When former owner Silvio Berlusconi sold AC Milan to Yonghong Li he promised the club would be in safe hands. Two years latter, the Rossoneri are banned from Europa League.
And they all lived happily ever after. After the formalization of AC Milan’s ban from the next edition of Europa League, everyone seems to be satisfied. Well, except for the fans who can’t imagine Milan, the most decorated Italian club, outside Europe. Just think of the huge outcry it would have caused had it happened to Barcelona, Bayern Munich or Liverpool.
The fans are hurt but no matter our feelings this was an inevitable decision from UEFA. The Rossoneri continuously failed to respect the Financial Fair Play rules between 2014 and 2018. Books were always in red and unsustainable investments did not pay off. It’s time to figure out what put us in this position and AC Milan’s official statement after the verdict offers a clear indication.
“The current shareholder took ownership of the Club in July 2018, inheriting substantial accumulated losses after the previous owner of AC Milan defaulted on debt obligations. These losses and the associated violation of FFP rules, as a consequence of actions taken under previous ownership, led to sanctions by UEFA”.
AC Milan’s second consecutive ban from Europe (the first was overturned by CAS) represents one of the darkest and most humiliating moments of the century-old Rossoneri history. And for all this we can thank the last years of the infamous management of former owner Silvio Berlusconi, his daughter Barbara and CEO Adriano Galliani.
First of all for having dug a crater in the budget of the club during the aforementioned period, then for having sold AC Milan to that mythological character of which we now struggle even to remember the face and who answers to the name of Yonghong Li. The fans should be furious with Mr. Li who brought the club to the lowest point after many years, but Berlusconi, who sold the most glorious Italian club to the anonymous and bankrupted Chinese “businessman”, had the moral obligation to deliver Milan to a figure that could make it grow even more.
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