Transcript
Speaker: Welcome to the Italian football podcast. Let's move on to Inter, the takeover situation, because last week, especially, we started to see a lot more reports intensifying about Thomas Ziliakos being the new owner of Inter. So first of all, can you just give us a little update on where you see the takeover? And then secondly, can you just give us a little profile of Ziliakos
Speaker: Who is he? How rich is he? What we can expect if he takes over at Inter? You know, all that kind of stuff. Because you have interviewed him for simply Inter recently, so you know him better than most. No, I sat down with him for 45 minutes in the summer and we've been in contact since. He's Finnish Swede, or he speaks Swedish fluently, like that's his mother tongue, just like Finnish is.
Speaker: He speaks Italian fluently and English fluently but obviously when you can speak in your mother tongue it was a much more relaxing and he could express himself more clearly and that's why I wanted to do the interview in Swedish and we sat down for 45 minutes to talk about that and who he was and how he was and he
Speaker: He comes from, he is a, you could almost say, Finnish aristocracy in the sense that he comes from a big family that is very well known in Finland, in business. I mean, he was the former CEO of Nokia Southeast Asia. And he
Speaker: He lived there in Singapore for very many years and he was the CEO there of course of Nokia Southeast Asia in there and then he was asked to become
Speaker: the Singapore F .A. asked him to become involved in local football. A semi -professional league had been set up and he became the manager of a team called Gailang International FC. And he was there five years and they won the league every year, five years in a row. And of course, you know, that's his director's experience in football, but he's also, like I said, he's a big
Speaker: director in business and fine in business and you know his experience with football is quite interesting. He told me when I interviewed him when he was a kid, he got a book or he got a magazine with an interview with Pele.
Speaker: where Pele said that if you want to be a football, you should have a drink or smoke. He didn't until he was 21 years old and was just training really hard to become
Speaker: a footballer, which he did in Finland, and he played for IFK Hilsingforsch, which is like one of the biggest clubs there. And then he went to Hojiko, which is the most big, the biggest club there. And then one year he decided he wanted to, as a youth player, he was 21 years old,
Speaker: That was incidentally when he had his first drink as well as he told me because of the Pelé thing for seven years. So what happened was his parents were friends with the president of the Finnish F .A.
Speaker: And he told him in passing that he dreamt of traveling to South American Brazil. And so what happened was that he was able to play with Fluminance's Youth Academy for one year. He spent a season there and of course a calendar year there.
Speaker: And he always says that he got to play in front of the Manakana with 160 ,000 people with the youth team. And it was crazy. And Rivellino was there.
Speaker: And so as he told me, he says that when he got the chance to take the pitch after having played in front of 160 ,000 people in a youth team game for Fluminense, he realized that he'd reached the peak of his career because he was never going to play in front of those crack crowds ever again.
Speaker: And how he got into Inter or wanting to buy Inter, I mean, he fell in love with Italy. He told me that he spent summers in Capri and he thinks he might have played football with Sandra Mazzola because he was 15 years old and he was there to learn Italian. And they used to play football on a pitch nearby the school. And there was an Inter star who was on holiday there.
Speaker: And he can't remember exactly who he was, but he has a memory of it being Sandra Mazzola, who he played football with. And he fell in love with Italy. And the whole thing with wanting to invest in Italian football was after the Manchester United thing. His wife had lunch in New York.
Speaker: with visiting one of his daughters who lived there. His wife had had lunch in New York with Dan Swift's wife. Dan Swift is, of course, a partner in Redbird. Dan Swift's wife had told Thomas's wife that they had bought AC Milan, and so he contacted him and said,
Speaker: uh... i want to get in and he said unfortunately you know there's not there's no possibility to get in here we've already closed the deal and you and then so what he did was basically decided to put together a group of investors and he released a press statement saying they've raised a billion over a billion dollars in u .s. dollars for investors to invest in football uh... fashion sport and sports and and and and and business generally uh...
Speaker: So he's been very open about whether he wants to take over or whether he wants to be involved in some capacity. He speaks very highly of Suning and the Zhang family and say they've been very kind to him and invited him, and he just basically doesn't want to go into too much detail, but he doesn't feel that maybe the Zhang family are prepared to sell Inter.
Speaker: And he doesn't want to come across as pushy. But he's been very clear in saying that he wants to be involved in some way. And he is a traditional, typical Scandinavian entrepreneur in the sense that he thinks very much outside the box. I spoke to him about what he would like to do differently. And he's got this idea. He's basically his idea is this. Inter have 500 million fans globally. Now, an overwhelming majority of them
Speaker: will never be able to see the live at the SunSeed or whatever stadium, no matter how big that stadium is, right? So he wants to start doing things like using technology to sell experiences to fans, you know,
Speaker: to sell experiences, like a virtual stadium experiences, meaning that a fan can sit in Stockholm, Lagos, Shanghai, and visit the stadium, right? And he's looking at monetizing in modern new ways that is quite new to football, which in other businesses is not that innovative at all. It's just how businesses work, right? So he's a very typical Scandinavian entrepreneur in that aspect.
Speaker: And he's an interesting character and we'll see what happens. I still think that he doesn't, that this is just my personal opinion, it's not something he said. My personal opinion is that he would love to invest in Inter and become a stakeholder if he's given guarantees that he can run marketing and create new revenue streams for Inter.
Speaker: But I don't think that that's something a Zhang family would want to do, given that it kind of encroaches a lot in what they do. But we'll have to wait and see.
