By Amy-Jo Crowley and Elvira Pollina
LONDON/MILAN (Reuters) – Finnish entrepreneur Thomas Zilliacus is weighing a bid for Inter Milan as the club attracts interest from international investors, people familiar with the matter said, with the team’s run to the Champions League final giving it a timely boost.
Inter will face England’s Manchester City on June 10 in European soccer’s showpiece game. It is Inter’s first Champions League final since Chinese retail conglomerate Suning Holdings took control of the club in 2016.
Off the pitch, Goldman Sachs and U.S. boutique bank Raine, which managed the sale of Premier League club Chelsea last year, have been in negotiations with various parties interested in investing in the Serie A team, two sources said.
Former Nokia executive Zilliacus is among potential suitors, according to two sources, who declined to be named as the discussions are confidential. Zilliacus emerged this year as a potential bidder for England’s Manchester United but dropped out of the running.
Advisers will likely set a deadline for a final round of bids for Inter in the next four weeks, two people involved in the process added, with another person saying a deal could be completed later in the summer.
However, Suning denied that a deal was in the works.
“There is no bidding process,” a media representative at Suning Holdings Group said. Inter Chairman Steven Zhang said last year that the owners were committed for the long term.
Inter, whose top players include Argentine forward Lautaro Martinez, are historically one of Italy’s top clubs. They won the Champions League in 2010 and won the European Cup, its forerunner, twice in the 1960s.
Yet Inter, Italian Serie A champions in 2021, were hard hit by the fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic and booked a 140 million euro loss in 2021-22.
To shore up its finances after the pandemic, Inter secured a 275 million euro ($296 million) financing backstop from Oaktree Capital Management, which is due next year.
Zilliacus had been looking to buy Manchester United through his holding company, XXI Century Capital, before he pulled out in April. One of the people said Zilliacus needed an equity partner to help finance a deal as he could not afford it alone.
XXI Century announced last month it was in talks with several large institutional investors and family offices from the United States, Asia and the Middle East to raise money for investment opportunities in European soccer.
U.S. investment firm RedBird Capital Partners last year completed a 1.2 billion euro deal last year to buy city rivals AC Milan, who share the same stadium as Inter.
Both teams would like to build a new stadium to replace their San Siro arena but plans have failed to advance.
($1 = 0.9297 euros)
(Reporting by Amy Jo Crowley in London, Kane Wu in Hong Kong, Sophie Yu in Beijing, Elvira Pollina in Milan and Akash Sriram in Bengaluru; Writing by Keith Weir; Editing by David Holmes)
