Chapter 453: Meet and study it

There has been a bit of detail about Palermo FC and their manager-changing boss and president, Maurizio Zamparini, so I won't go into any nonsense here, let's take a look at what the club is in right now.

In fact, in recent years, Zamparini has been trying to sell Palermo, but several previous negotiations have ended in failure. After being promoted to Serie B champions in the summer of 2014, the Eagles have not been able to continue their consistent performances last season, with a relegation spot confirmed three rounds in advance. At that time, some media reported that a foundation led by American businessman Paul Baccarini had all but bought the club in February last year, and even the name of the chairman had been changed on some sports websites, but the deal ended in Zamparini's last-minute reversal.

Previously, there were rumors that the Celestial Empire consortium was interested in taking over the Sicilian club, but they were all gone.

Palermo, who have returned to the second division, have performed well in the middle of the season, and have always been at the top of the standings, especially since mid-December last year, the team's ranking has basically stabilized in the top three of Serie B. With the top two in the league eligible for direct promotion, and the third to eight in the play-offs for the last place to be promoted to Serie A, their results are still in line with outside estimates.

It's just that in the last week of April this year, Palermo suffered a record of 1 draw and 1 loss, and the ranking slipped directly to fourth place, and it was difficult to qualify for direct promotion. As a result, Zamparini, who had endured for almost a whole year, finally made a move, sacking coach Bruno Teddino at this crucial moment, and replacing Roberto Styron, the former Bari coach who was born in 1977 and played for Parma, Napoli and Torino, caused discontent among the club's supporters.

Perhaps tired of changing managers again and again, or perhaps the 77-year-old Italian real estate tycoon has lost his love for the sport he has loved since childhood, the Palermo club issued a statement on Friday morning without warning praising Parini as president of the club and that Bettini who had previously assisted him would take over the position on an interim basis, with the latter being tasked with selling his stake in the club to interested buyers.

As friends and close partners, Raul and Gines both knew that Li Muddy had a dream of taking charge of a football club, and instead of laughing at the latter's inadequacy, the two were interested in getting involved.

Gines, the economic tycoon of Spanish football, is about to turn 58 years old after spending this year's birthday, as early as two or three years ago, he was actually making various preparations for moving behind the scenes, which can be clearly seen from his decision to rarely directly represent players after Raul, Enrique, Morientes and other people have retired. In the past year or two, in addition to being more enthusiastic about developing his career in the Celestial Empire, Gines has begun to transfer most of the business of the brokerage company to other partners, and his son Genes II has also begun to slowly take over his father's work, as if he is a successor.

However, after a busy life, he is obviously unlikely to become an idle old man directly after retirement, and Gines, who is becoming more and more enthusiastic about the football agent industry, suddenly finds that there is an opportunity to participate in the operation of the football industry from another angle, and is naturally very interested.

As for Raul, who originally aspired to become the president of Real Madrid, he knows how difficult it will be to achieve this goal. According to the rules for the election of the chairman revised by Galeries Lafayette after his re-election in 2013, the requirements are: 1. The age of the election president needs to be at least 20 years old; 2. 15% of the club's annual budget for next season must be used as a campaign deposit, and no third party funding is allowed. These two conditions have basically dashed most of the dreams of becoming the head of the world's No. 1 club in advance.

Why? Let's take a closer look.

Let's take a look at the second requirement first, taking the budget of the Galaxy Battleship this season as an example, 15% of the close to 700 million euros is 100 million, and if this huge amount cannot be funded by others, there are really few people who can easily get it. Raul has been in football for 20 years, not only is he the dual leader of Real Madrid and the Spanish national team, but he has also received a lot of money in commercial sponsorship, but when most of the money is invested in real estate and financial projects, it is difficult to raise even 10 million in cash in a short period of time.

Not everyone is like Galeries Lafayette, backed by Spain's largest construction group, and can come up with more money at a desperate cost. And because he did perform well enough in the position of president of Real Madrid, he was recognized by everyone, and he was re-elected directly without passing the election as the sole candidate many times, and there was no need to make up a deposit at all.

Of course, there are so many rich people in the world, and there are many people who are richer than Galeries Lafayette, but none of them can meet the first condition, because Real Madrid's membership is so rare, let alone have it for 20 consecutive years.

With the invasion of capital into football, Spain's economic situation has been relatively sluggish since the worldwide financial crisis of 1987 (Black Monday). Affected by the general environment, coupled with a series of reasons such as poor management, many Spanish football clubs have fallen into financial crisis and are on the verge of bankruptcy since the eighties and nineties of the last century. In order to prevent the football industry, which had developed for a hundred years, from being swept away, Xiguo ZF forcibly ordered the club with huge financial problems to reorganize, cancel the membership system, and form a joint stock limited company.

As of now, the Spanish football circle, which was once full of membership, has long lived up to its former state, and even the four clubs in La Liga and La B are still adhering to the old-school membership system, which was absolutely unimaginable 30 years ago.

Membership is essentially very similar to a club. Communism, a model that makes the club a public property for all fans, is highly inclusive, regardless of origin, just whether or not they are supporters of the team. As a result, clubs often have a wide and strong level of support, with ZF stepping in to help when it matters most. For example, Real Madrid and Barcelona have both suffered very serious debt crises, but they have easily turned the corner with the help of local ZF. In particular, the Galaxy Battleship has been repeatedly criticized by competitors for obtaining interest-free loan assistance from the City of Madrid ZF and selling land at far supermarket prices.

