A Club on Its Knees
May 2021. The San Siro sits half-empty, Europe is still locked down, and Inter Milan, freshly crowned Serie A champions, cannot make payroll. The club that gave the world il Grande Inter of Helenio Herrera, that beat Real Madrid in the 1965 European Cup, that launched Ronaldo and Zanetti and Bergkamp onto the world stage, is functionally insolvent. Total debt: 807 million euros. Annual losses: deep into nine figures. The owners, Chinese retail conglomerate Suning, are drowning back home. Zhang Jindong, Suning founder and father of Inter president Steven Zhang, has watched his personal fortune collapse. China’s crackdown on overseas sport spending has slammed shut every exit. The family’s stake in China Evergrande, the property behemoth, is worthless.
Into this wreckage walks Oaktree Capital Management. The Los Angeles-based distressed debt specialist, co-founded by Howard Marks, the man who quite literally wrote the book on investment risk, offers Suning a lifeline: a 275 million euro emergency bridge loan, secured against their controlling stake in the club, at 12 percent annual interest. The Zhangs accept. They have no choice.
Three years later, the loan has ballooned to 395 million euros. Suning cannot pay. They try everything. They approach bond giant PIMCO. They attempt to refinance. They beg, negotiate, threaten. Oaktree does not blink.
On 22 May 2024, Oaktree takes the keys. Not with a press conference. Not with a fanfare. With a terse three-paragraph statement. The club they lent money to at distress-level rates is now theirs, acquired at a fraction of its true market value.
This is not a football story. It is a private equity masterclass.
What Oaktree Actually Bought
The numbers at the moment of acquisition were, on the surface, terrifying. 807 million euros in total debt. An 86 million euro loss for fiscal year 2022 to 2023. A shared stadium the club did not own, in a country where building a new one takes longer than constructing a medium-sized highway. And yet Oaktree saw what no Italian bank or domestic investor had the nerve to see: Inter Milan is one of the twenty most recognized football clubs on the planet, with 21 Serie A titles, three European Cups, and a global brand worth multiples of its debt load.
The club had structural problems, not terminal ones. Revenue had been suppressed by COVID, by stadium sharing, and by Suning’s paralysis. The squad, under Simone Inzaghi, was outstanding. In the same season Suning lost the club, Inter had just lifted the Scudetto. The year before that, they had reached the Champions League final. The bones were perfect. The balance sheet was a disaster. That gap between bones and balance sheet is exactly what distressed debt investors live for.
Two Years of Ruthless Discipline
Oaktree’s playbook was never complicated. It was simply executed with a ferocity that Italian football had never experienced. The fund moved immediately on three fronts.
Financial surgery. Costs were cut hard and fast. The wage bill, one of the most bloated in Serie A, was restructured. Player trading became a discipline, not an emergency measure. Oaktree hired Alessandro Antonello and kept Giuseppe Marotta as the two power centers, giving the football operation autonomy while maintaining iron control over the spreadsheets. They did not panic-sell stars. They let the club operate. But every euro in, every euro out, was tracked with the precision of a credit fund managing a distressed portfolio.
Revenue acceleration. The results were dramatic. For the 2024 to 2025 season, Inter posted 567 million euros in revenue, a record for Serie A. Broadcasting was the engine: 299 million euros from domestic and European competitions. Matchday: 117 million euros. Commercial: 165 million euros. EBITDA reached 160 million dollars. The club was approaching the moment Oaktree had circled on the calendar since day one: operativa breakeven, operational breakeven, targeted for the 2026 to 2027 season. And crucially, according to Football Benchmark’s 2026 edition of its annual European club valuation study, Inter recorded a historic profit last season, the first in recent memory, which directly powered the valuation surge.
Institutional credibility. Oaktree understood that in football, reputation is revenue. They did not strip the club for parts. They did not flip it to the first buyer. They let Inzaghi build. They signed BBVA as sleeve sponsor. They showed up at forums, spoke to the press, navigated Italian politics. For a distressed debt fund that had never owned a football club before, the operational maturity was remarkable.
