The Serie A Thread

[OneMoSalah 8,611]

Dybala’s assist for Chiesa’s goal was filthy. Good to see what a bit of invention in the final third looks like, have forgotten watching us.

[Vesper 27,283]

2020-21 Italian Serie A

Hellas Verona              
Juventus                      

http://www.sportnews.to/mysports/2021/serie-a-hellas-verona-vs-juventus-s2/#!

https://www.totalsportek.com/page-5/

[Vesper 27,283]

Suning’s Chinese Super League collapse and what it means for Inter Milan

https://theathletic.com/2425092/2021/03/04/sunings-chinese-super-league-collapse-and-what-it-means-for-inter-milan/

“I’m all for challenges and Inter is the toughest of my career,” Antonio Conte recently told Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera. As someone so closely identified with Juventus, going over to their biggest rivals and accepting the brief to end the dynasty he helped build wasn’t an easy decision. 

Then there’s the nature of Inter Milan itself. One of Conte’s mentors Giovanni Trapattoni thinks this team is different from all the others. He likened coaching Inter to being on a spin cycle in a washing machine. It’s turbulent and hard to maintain your balance because there’s always a sudden tremor ready to knock you off your feet. Rising above it all is hard. 

It’s why only the strongest characters win at Inter: Helenio Herrera, Trapattoni and Jose Mourinho. Now, after runners-up finishes in Serie A and the Europa League last season, Conte is closing in on Inter’s first scudetto since Mourinho’s treble in 2010. A team that finished 21 points behind Juventus before his arrival is now seven points ahead of them. Romelu Lukaku and Lautaro Martinez can’t stop scoring, Fabio Capello thinks Nicolo Barella is one of the top three midfielders in Europe and the defence is no longer conceding. Anyone who follows Conte on Instagram will have noticed how proud he is of the flowing football they’re playing at the moment. 

It feels like Inter’s year. But this is Inter and it’s never that simple. Not a day goes by without more gossip and speculation about the financial stress that owner Suning finds itself under in China.

“They aren’t destabilising,” said Inter’s chief executive Beppe Marotta. “This is a very tight-knit group. There’s been painstaking work in this respect from Conte and when the team stick together, even the biggest problems become small.” 

---

So what’s going on with Suning?

Well, the share price has halved in three years, COVID-19 hit its retail business hard, its property investments tanked, a rescue plan involving another of China’s biggest companies backfired, it has been forced to sell nearly a quarter of its publicly listed operation to the Chinese state and it has been told by the government to forget football and focus on footfall.

It has had better months.

Founded in 1990, Suning grew from flogging air-conditioning units in Nanjing to selling pretty much everything all over China. Under co-founder Zhang Jindong, the company became a conglomerate, diversifying into media, real estate, sport and technology, making him one of China’s richest men.

The core business changed its name to Suning.com in 2018 to signal a move towards online shopping. Signalling and doing are two different things, though. The company is still China’s largest bricks-and-mortar retailer with hundreds of stores, but it has slid out of the top four in terms of sales.

 

Suning’s headquarters in Nanjing (Photo: Fang Dongxu/VCG via Getty Images)

Zhang Jindong’s financial support for ailing Chinese property developer Evergrande has also been a millstone around Suning’s neck, as money it borrowed to prop up Evergrande has weighed heavily on the company.

For a time, it looked like a share-swap with Alibaba, the online giant owned by China’s most famous entrepreneur Jack Ma, might get Suning back on track but, first, the companies fell out, and then Ma ran into difficulties with the Chinese government. China is a big country but there is still only room for one boss and his name is president Xi Jinping.

This left Suning with nowhere to turn but towards two state-backed investment firms. They paid just over £1.6 billion for a 23 per cent stake in the business last month.

While interesting to Suning’s staff, customers and investors, none of this would have troubled the back pages of western newspapers if Suning and Zhang Jindong had not got involved in football.

In 2015, Suning bought Chinese Super League (CSL) team Jiangsu Guoxin-Sainty, renamed them Jiangsu Suning, handed them the company credit card so they could buy Brazilian stars Ramires and Alex Teixeira in one window, and then hired Fabio Capello as manager.

