The newspaper Financial Times met Inter president Erick Thohir in an Italian restaurant and was at first surprised that the Indonesian tycoon showed up alone, without an entourage: “This is my character,” he says. “I cannot change just because I become well-known.” Then he explained his vision after watching the decline of Italian football on the pitch and in financial terms in the last years: “It happens in many companies. When you’re on top, you’re comfortable, you get fat and lazy and then suddenly there’s another company and it’s working hard and fighting to compete. In our case it was the English Premier League and Germany’s Bundesliga.”
Thohir then talked about Silvio Berlusconi, the former Italian prime minister and owner of rival AC Milan, who once said that as a proprietor “you spend loads of money and earn nothing”. Thohir has his vision: “Football is changing. I want to use the US model, where sport is like the media business, with income from advertising and content, mixed with the consumer goods industry, selling jerseys and licensed products.”
On the new arrivals in the club’s organisational culture, where he has made a dramatic change from Inter’s Italo-centric past, by bringing in highly regarded anglophone executives from sport and media, one of them Michael Bolingbroke, former chief operating officer of Manchester United, one of the world’s most profitable clubs: “There are a lot of good people inside the company but they need new examples to follow. Many Indonesians who buy a foreign business think ‘I own this now so I will bring in Indonesians’. I know I need to bring in good people with a good background from different industries.”
One of the first signings under Thohir’s reign was Nemanja Vidic from Manchester United and the president reaffirmed the strategic importance of the Serb’s arrival: “He was a good brand for the Asian market. I talk to Mr Moratti and then sit down with the management and ask, will this player help us compete on the field and what about on the marketing side? It’s like a credit committee in a bank.”
As Thohir gets up to leave after the interview has ended, he gives one business card for his media business – “this is the real one”, he says – and one for Inter: “This one is to show off.”
Source: fcinternews.it
