In a lengthy interview with La Gazzetta dello Sport, Rocco Commisso, owner and president of Fiorentina, has attacked Inter without mincing words, accusing them (along with Milan and Juventus) of having won in recent years, thanks to accumulated corporate debts.
These were his words:
DEBTS – “Do you not envy any club that has won in recent years? No, because certain victories have come thanks to absurd debt situations that have brought clubs almost to bankruptcy and then into the hands of Funds for non-repayment by the properties of the loans received. And I still wonder if whoever won in certain years could have been registered in the championship… I was about to buy Milan then it ended up with Mister Li and you know how it ended. And Zhang? No one knows where he is anymore… He too was forced to leave Inter, indebted with the Oaktree Fund. Then there’s the case of Juve: from Ronaldo onwards, Exor had to put in 900 million euros to sort out finances in five years, despite the annual revenues being more than 450 million, more than triple that of Fiorentina. Of the clubs we can compare ourselves to, in terms of size and revenue, only Atalanta have done better than us in terms of results, but their project, including infrastructures, started earlier. The others, no, I can’t envy them”.
SYSTEM CHANGE – “Have I lost my trust in these years? The trust is always there, but I haven’t seen improvements in any of the aspects you mentioned, starting with the respect of the rules. Juventus has been penalized for irregularities, but Milan and Inter have continued to spend despite hundreds of millions of debts and have never been penalized for this. No one wanted to intervene. These clubs, starting with Juve, wanted to fix their finances with Super League money at the expense of national tournaments. Fortunately that project failed and football was saved. Changing the system? I believe that this inertia is an Italian disease. We need to put football in protection, by enforcing the rules and exploring new paths, but in Italy we are never able to do so”.