 

Ramires was a high-profile signing for Jiangsu from Chelsea (Photo: Visual China Group via Getty Images)

But that was just warming up for the 2016 purchase of a majority stake in Inter — £230 million-worth of luxury Italian goods.

And then, to tie it all together, Suning went on a shopping spree for PPTV, the streaming service it had bought in 2013, hoovering up live rights to domestic football in China and Italy, and then sealing a £523 million deal for Premier League games between 2019 and 2022. It was a remarkable sum for a new outlet to pay but few questioned it because the Chinese market is massive and the numbers do not really need to make sense to us, right?

Wrong, as Jiangsu Suning and the Premier League, now in court with Suning over the collapse of that contract, have learned and Inter may soon discover.

---

What happened with Jiangsu?

Good news first: in November, they finally won the CSL, beating Guangzhou Evergrande (of whom the aforementioned ailing property developer is the majority shareholder) in the final, with Teixeira among the goalscorers.

Now the bad: three months later, on February 28, Suning’s parent company issued a terse statement to say, “from today, Jiangsu Football Club ceases the operation of its teams”. There was a “reluctant” and a “regretfully” in there, too, but that was that for the Chinese champions, their successful women’s team and youth sides.

Jiangsu FC dropped Suning from their name earlier this year when the Chinese Football Association told clubs they needed to sound more like western clubs to attract other sponsors. Suning dropped Jiangsu when the Chinese government made it very clear Suning had to spend every cent it had on saving its shops and not a penny on football.

Zhang Jindong admitted this in a video address to Suning’s huge workforce on February 19, when he said “we will close and cut down businesses irrelevant to the retail business without hesitation”. He was not kidding.

That said, the writing had been on the wall for some time. After all, Jiangsu’s players often had to wait for their pay during last season’s title-winning campaign, even going on strike on one occasion. And although it is unusual for the champions to go bust, bankruptcies are nothing new for Chinese football.

 

Jiangsu’s training ground lies deserted (Photo: Fang Dongxu/VCG via Getty Images)

“It is not the first time clubs have encountered difficulties and it probably won’t be the last,” explains Dr Jonathan Sullivan, an expert on Chinese football and an associate professor in the University of Nottingham’s Asia Research Institute.

“It seems to be a hazard of Chinese football in the professional era and I suspect it may portend a broader reconsideration of ambitions for CSL owners and closer regulation.

“The league’s development required private capital to make it work but it was always subsidiary to the state’s main ambitions for football — improve public health and deliver national pride via performances and having a presence in the international game.

“The CSL is now suffering because private capital is suffering. The extent to which COVID-19 has hurt the Chinese economy is masked by government investment, and it is likely that Suning is not the only retail business suffering.

“Given that the CSL was always a subsidiary concern in the government’s football strategy, and that stability trumps everything, it is much more important a struggling company retrench than risk potentially destabilising failures. Professional football is generally expensive, unprofitable and easily sacrificed when the going gets tough.”

Simon Chadwick, a professor of Eurasian sport at the Emlyon Business School, agrees. “The Suning episode embodies what it means to live and work in an authoritarian, centrally-planned country,” says Chadwick.

“China’s promotion of football back in 2015 was state-led: big on vision but short on implementation. This promotion was also consistent with the country’s 13th five-year plan, which emphasised the need for outbound investment. So, we saw a frenzy of Chinese entrepreneurs investing in football, at home and abroad, to curry favour with the government.

“However, midway through the plan, it had become apparent football was more of a financial burden than a revenue driver, and that signing players like Carlos Tevez was never going to be a basis upon which to build China’s football success.”

Chadwick believes the “sea change that ultimately brought us to the Suning debacle” started at the end of 2016, the year Tevez joined Shanghai Shenhua and Oscar signed for Shanghai SIPG. The government forced China’s biggest property company, Wanda, to sell its shareholding in Atletico Madrid amid concerns about too much Chinese money leaving the country.