It is precisely because all their business income can be used for consumption, and even overdraft a large amount, the excess part will be paid by the members, and no one requires the club to make a profit. Therefore, the two top teams in the Spanish Super League can not take into account the overall sluggish economic environment of the whole country, and continue to use large sums of money to introduce the world's top stars, so that Spanish football can dominate the European arena with the strong rise of the Premier League.

For members, when the club itself has achieved self-sufficiency, it can be said that they are happy to die, and they only need to pay a membership fee ranging from 50 to 150 euros a year, and they can enjoy the benefits of priority ticket purchase and purchase at a discounted price. In addition, full members have the right to participate in the team's decision-making and intervene in the management's planning on major matters.

It is precisely because of such and such benefits that most of the fans of Real Madrid or Barcelona in the world want to become members of the club under the premise that the economic situation is not too bad. But this status is really not so easy to obtain for some club supporters.

For more than a decade, there were always some countries and the media would publish the list of clubs in world football from time to time, and several clubs such as Benfica, Barcelona, Manchester United, Bayern Munich and Brazil were always among the best. Among the top clubs, only Real Madrid has a somewhat strange number of members, and the number has been maintained smoothly between 91,000 and 93,000, far behind their clubs in the same level.

The reason for this situation is not the lack of enthusiasm of Real Madrid fans, but the fact that the Galaxy Battleship has basically stopped opening the way for new members to join, and the club's official response to everyone's questions in this regard is: The Bernabeu Stadium can only accommodate more than 80,000 people, and too many members will make it difficult for fans who do not have the qualifications to buy tickets.

This answer, there is no one!

Now Real Madrid's members are basically fans of the older generation, and even if there are new people to replace them, almost all of them are the immediate family members of the original members, and it is difficult for outsiders to insert into that circle rashly. For example, Li Mudi, who was officially "turned regular" half a year before taking over Caslitia, was only a supporter of the club before that (this identity is something that everyone can pay to join, and after joining, you will get an official card with your name printed on it, although there are corresponding benefits, but there is still a big difference compared to official members).

So the two conditions of the guarantee deposit and the 20-year membership basically make Galeries Lafayette's chairmanship unbreakable, unless he himself "dies" or gets tired of it, and the next president like Mr. Bernabeu who can control the club for a long time is actually destined to appear.

This is not good news for Raul, although the former Real Madrid captain has a very high status in the eyes of Melinger, but he has no management experience and is obviously no threat to Lafayette for several years. Gines speculated darkly that the Real Madrid president had removed Raul from his position as assistant general manager and put him on the path of coach in order to eliminate the hidden danger in advance, while the other two were noncommittal about this argument.

However, Raul still expressed his willingness to join his friend's dream of buying the club, hoping to get enough training opportunities before becoming the president of Real Madrid, so he joined the club together.

Three people plus a professional asset management and operation expert, for the Palermo club changed ownership until half past one in the second half of the night, but also made a simple simulation of the acquisition process, and combined with many previous success and failure cases, summed up what needs to be strengthened or improved so far, the harvest is still not small.

In general, their small group still lacks a lot of money and management talent in all aspects. However, the former can be solved by bringing in other collaborators, and the latter is a little more troublesome, but on the basis of retaining a part of the original staff, it is theoretically possible to find or train several key positions in the following period.

So after assigning the tasks at the end of the season, the impromptu workshop came to an end. The Torino coach, who had been yawning for a long time, hurriedly returned to the bedroom to rest, and Li Mudi, who had a new understanding of his future development path, slept very soundly this time, and did not take to heart the game that was about to encounter his biggest sufferer, Napoli, on Sunday.

With the top four in the league already worry-free, he doesn't care about losing away to the White Dolphins at all, as long as it's not a heavy defeat, he can accept the rest of the results. Because the loss will allow Napoli to continue to maintain the pressure on Juventus, which means that the old lady may not be able to prepare for the Italian Cup final due to distraction from the competition for the league title, the red bulls can not only prevent the number one arch-rival from winning the championship, but also have a certain probability of encountering a reserved opponent in the domestic cup on the 11th, which can be regarded as killing two birds with one stone.

So on Saturday morning, after the Torino club announced on its official website that they will play in southern Italy, the absence of Belottti, Ranocchia and Baseli caused a lot of controversy. Countless Juventus began to complain on the Internet about the Torino team's release of water, believing that they were preparing for the weekend league with the goal of losing, and that the Red Bulls had completely abandoned their discipline in order to prevent Juventus from winning the championship.

These actions almost replicated the reaction of AC Milan supporters before, and were met with strong anger from Red Bulls fans, who saw it as a sign of the opposing team's lack of confidence in their own destiny, and the two sides engaged in a war of words that ended abruptly until the end of the battle on Sunday.

Defending champions Juventus were the first to take the lead on Saturday as the Football Association brought forward their league game in order to give them more time to rest for their Coppa Italia final. As a result, facing Bologna at home, Allegri really didn't dare to relax too much, and the advantage of only two points made the always conservative coach dare not be careless, and he still sent Higuain, Dybala and other main attackers, until the victory was locked, and personnel adjustments were made until the victory was locked, which is also a situation that Torino fans are more willing to see.

In the end, after conceding the first goal, the old lady still scored three goals in the second half to complete the reversal, and temporarily widened the gap with Napoli to five points in the first game, and the pressure came to Sarri and his team. To keep their title hopes alive, Napoli will have to win their remaining three league opponents and, if possible, try to get as many goal difference as possible. Judging from the ranking layout announced by the Torino team, it seems that the wish of the White Dolphins is relatively easy to achieve.