The Number That Defines the Era: 2.1 Billion Euros
On 28 May 2026, Football Benchmark published the eleventh edition of its annual study on European club enterprise valuations. The headline: Inter Milan has crossed the 2 billion euro threshold for the first time, reaching an enterprise value of exactly 2.137 billion euros. That is a 25 percent increase in a single year, the largest jump among Italian clubs and one of the largest across all of European football, surpassed only by Aston Villa and Barcelona.
To understand what that number means, look at where Inter stood a decade ago: valued at less than 500 million euros before the Zhang family arrived. By 2022, they had reached one billion. Now, under Oaktree, they have more than doubled that in four years. The trajectory is not accidental. It is the direct result of combining three Serie A titles in six years, two Champions League finals, three Coppa Italia trophies, record revenues, and, for the first time, financial sustainability.
Andrea Sartori, CEO of Football Benchmark, put it precisely: “Today’s Inter reminds me a lot of pre-Ronaldo Juventus, in terms of sporting success and financial sustainability. It is no coincidence that the CEO is the same, Beppe Marotta, backed by strong ownership.” The comparison is pointed. Juventus in those years was the most admired club operation in Italy. Inter, under Oaktree, has become that.
Inter now leads every Italian club in enterprise value. Juventus and Milan sit level at 1.8 billion euros each. Napoli is at 967 million. Roma at 730 million. Atalanta at 638 million. Inter has created, in Sartori’s words, a “significant gap”between itself and its Italian rivals. That gap is the Oaktree premium: the premium paid by markets for a club that wins, earns, and no longer bleeds cash.
The Italian Problem and the European Abyss
The Football Benchmark report contains a warning that every Italian football official should read slowly. The gap between Inter, at 2.1 billion euros, and the tenth-ranked club in Europe, Chelsea, at 3 billion euros, is still almost one billion euros. Only one Italian club, Juventus in 2022, has ever made it into the European top ten. Four clubs now exceed 5 billion euros in enterprise value: Real Madrid, Barcelona, Manchester City, Manchester United. Real Madrid, powered by the new Bernabeu, has grown 23 percent in a single year and is approaching 8 billion euros.
Sartori’s conclusion is unambiguous: “Without modern, multi-functional stadiums, clubs cannot progress significantly. The Italian market remains quite stagnant. The chasm created by European football’s elite must serve as a warning.” This is why the new San Siro is not a vanity project. It is an existential necessity if Inter is to close the gap with Europe’s elite in the next decade.
The Stadium: The Asset That Changes Everything
On 30 September 2025, after an almost twelve-hour council debate, the City of Milan voted to sell il Meazza, San Siro, to AC Milan and FC Internazionale for 197 million euros. Seventy-seven years of municipal ownership ended in a single night. The clubs together will invest more than one billion euros in building a new 71,500-seat arena, designed by Foster + Partners and MANICA Architecture, targeting a 2030 to 2031 opening ahead of Euro 2032, which Italy co-hosts with Turkey.
The stadium is not just a building. It is the next valuation event.
Today, Inter earns around 80 million euros per year from matchday. The new stadium, with premium hospitality, naming rights, concerts, year-round retail, and tourism, is projected to generate up to 180 million euros per year for each club. Football Benchmark’s own data makes the structural gap visceral: Inter currently earns 41 euros per seat per event. PSG earns 137. Real Madrid earns 124. Even Juventus at their Ronaldo-era peak reached 73. The new stadium is the mechanism that closes that gap. And when it closes, the valuation model re-rates entirely.
There is, as in every Italian story worth telling, un problema. Prosecutors have opened a formal inquiry into the San Siro sale process, with allegations that alternative bidders were unfairly excluded from the tender. The clubs and the Milan mayor have pushed back hard. The investigation is ongoing. Construction is scheduled to begin in 2027. Marotta himself said it publicly: “In the last fifteen years, fifty stadiums were built in Europe. Only three were modernized in Italy.” The new San Siro is a race between ambition and bureaucracy. In Italy, that race rarely ends predictably.
Enter Brookfield: The Plot Thickens
And then, just as Oaktree’s Inter story was reaching its most profitable chapter, the corporate landscape shifted again. In August 2026, Brookfield Corporation, the Canadian alternative investment giant, completed its full acquisition of Oaktree, purchasing the remaining 26 percent stake held by founders Howard Marks and Bruce Karsh for approximately 3 billion dollars, valuing all of Oaktree at 11.5 billion dollars. Oaktree manages assets worth 225 billion dollars. Brookfield manages roughly four times that.