It was also the beginning of a crackdown on celebrity entrepreneurs. Wanda’s Wang Jianlin was the man whose wrist was slapped that time and Ma is the most recent example, as the Alibaba boss is widely believed to have been detained by the authorities last year. The story was officially denied but he has re-emerged recently as a much less outspoken figure.

“No person and no business can now be bigger than the state, which is omnipresent and all-powerful,” says Chadwick.

“Suning’s retrenchment is the archetypal response to central government priorities and pressure: stick to what you know, don’t engage in overseas whimsy and always remember who’s in charge.

“As for football, the vision has clarified. China still wants to become a football superpower but sees that this is best achieved by having close relations with FIFA and staging the World Cup, which many believe will be in 2030.”

---

What’s the reaction been like in China?

In a country where the government has the power to tell private companies to invest in football, and they do, until the government tells them to stop, and they do, would it surprise you to hear the reaction to Jiangsu’s demise has been muted by western standards?

And fans of Jiangsu are not the only ones facing the prospect of having no team to cheer this season. Tianjin Quanjian, who once signed Alexandre Pato and Axel Witsel, went bust last year and their rivals Tianjin Tigers are in trouble now.

A China-based journalist, who wished to remain anonymous, told The Athletic there has been “a lot of hand-wringing” about the situation in the Chinese press but actual criticism of the government’s football strategy is “obviously off-limits”.

The Chinese FA issued the blandest of statements following Suning’s decision to shut down Jiangsu, saying it was “sorry” to hear the news and thanking the company for its previous support for the game.

 

Jiangsu celebrate their Super League title — three months later, the team no longer exists (Photo: STR / AFP)

“Jiangsu fans are angry at Suning and there’s a lot of sympathy for them from other fans because they know it could easily — and in the case of Tianjin, definitely will — happen to their clubs,” the journalist said.

“The foundations of Chinese football are very weak, with clubs at the mercy of investors’ fluctuating fortunes. But it’s the fans who suffer most and they are utterly powerless to do anything about it.

“There have been minor shows of public anger by a smattering of fans but demonstrations are not tolerated here and won’t happen. Fans need to get creative to make their point. Some Henan fans recently mounted a campaign against the change of the club’s name by taking out adverts on electronic billboards in prominent places.”

Sullivan believes this disregard for supporters is one of the reasons the Chinese game remains so fragile.

“The history of professional clubs in China is littered with failures, mainly due to the woes or caprices of private investors,” he says. “As always, fans will just have to suck it up. The way fans have been treated in China is one of the reasons the domestic game has failed to develop and the current difficulties just reinforce that.

“Among ‘football people’ the appetite is there, the passion is there, but if you want to cultivate the broad support base you need for a league to prosper sustainably over time, you can’t continually send fans messages like this.”

---

When did they get involved with Inter and what were their first big moves? 

Suning acquired a controlling stake in the Italian club during the summer of 2016 and was welcomed as an owner with the right intentions and ambition to make Inter a force again. 

When anyone buys Inter, they are expected to go on a spree and make a statement of intent. For instance, Ernesto Pellegrini went out and got his new team the Ballon d’Or-winning Karl-Heinz Rummenigge. Massimo Moratti splurged on Paul Ince, Roberto Carlos and Javier Zanetti and it wasn’t long before he broke the world transfer record for Ronaldo. 

Despite inheriting a limiting financial fair play (FFP) settlement agreement, which withheld €20 million in prize money, imposed squad restrictions and limited the number of new signings eligible to play in European competition, Suning was very much in step with this tradition and its strategy contrasted starkly with its predecessor, the ever-smiling Indonesian media mogul Erick Thohir. He had mistakenly thought giving away fan favourite Fredy Guarin to Juventus for Mirko Vucinic might make Inter fans dream again. However, it invoked uproar and a protest caused the move to collapse. He ended up buying Hernanes instead for an €18 million fee that did little to suggest the club’s new benefactor was as loaded as some of the other foreign investors who had entered European football. 

