Zlatan Ibrahimovic has defended Gerry Cardinale after a torrid year at Milan, insisting the RedBird owner will get it right, even if he is "learning the hard way" for now.
The comments matter because both men are the faces of a project that just missed European football entirely. A season without the Champions League for the first time in years, a mid-table finish, and a summer that forced Milan to tear up the management structure and hand Massimiliano Allegri the dugout with Igli Tare as sporting director. Ibrahimovic and Cardinale have taken the heat for that, so hearing the Swede lay out how he sees the ownership is worth the time.
Speaking alongside Cardinale at the WSJ Sports Events in New York on July 16, Ibrahimovic was asked what the biggest lesson he had passed on to the American was.
"Stay calm, don't let emotions get the better of you, because when you make decisions under the influence of emotion, you make mistakes," he said. "Gerry is learning the hard way because so much has happened since he arrived at Milan. Every country has its own way of working, and in Italy it's very unique. He's gaining experience by going the hard way because he's not enjoying Milan yet: you can enjoy it when you win."
That last line is the honest part. Cardinale bought Milan from Elliott in 2022 for around €1.2 billion, and the first full season under his ownership delivered a Scudetto hangover rather than a step forward. The Scudetto itself came in 2022 under Elliott's stewardship, before RedBird had completed the deal. Everything since has been the harder road Ibrahimovic describes.
On his own move into the boardroom, the Swede was typically Zlatan.
"Cardinale promised me I'll become a billionaire," he said, laughing, before adding that the office "works like in a dressing room. There's a leader that other people follow and who sets the bar, dictates the mentality. This is what I would like to bring."
He also pushed back on the idea that early failure means the project is broken.
"If everything were perfect from the start, he wouldn't have learned anything," Ibrahimovic said. "He owns a club that is gigantic, truly gigantic. But Gerry will arrive, I'm 100% sure of it: he has the will and the character to make it. If he managed to bring me to RedBird, he can do anything."
The sharpest section came when the conversation turned to Serie A as a whole, and here Ibrahimovic sounded less like an executive protecting his employer and more like someone genuinely worried.
"I believe the product isn't good enough: Italian football today isn't even close to that of England or Spain," he said. "The infrastructure in Italy needs to change: just look at the Premier League stadiums and those in Italy. If they don't change their way of thinking and working, it's a sinking ship."
Coming from the man in charge of Milan's football side, that is not a small admission. It is also exactly why the club has spent years trying to get a new stadium built, having finally moved to buy San Siro jointly with Inter. The gap Ibrahimovic describes, English clubs outbidding Italian ones for players who would once have chosen Serie A, is the commercial reality behind every transfer window Milan operates in.
Whether Cardinale "arrives," as Ibrahimovic puts it, will be judged on the pitch and on the stadium, not in a Wall Street Journal Q&A. For now the patience he is asking supporters for is running thinner than he might like.