Technically, Inter Milan is now under Canadian ownership. Practically, nothing has changed yet. Oaktree remains operationally autonomous within Brookfield. Katherine Ralph, Alejandro Cano, and Max Catanese, the three Oaktree executives who have run Inter since May 2024, continue to do so. The 99.6 percent stake in the club remains in Oaktree’s portfolio.
But the medium-term calculus has shifted. Brookfield is not a distressed debt fund with a philosophy of patient ownership. It is a capital allocator with a mandate to deploy and return. Italian football finance expert Marco Bellinazzo of Il Sole 24 Ore has said plainly what the market is now discussing openly: Oaktree and Brookfield are assessing the possibility of selling Inter entirely. The asking price? More than two to three billion euros, and likely significantly higher once the new stadium is operational and the revenue numbers are rerating.
What Is Inter Actually Worth?
This is the question that will define the next chapter, and the answer depends entirely on which lens you use.
The current lens. Football Benchmark places Inter at 2.1 billion euros enterprise value in May 2026. CNBC’s parallel valuation puts the club at 16th globally by total revenue, with 581 million dollars in annual revenue and a 20 percent one-year value increase. Both methodologies agree on the direction: up, fast.
The forward lens. With the stadium operational, matchday revenue doubles. With naming rights sold, add another 20 to 30 million euros per year. With the Champions League consistently accessible, broadcasting income stabilizes above 300 million euros annually. A club running at 700 to 750 million euros in revenue, with low debt, a modern stadium, and a global fanbase, trades at multiples of four to six times revenue in today’s football market. That puts Inter between three and four billion euros on a forward basis, and Oaktree knows it.
The deal thesis lens. Oaktree entered this trade by lending 275 million euros at 12 percent interest. They received an entire football club when the borrower could not pay back 395 million euros. If they sell Inter for three billion euros, the return on that 395 million euro basis is extraordinary by any measure in the history of sport finance. This is not just a good deal. It is possibly the greatest single trade in the history of football ownership.
The Italian Question Nobody Wants to Answer
Marotta’s comment at the Football Business Forum landed like a confession and a provocation at the same time: “Just think, two of the most important clubs in Italy are foreign-owned. That means that the Italian system is not capable of supporting elite sport.”
He is right, and it stings precisely because it is true. Inter and AC Milan, the two clubs that define Milanese identity in the world, are assets of American and Canadian financial engineering. The great Italian football families could not hold on. The capital requirements of modern elite football exceed what domestic ownership can sustain without a stadium, without a modern revenue base, without private equity discipline.
And yet the Football Benchmark report offers the Italian football world a sliver of hope wrapped in a hard truth: Inter’s growth is real, it is substantial, and “it still has significant room for improvement.” The club is not at its ceiling. It is at the beginning of its financial maturity. The next phase, stadium revenues, naming rights, and global brand development, could push Inter from 2.1 billion euros to 3.5 or even 4 billion euros over the next five to seven years. That is the prize Oaktree and Brookfield are weighing against the clock.
Sometimes the best thing that can happen to a great Italian institution is to be rescued by someone who has no sentimental attachment to it whatsoever.
What Comes Next
The exit scenario is not immediate. The stadium project is the value unlock, and it will not be complete until 2030 at the earliest. A sale before the stadium opens would leave significant value on the table. The rational play is to hold through the stadium opening, demonstrate the new revenue numbers for one or two seasons, and then sell into a market where the asset is de-risked, performing, and priced accordingly.
The buyer, when the time comes, will be a sovereign wealth vehicle, another fund, or a consortium from the Gulf, the United States, or Asia. Italian football has become too expensive for Italian money. The next owner of Inter Milan, like the current one, will almost certainly not speak Italian.
The nerazzurri faithful can console themselves with this: whoever buys the club will inherit a machine that Oaktree built well. Financially disciplined. Operationally sound. Moving into a new stadium. Running at record revenue. With 21 Scudetti on the wall and a squad capable of competing for a Champions League title.
The best deal in football is about to become the most expensive club in Italian history. The only question is who writes the check, and when.