Suning, however, did not disappoint. In the last five years, Inter have had the highest net spend in Italy at €352 million, according to research by Swiss Ramble.

Super agents were conspicuous by their presence on the fringes of the new owner’s first shareholders’ assembly at the luxury Palazzo Parigi hotel in Milan. Six months after buying Teixeira and Ramires for Jiangsu in deals worth €78 million, Suning splashed out €40 million on Joao Mario then another €29.5 million on the next big thing from Brazil, Gabriel Barbosa. The pair of them aren’t bad players but flopped at Inter and their first experiences abroad were at a club in a state of flux. 

Before they’d even kicked a ball for Inter, coach Roberto Mancini was dismissed in pre-season after suggesting the team had other needs (like Yaya Toure) and Suning ended up going through four managers in their first year, perhaps unsurprisingly missing out on the Champions League. It was not a mistake they’d make twice. 

Even within the constraints of FFP, Suning showed ambition. The owner was not considered to be the problem. The drama around star striker Mauro Icardi stemmed from his biography, which turned the ultras against him, and then his wife’s forthright opinions as a TV pundit, which made his position as captain untenable. 

In the middle of it all, Inter qualified for the Champions League, leapfrogging Lazio on the final day of the season with a memorable come-from-behind victory over the Rome side at the Stadio Olimpico. It persuaded Suning to reward coach Luciano Spalletti with a new three-year contract. At the club’s Christmas party, Steven Zhang, European football’s youngest president, proudly told his audience: “Finally we have an ability to talk about reaching and touching the silverware that we’ve been thinking about, that Inter have been missing so much. Every single game… every single event… we’re going to win it.”

The US-educated Zhang, who turned 29 last year, was regularly on the ground in Milan before the pandemic hit. A modernising force, he recognised Inter’s potential as a lifestyle brand (the club is about to announce a new logo) and entertainment studio. Zhang set up Inter Media House, seeing value in football clubs as unique content providers.    

Suning’s project was about to go to another level. Inter were moving into new offices in the stylish, regenerated Porta Nuova district of Milan. The training ground at Appiano Gentile was in the process of being upgraded and a partnership was struck with Milan to work on a new stadium. Giuseppe Marotta, the chief executive credited with re-establishing Juventus at the top of the Italian game, joined the executive team. Inter were beginning to look like the complete package, every inch a “super club”. 

Marotta’s arrival gave them a chance of appointing Conte, as close as you get to a sure thing when it comes to turning a contender into a champion. Spalletti delivered Champions League football again, but he was sacked nine months into his new deal. Unless the Tuscan took another job or came to a settlement in the meantime, he’d remain under contract at Inter. That decision is listed as an exceptional charge on their accounts at the eye-watering figure of €25.8 million.

And Conte doesn’t come cheap either. He is not on Diego Simeone money. No one is on Diego Simeone money. But Conte is the highest-paid coach in Serie A, with his reported €11 million salary apparently being as much as what Juventus’ Andrea Pirlo, Atalanta’s Gian Piero Gasperini, Roma’s Paulo Fonseca and Milan’s Stefano Pioli all earn put together. 

But Conte was not Inter’s only star signing. Unshackled from their FFP settlement, the transfer strategy that summer was aggressive. Some deals had already been arranged, such as the one for free agent Diego Godin, who arrived on big wages from Atletico, and Valentino Lazaro, bought for €22 million from Hertha Berlin.

If that purchase has largely been forgotten about, it’s because it paled in comparison with the others that were completed over that window. Inter made Cagliari midfielder Nicolo Barella their club-record signing, an honour he didn’t hold onto for very long, as Romelu Lukaku then signed from Manchester United for €74 million. 

 

Lukaku has been a huge success at Inter (Photo: Marco Luzzani – Inter/FC Internazionale via Getty Images)

A system change, but above all, a culture change, led to Icardi, Radja Nainggolan and Ivan Perisic being put up for sale. Raising funds for them was a challenge. After originally fretting that the €110 million clause in Icardi’s contract was too low, he ended up being loaned to Paris Saint-Germain, who then negotiated his permanent transfer down to half that figure. Perisic moved to Bayern Munich and won the treble — but has since returned — and Nainggolan, after being bought for €38 million plus Nicolo Zaniolo, was loaned to Cagliari in consecutive seasons for personal reasons (his wife is Sardinian and was undergoing treatment for breast cancer). 

