Cardinale is an American sports entrepreneur connected to some of the biggest businesses in American sports.
Gerry Cardinale wants to bring an “American-like” soccer stadium to Milan, Italy that could seat 70,000 customers. That seems simple enough except Italian soccer has never been an expensive proposition. Sure Italian soccer wants well-heeled customers and gets them but there are also cheap seats for the average person with the 2023-24 Milan AC’s low-level season ticket prices starting around $270 US for 19 matches. But San Siro Stadium in Milan is 98-years old and its two Italian league soccer tenants, AC Milan and Inter, want either a new facility or two new facilities. There is money to be made in a new facility and renovations at the 98-year-old stadium that is owned by the city of Milan and rented out by both teams no longer makes business sense.
Cardinale owns the AC Milan franchise. But Cardinale is an American who does an awful lot of business in the American sports industry through his company Redbird Capital. Redbird Capital owns about 10 percent of Fenway Sports Group, the parent company of the Boston Red Sox, Pittsburgh Penguins and Liverpool FC franchises. The company has a partnership with the National Football League to distribute NFL Sunday Ticket to bars, restaurants, hotels and other commercial venues. The company owned the XFL and then merged with the United States Football League to form the United Football League. The company has a piece of the New York Yankees YES regional sports cable TV network. Cardinale is ready to not only change AC Milan but Italian soccer as well. “I’m going to create a company that’s going to build this stadium and then, frankly, I want to take that company and have it go build stadiums for all the other teams.” Italian soccer apparently cannot compete with other global soccer leagues because its present stadiums don’t produce enough revenue. Cardinale wants to change that.
San Siro Stadium
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