De Laurentiis fires warning shot at Cardinale: Investment funds are 'killing' Italian football from within

Italian football is experiencing a crisis not on the pitch, but right in the boardrooms of club owners. Aurelio De Laurentiis — Napoli president — just used an international press award ceremony to launch a direct attack on AC Milan owner Gerry Cardinale and, more broadly, the investment fund ownership model in football. The headline statement: "Investment funds have brought no benefit." Sound familiar? It's the same logic as a gambler who loses everything at a casino, then blames the house — except De Laurentiis isn't losing. He's trying to rewrite the rules of the game. Let's start with a dinner three years ago. According to De Laurentiis himself, he dined with Cardinale — founder of RedBird Capital Partners — who was then planning to enter AC Milan. The Napoli owner saw immediately a man "with the needs of a financier, not a real entrepreneur." Three years later, De Laurentiis took an international stage and said directly: what Cardinale was saying "made no sense." That's his description — and I partly agree with him, but for entirely different reasons. What I've observed over 52 years of following football is this: fund-type investors never come to build. They come to harvest. Once the returns hit the threshold expected by the fund's own investors — typically three to five years — the exit becomes priority number one. Football needs ten years to build a world-class academy, five years to develop a tactical system, but funds count time in quarters. That's not a contradiction — that's a structural reality. De Laurentiis understands this. He worked in film — Filmauro — since 2026, a true craftsman who chose ideas, funded them, produced them, and distributed them himself. He brought that logic to Napoli. Napoli under him isn't a financial product; it's a work he crafts by hand. The 2026 Scudetto — the one people said Napoli would never have — was the result of that craftsmanship patience. Not from a fund counting quarters. But here's where I want to reverse the question with De Laurentiis. He says investment funds bring no benefit — so where's the evidence? The 44-point speech I analyzed contains not a single financial figure cited. No revenue reports, no transfer data, no financial rankings. It's an award-acceptance speech, not an analytical report. De Laurentiis is making a massive claim with empty hands on data. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is also a form of cowardice — not financial cowardice, but intellectual cowardice. However, there's one detail in the speech that I find far more interesting than the Cardinale attack. Napoli were offered US$6 million to play two friendlies — one in Australia, one in Singapore. Thirty hours of flying total. De Laurentiis refused. He said: "That seemed madness to me." This is why I believe he's genuinely serious about football, even if the speech carries self-interest motives. A fund investor sees US$6 million — they consider it. A craftsman-president sees thirty hours of flying stacked on pre-season preparation — he says no. That's the only real difference I see between the two models: fund investors measure in dollars, craftsman-presidents measure in player fitness. Now, let's talk about what Italian media calls Serie A's "Big 5." De Laurentiis identified Juventus, AC Milan, Inter, Napoli and Roma as the "commercial driving force" of Italian football. Sounds reasonable, but look closely: Lazio is excluded. Atalanta is excluded. Fiorentina has no spot either. That's not a commercial map — that's a power map. De Laurentiis is drawing an inner circle with Napoli at the center, even though Juventus and Milan brands remain stronger internationally. Once again, this is a self-serving position, but that doesn't make it wrong. The real issue of Serie A, as I read from the speech, is DAZN. Viewership has been declining year after year — and this is a trend I've witnessed across recent seasons. The Premier League earns over £6 billion from broadcast rights while Serie A struggles with a deal that De Laurentiis himself describes as "not enough." His proposed solution? Let the big five clubs market themselves. Sell international rights independently. Develop their own content. And even sell pay-per-view friendlies at 10 euros per match — exactly the figure he announced. That's not a new idea. It's an upgraded version of what Real Madrid runs with Real Madrid TV, or what Barcelona is experimenting with Barçavision. I live in Japan. My J-League is wrestling with the same exact question: how to sell international broadcast rights better? But J-League has one advantage Serie A doesn't — not too many investment funds crowding into the boardroom. When I hear De Laurentiis say "it's difficult to change the mentality of those who run football," I understand he's talking about a system where reform requires consensus from too many parties — including those whose interests run counter to the league's. There's one legal detail few noticed: De Laurentiis said some Italian football laws "date back to the 1800s" that "when read and seen to have been amended, are difficult to understand." This isn't exaggeration. Italy's sports system operates on a legal framework often described as "unteachable" — from special sports tax regimes to ownership regulations. Look at the list of foreign owners in Serie A over the past two decades: Russians, Americans, investment funds — most came and went, few built long-term. De Laurentiis is a rare exception. So the final question: who's right? I've followed football long enough to know that the truth usually lies in the middle. Investment funds aren't devils — they're neutral financial tools, and they can bring capital that many clubs can't generate independently. But De Laurentiis is also correct in this: when profit becomes the ultimate goal instead of the football product itself, the sport we love gets distorted. Cardinale may be a brilliant investor. But football doesn't need more brilliant investors — it needs people crazy enough to turn down US$6 million for a training session. What about you? Which model do you believe will save Italian football?