Conte left the impression Inter had done a lot in the market but still weren’t ready to contend. After Inter went to Borussia Dortmund, played superb football for an hour then faded and lost just as they had done in Barcelona, he memorably said it was hard to expect more of the team when the club was buying him players from Cagliari (Barella) and Sassuolo (Stefano Sensi). So the club went Christmas shopping in the Premier League. Along with Ashley Young from Manchester United, Inter organised the rental of Victor Moses, who was reunited with his old Chelsea boss.

Neither of them, however, got a photoshoot at Milan’s world-famous opera house, La Scala. That was reserved for Christian Eriksen, who was welcomed as the playmaker Inter had lacked since the days of Wesley Sneijder.

 

Eriksen was brought in on huge wages as Inter’s marquee signing (Photo: Vincenzo Lombardo – Inter/Inter via Getty Images)

The €27 million that Inter committed in fees doesn’t seem all that high — except the Dane could have been signed for free when his contract with Tottenham Hotspur expired at the end of the season. The fee on top of the wage package Inter agreed, making Eriksen one of the highest earners at the club and, by the same token, in Serie A, was considerable for a player nearing his thirties who had no obvious role in Conte’s scheme. In the meantime, the pandemic engulfed Lombardy before any other major European region. 

---

What’s been the impact of the pandemic? 

Stadiums closed, which was a problem for Inter, whose average gate of 65,800 at San Siro was the biggest in Serie A. For this season, the club estimates a negative impact on match-day revenue and cash in the region of €60 million. Sky Italia withheld the final €130 million installment of last season’s TV money from the league. 

Other stresses included the non-renewal by some sponsors of existing contracts or renegotiations and renewals at less advantageous figures. Inter’s longstanding and iconic shirt sponsor Pirelli will not feature on next season’s jerseys for the first time since 1995, with the club seeking a more lucrative deal than the one that paid €11 million last season. The failure to increase revenues from sponsorships and advertising as envisaged in the club’s prospective plans, and the increase in the collection times for payments due to the adverse economic context in which Inter’s customers operate, has also compounded matters. 

A €102 million loss was posted in their latest financial results, one of the biggest in European football, and there aren’t many levers left for Inter to pull to ease the strain on their accounts, which include a lot of debt that is due to mature in 18 months.

“The project stopped in August,” Conte recently said as the €40 million deal struck with Real Madrid for Achraf Hakimi was done at the end of June. Almost all the other incoming business Inter conducted afterwards was free or for nominal fees. Other clubs were able to dump some of their high earners, but Inter’s wage bill, which has increased by €74 million in the last four years, went up slightly again. Alexis Sanchez’s move from Manchester United was made permanent and other well-paid veterans like Arturo Vidal and Aleksandar Kolarov rocked up at San Siro. 

Raising funds through sales was trickier than it’s ever been before, with the market undergoing a severe contraction. As Greg Carey of Goldman Sachs told the Financial Times’ Business of Football summit last month: “A lot of the clubs use the transfer window to basically replenish their cash flow. Well, nobody has any money right now.” 

Take the case of Eriksen. The Dane has suddenly and unexpectedly become an integral part of Conte’s team but was on the transfer market barely a year after touching down in Milan and was pretty much unmoveable. Finding buyers willing to match big wages and pay the kinds of fees that prevent you from absorbing a loss on a player is nearly impossible at the moment. A firesale would not work and besides, a significant part of Inter’s value lies in having a competitive team that can compete at the highest level. That helps explain why Martinez revealed this week he has an agreement in principle to sign a new contract. Rather than selling stars, the best bet is to find a way of keeping them while moving on high-earning non-contributors instead. But that can take time as those guys often can’t find as good a deal elsewhere. 

