mentally weak player.

Alex, came the season before, sure he was good this season after spending the previous one injured for the majority of it.
Romagnoli was great and he's one of my few beacons of light in this team. And we can also fully thank Miha for this one as he's the one who pushed hard for him. Let's not give Galliani credit for unearthing a talent here when he had nothing to do with selecting him.
Again, Antonelli wasn't brought in last summer, but again, just like Alex he was simply an opportunistic move from Galliani. Let's not attribute it as some masterstroke that should be repeated in FM for years to come, it could just as easily have gone down the same roads as Mesbah, Taiwo, etc
Bacca... The man is good, but he's 30 years old and imo we overpaid. Not to mention we brought in a striker that's reliant on service to be really effective and left him with basically no midfield behind him. The goal tally is a testament to how good Bacca is, but if a decent offer came for him this summer and we manage to make a profit (highly unlikely) I'd take it and look for someone with different characteristics in attack
Kucka... Don't get me started. Sure he can be mildly impressive when he's bulldozing his way around, but his end product shows how limited he is in general as a midfielder. Had we had Witsel instead of this muppit we would have seen a more dominant midfield throughout the season which could have really helped us out
Niang... Don't want to get into that one
Balo... Same thing, Galliani just never learns his lesson. And don't get me wrong here I like Balo very much, but at this point Milan clearly is not the right environment for him to flourish or to get over his issues

It's not just about the individuals. It's (once again) completely misdirecting our priorities.

We splashed almost 50% of our budget on strikers: in the end, only Bacca justified the signing, while we virtually had Adriano and Balotelli doing little to nothing. We entered this season with one or even two strikers too many (Niang, Menez, Adriano, Bacca, Balo), once again disregarded the importance of a proper midfield, overpaying Bertolacci.

Agreed

Once again, I disagree. We knew that Menez would be unavailable till winter at least. We were supposed to play with 2 strikers - even remember Mihajlovic claiming that 4-3-1-2 is the best formation for this team (he got that wrong!) and so for a 2 striker formation we had 4 fit strikers on our roster. Which is not excessive at all.

Balotelli's injury, Niang's freak accident - how do you expect a director to figure this out when making a transfer?

Bertolacci - you say we overpaid for him? But this is based on his performance right? I didn't see that performance coming. I honestly believed he was exactly what our midfield needed. A creative player with good passing ability. He failed. C'est la vie.

Do you think we overpaid for Romagnoli as well? Every team has flops. Man Utd has a Fellaini , Depay and a Falcao. Atletico has a Jackson Martinez. Inter had a Kondgobia , a Jovetic and so on.

We had one bad transfer.

As for our transfer priorities, if we keep changing coach every time Silvio farts, what do you expect?

Bertolacci I'm guessing will be given one more season. Which seems fair. He can't complain he wasn't given a fair run. I just hope the new coach will be sensible enough to make a quick decision on him.

I could have told you how sh!t the Berto transfer was from day 1 man, the man is clearly weak, both in mind and body. He was never going to be good enough to justify that kind of price tag and tbh, now that the season is over I'm even surprised that he turned out worse than I expected.

And it's not simply about seeing which player didn't justify his price tag so we quantify the transfer window as that one bad transfer. You have to look at the entire picture and simply ask, were the transfers we made good enough to improve the team from last season? And you compare that to the kind of money we spent... A jump of 3 places from 10th to 7th after spending nearly a 100m says it all for me. The true problems of the squad imo were not addressed and that is why it was a terrible transfer season. At least before we could at least fall back on the old excuse that there was no money. But after a 100m? And still this pitiful side is presented to us to endure another terrible season? No, just unacceptable from Galliani

I get your angle, but I'm not quite with you on this.

All in all it's a mess. Thing is, people here at MF (Han, X-O) knew we overpaid him the moment we signed him. Hell, I even felt it deep down, because let's face it, the man didn't exactly warranted his signing fee with last season. He was good in a small team, but nowhere near as good as we made him appear.

You say miscalculations happen. But we're not United or Atletico. The thing is, those clubs splash much more money then we do, they make 5 superb and 1 lousy choice (United maybe not so much lately) and they have still more resources.

We're a limited club, perhaps spending 20M on someone who's actually worth the money or less for a bigger talent would have been logical, no?

Adriano was a completely needless signing. I'm not sure if Miha wanted him or not. At that point, we could have kept SES or brought back Ganz, Petagna or whoever we have on our radar.

My bottom line is: if a team with limited resources decides to break the bank and spent more then usual, it should be done wisely and carefully. If we had problems for the past 2 years, we should have located them with more precision and made our team more compact, more balanced. How do you explain us having 4 center-backs competing for 2 spots? Or starting the season with Noce, NdJ, Kucka and Poli all in for one or maybe two spots? While at the same time other positions show great deficiencies.

And don't get me started with the completely useless yet typical tactic of signing players like Balotelli, Boateng, etc. Getting rid of the "last years mistakes" only to fill up the roster with new ones...

Yep

We didn't finish 15th, but we finished 7th. Last year we finished 10h. Two years ago we finished 7th again. What are you saying, that this isn't a disgrace? That we should just brush it off as just "not good enough". I'm sorry, but I was raised with a different mentality, the Milan mentality. Every season it was title and Champions League. Every season. Now we can't even qualify for the UEFA Cup. It's simply tragic. There are no other adjectives.

Agreed there

[Forza Milan!]

That's what I used to think. I thought Galliani was the poor front man who didn't have the resources so he fudged along and begged around for old past it star players.

And let's face it, he's been making terrible decisions for a while now, forget about last summer. How can you explain all the lavish contracts he gave to players who were too old and past it? Players who they had absolutely no clue about (Traore anyone??), players who other clubs still wouldn't have taken on even if we paid them to do it. Player who were happy to sit on their @sses with us because of the previously mentioned huge salaries given to them because Galliani scavenged them for free.