What else has happened?

Well, in January, a notice appeared on the website of CONI, the Italian Olympic Committee and governing body of Italian sport, to say Eriksen’s agent is taking Inter to arbitration. And then there was a report in Corriere dello Sport alleging tension between Real Madrid and Inter over the first instalment of Hakimi’s transfer, which in turn led the Spanish giants to release a statement describing the story as “completely false”. Inter’s reaction to that and another story this week about an alleged missed bonus payment on Lukaku’s transfer from Manchester United is to insist they will respect all agreements.

---

What might happen next for Inter? 

After Zhang initially called reports of Suning selling the club “entirely baseless”, the stance has softened. At the end of a conference call to announce Inter’s latest financial results on February 26, the last item on the agenda was an update on the search for a new partner. “As part of ongoing capital structure and liquidity management, the business and our ownership are in talks to provide solutions in this respect.” 

One of them, as reported by the Financial Times, is the rush to raise $200 million in emergency cash. Another would be to give up a controlling or minority stake in the club just a couple of months before Inter could be crowned champions. “Suning has confirmed its commitment to the ongoing financial support of the club with or without additional external support, but it is also sensible and prudent to look outside,” the call concluded. “With that in mind, Suning appointed key advisers in Asia to find suitable partners, be that with an injection of equity capital or otherwise. Talks with key potential partners in this respect remain ongoing.” 

Is there interest in buying Inter? 

The London-based private equity group BC Partners was in talks with Inter but the exclusivity period to agree a deal has expired. After carrying out due diligence on the club’s accounts, BC is at an advantage in that any other prospective investor would need time to conduct its own examination of Inter’s affairs and that would take precious time. 

But private equity’s interest in the club divides opinion. One industry expert tells The Athletic: “I don’t really see how they can make it work from a returns perspective. The numbers just don’t work. How can you pay €700 million or a billion, whatever the price they want is, for something that is loss-making in the hundreds of millions? How can you make a return and assume that you can get this sold at two or three times the money? This is what private equity requires for an investment to be approved. You have to show a case to your investment committee that shows you can double or triple the money in four or five years.” 

Others are more bullish and see huge potential in Inter, which is another reason Suning would perhaps be reluctant to let go of the club. An experienced M&A adviser The Athletic spoke to even counters that the club could be worth €3 billion over the same timeframe. There is a view Serie A clubs are undervalued compared with the Premier League and a pathway to profitability exists at Inter under more disciplined management. 

But how?

This ultimately comes down to where you think the industry is headed. Serie A’s president Paolo Dal Pino aims to double the league’s revenues and its clubs will vote on whether or not to sell a 10 per cent stake in a new entertainment company, valued at €1.7bn, to a private equity consortium fronted by CVC, Advent and FSI, who argue they have the expertise to help Italy’s top flight achieve that goal. 

The likelihood of that proposal winning approval has recently been thrown into doubt amid concerns that 1) the partner would have too much influence compared to its equity stake and 2) a clause in the term sheet could damage Serie A revenues since it relates to “unexpected changes in format”.

This has been presented in some quarters of the Italian media as a “European Super League clause” even though it does not specifically refer to it. The clause could just as easily relate to another entirely hypothetical scenario like, let’s say, the north of Italy breaking away from the south or the return to some pre-unification land of independent city-states. 

Whether it’s a Super League or not a Super League, you’re going to have a suped-up, even more lucrative Champions League, whatever format it will be. As a three-time winner and one of the world’s biggest clubs, Inter would be well-placed to be a founding member of any new competition.

Another way to look at it is geographic. Milan is a very modern and dynamic city — the third wealthiest city in Europe and the Italian capital of fashion, media and finance. The place has transformed since the Expo in 2015 and if you’re one of the world’s leading architects and you don’t have a project in the city, something is wrong. In AC Milan, Inter have a stable, well-run partner with whom to build a new stadium and the city’s corporate community has the resources to pay for naming rights, season tickets and hospitality boxes for the events it would showcase. 