Now let's get back to last summer, as Filippo said, once again, the focus was on the attack while our terrible midfield was left as is with only the addition of a player who had a decent season at Genoa (forget about his price tag for now which is another issue altogether) How many summers can we go through this now, and I blame the fetish for attackers on Silvio, don't get me wrong there, but every summer we have to go through this and we're still paying for those decisions to this day. Let's not forget that Matri will be coming back from his loan. Let's all remember and cry over that one now. How we finance Juve's move for Tevez by taking that lump off their hands and paying them good money for him as well while once again we were told there was no money to fix the midfield.

Let's also not forget all the favours we've done for Genoa and all the other close friends of Galliani's

It's just ridiculous at this point. The amount of mistakes done by this man to bring us to this dire position we're now in is simply a tragic notion to even comprehend.

This man cannot be allowed to run things any longer simply as that really. And if this sale goes through, the first thing on the agenda should be to get the man out of the way ASAP!


Alex, came the season before, sure he was good this season after spending the previous one injured for the majority of it.
Romagnoli was great and he's one of my few beacons of light in this team. And we can also fully thank Miha for this one as he's the one who pushed hard for him. Let's not give Galliani credit for unearthing a talent here when he had nothing to do with selecting him.
Again, Antonelli wasn't brought in last summer, but again, just like Alex he was simply an opportunistic move from Galliani. Let's not attribute it as some masterstroke that should be repeated in FM for years to come, it could just as easily have gone down the same roads as Mesbah, Taiwo, etc
Bacca... The man is good, but he's 30 years old and imo we overpaid. Not to mention we brought in a striker that's reliant on service to be really effective and left him with basically no midfield behind him. The goal tally is a testament to how good Bacca is, but if a decent offer came for him this summer and we manage to make a profit (highly unlikely) I'd take it and look for someone with different characteristics in attack
Kucka... Don't get me started. Sure he can be mildly impressive when he's bulldozing his way around, but his end product shows how limited he is in general as a midfielder. Had we had Witsel instead of this muppit we would have seen a more dominant midfield throughout the season which could have really helped us out
Niang... Don't want to get into that one
Balo... Same thing, Galliani just never learns his lesson. And don't get me wrong here I like Balo very much, but at this point Milan clearly is not the right environment for him to flourish or to get over his issues


Agreed


I could have told you how sh!t the Berto transfer was from day 1 man, the man is clearly weak, both in mind and body. He was never going to be good enough to justify that kind of price tag and tbh, now that the season is over I'm even surprised that he turned out worse than I expected.

And it's not simply about seeing which player didn't justify his price tag so we quantify the transfer window as that one bad transfer. You have to look at the entire picture and simply ask, were the transfers we made good enough to improve the team from last season? And you compare that to the kind of money we spent... A jump of 3 places from 10th to 7th after spending nearly a 100m says it all for me. The true problems of the squad imo were not addressed and that is why it was a terrible transfer season. At least before we could at least fall back on the old excuse that there was no money. But after a 100m? And still this pitiful side is presented to us to endure another terrible season? No, just unacceptable from Galliani


Yep


Agreed there

Have to agree with pretty much everything you said, Han.

Galliani used to be reasonably good, but he is way past his better days. Last decade has been going from bad to worse, starting with the ridiculous deals made with players after our CL win, and ending with (most of) 100M flushed down the toilet (with many sad chapters in between). And (as has already been said) it is not so much the individual decisions, but the "big picture": consistently investing in the wrong places, expense levels that are well past unreasonable (reference recent stockholder meeting), laughable coach selections, endless "bickering" between Galliani + Barbara + Silvio, no new stadium, and so on. All of this spells M-I-S-M-A-N-A-G-E-M-E-N-T.

At this point I am hoping that the sale goes through (sadly not a done deal IMHO), Berlu gets relegated to a "PR role" (or removed entirely), and Galliani is gone for good. Unless that happens, I fear the downward spiral will continue, and we may start looking at 7th place as "success". FWIW, the alternative proposed by Berlu (an "Italian Milan") could have potential, but with our current inept management it is not going to end well IMHO. With Inter now well-funded again, we risk becoming "the other team" in Milano (kind of like Torino has been for some time).

[han2503]

FWIW, the alternative proposed by Berlu (an "Italian Milan") could have potential, but with our current inept management it is not going to end well IMHO.

Sorry, have to disagree with this bit. And this coming from an Azzurri fan. The talent pool in Italy is simply not good enough atm, not if we want to truly be successful. And the only real top class Italian player around atm is in France.

Sure there are the Juve guys but aside from Marchisio, they're all getting a bit long in the tooth.

The Italian Milan idea is a terrible one imo, and just shows how out of touch Silvio is

[Forza Milan!]

Sorry, have to disagree with this bit. And this coming from an Azzurri fan. The talent pool in Italy is simply not good enough atm, not if we want to truly be successful. And the only real top class Italian player around atm is in France.

Sure there are the Juve guys but aside from Marchisio, they're all getting a bit long in the tooth.

The Italian Milan idea is a terrible one imo, and just shows how out of touch Silvio is

I believe that the idea is to look for "new talent" rather than established players. But it does not matter, even if Italy was full of talent you need a capable management team for something like this to work.

[han2503]

I believe that the idea is to look for "new talent" rather than established players. But it does not matter, even if Italy was full of talent you need a capable management team for something like this to work.

Well, that's part of the problem in and of itself, I don't see all that many young players coming through who are good enough to be starters in a Serie A side.

And personally I don't think the infrastructure is really there to really start producing players in a similar way that countries like Germany, Belgium, Spain and France do. And this is not just at Milan but at the nation as a whole