That’s all in the future, though, and a Super League has been talked about for decades without happening. For now, it’s hard for Inter’s players and fans to focus on anything other than the present, particularly when the scudetto is within grasp. “When you’re at a club like Inter, aside from anything else, you’ve got to keep your mind on the pitch,” Conte said after the weekend’s win over Genoa. “I can only influence what I’m able to influence. It’s useless wasting energy on what we can’t. We must stay focused on what we can determine.”

 

Edited March 5, 2021 by Vesper

[NikkiCFC 7,565]

Vlahovic is very promising striker.

I usually dont fall for Serbian players but this one looks better than Jovic for me.

11 goals in last 16 Seria A games.

190cm and strong. It is huge difference between Haaland and all others but if we do not get him this one is the one to watch.

[NikkiCFC 7,565]

Another loss for Juve. Congrats Antonio. 

[Jase 43,479]

Juventus and Milan dropped points today. I mean, Inter have to see it out from here...

Juve in danger of missing out on the Top 4...

[NikkiCFC 7,565]

2 hours ago, Jason said:

Juventus and Milan dropped points today. I mean, Inter have to see it out from here...

Juve in danger of missing out on the Top 4...

If Juve and Napoli win their game in hand 4 teams would be in space of 2 points. I feel Milan may miss CL again. 

[Jase 43,479]

Just now, NikkiCFC said:

If Juve and Napoli win their game in hand 4 teams would be in space of 2 points. I feel Milan may miss CL again. 

Their game in hand is against each other. lol They play that next midweek.

[NikkiCFC 7,565]

Juve can play Super League next season with Real because it seems they may miss out on CL 🙃

[Blues Forever 1,232]

Should have never appointed Pirlo in the first place.

[NikkiCFC 7,565]

On 03/04/2021 at 22:34, NikkiCFC said:

I feel Milan may miss CL again. 

I said this when they were 2nd. Now down to 5th place. 

[milka 3,306]

Congratulations to Antonio Conte .

He done it again .

 

Edited May 2, 2021 by milka

[Nero 1,794]

 

[Pizy 17,860]

Oh, wow. I’m actually shocked Jose would go to another club who will be at a severe disadvantage financially compared to their rivals after leaving Spuds. 
 

I figured he’d either become a national team a manager or take another short break and wait for a big club job to open up like Juventus.

[Blues Forever 1,232]

Just now, Pizy said:

Oh, wow. I’m actually shocked Jose would go to another club who will be at a severe disadvantage financially compared to their rivals after leaving Spuds. 
 

I figured he’d either become a national team a manager or take another short break and wait for a big club job to open up like Juventus.

Just keep making wrong choices since Roman sacked him for the 2nd time. 

Edited May 4, 2021 by Blues Forever

[NikkiCFC 7,565]

9 minutes ago, Pizy said:

Oh, wow. I’m actually shocked Jose would go to another club who will be at a severe disadvantage financially compared to their rivals after leaving Spuds. 
 

I figured he’d either become a national team a manager or take another short break and wait for a big club job to open up like Juventus.

No chance tier 1 clubs take him ever again.

Spurs, Roma this is tier 2 and his level now. Lets see if he can survive even there...

[Pizy 17,860]

53 minutes ago, NikkiCFC said:

No chance tier 1 clubs take him ever again.

Spurs, Roma this is tier 2 and his level now. Lets see if he can survive even there...

I think Jose is a master at “selling” himself to these big clubs. If Juve has another very poor season next year under Pirlo I could’ve seen them being desperate and turning to a big name like Mou for a short term fix.

 

[Blues Forever 1,232]

Just now, Pizy said:

I think Jose is a master at “selling” himself to these big clubs. If Juve has another very poor season next year under Pirlo I could’ve seen them being desperate and turning to a big name like Mou for a short term fix.

 

Jose to Juve is never going to happen. He has bad reputation at there like taking digs at them and insulted their fans several times. If their board appoint him, there is going to be a lot of carnage in Turin.

Edited May 4, 2021 by Blues Forever