In the beginning they were bars, tobacco shops, small shops of various kinds, at most houses. Until the mid-80s, the average footballer at the end of his career invested his money in this way. Many continued their football activity, reinventing themselves as coaches or commentators in the (few) sports programs of the time. Someone, on the other hand, even ended up living thanks to the new businesses, certainly not as profitable as the previous one but nonetheless respectable. However, the 90s changed football and, fatally, footballers. Much higher salaries (up to excess) have turned football players into real entrepreneurs, capable of investing large sums of money in anything.
The problem, however, is that many of them didn't have (and still don't have) an idea of what it means to be an entrepreneur. And so in recent years we have witnessed the most disparate investments: clothing chains and restaurants (Vieri, Brocchi, Maldini, Cannavaro, Gattuso and Zanetti, just to name the most famous), real estate companies (Cannavaro and Vieri again, as well as Del Piero), discos (Abbiati, Brocchi and Gattuso), fishmongers (Gattuso again) up to pharmaceutical products (Cannavaro), cereal crops (Del Piero), quilts and duvets (Buffon) and elusive Peruvian black marble mines (Baggio!! !).
How did these investments go? To put it mildly, let's say not so well, except in some cases.
BFC&co, A 14 MILLION EURO BANKRUPTCY.
ANOTHER LEAK IN THE WATER OF THE AWARD-WINNING BROCCHI – VIERI COMPANY.
The latest bankruptcy, in chronological order, is that of BFC & co, a wholesale company that for a few years has attempted to sell products of all kinds: from kitchen utensils to garden items, passing from fitness materials to lamps, power tools and various household items. The protagonists of the story are two football players – friends, Cristian Brocchi and Christian Vieri. The idea was to import low-cost products from abroad and then make them profitable in Italy, but things didn't exactly go like this.
"The decline in consumption has made it impossible to continue the business" reads the report on the balance sheet for 2009, as demonstrated by the 10 million debts (6 with the banks) recorded in the latest balance sheet. In a nutshell, bankruptcy, for which the sole director Fabio Arcuri, already in business with Brocchi and Vieri in Baci&Abbracci, will have to answer to the Bankruptcy Court. But if Arcuri cries, Cristian and Bobo certainly aren't laughing: owners of 50% of the shares (25% each), this story will cost them a lot too. The two are not new to entrepreneurial disappointments. In the past, it fell to PBC Credit & Finance to go into liquidation. Is it time to let it go?
BAGGIO, COSTACURTA, ROSSI AND CARRERA THE EXCELLENT SCAMMERS.
BUT ALSO MANCINI, DONADONI, TASSOTTI AND GALLI….
But if Brocchi and Vieri have had to deal with bankruptcy, some have had it even worse in the past. Because it's one thing if a company doesn't go well, it's another if you end up the victim of a financial scam. At the beginning of the 90s, the then "Divin pigtail" Roberto Baggio was literally made fun of by a gang of unscrupulous crooks. The former Ballon d'Or, in the company of Alessandro Costacurta, Massimo Carrera, Sebastiano Rossi and many other names in the world of football, invested almost 7 billion old lire in Imisa, a company that had bought the rights to extract the black marble in an imaginary mine of Los Dos Paisanos, in Peru. A colossal scam, given that according to the investigators of the time the amount of billions raised was enormous (83!). The money was all sent to New Bank Limited of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines (Caribbean), an off-shore credit institution not authorized to operate in Italian territory. The mine obviously didn't exist, and the mockery was so sensational that it "forced" Baggio not to even claim the lost money.
Less sensational, but still important scams, also affected Roberto Mancini, Roberto Donadoni, Mauro Tassotti and Giovanni Galli. The current Manchester City coach lost 1,4 billion of the old lire (with him also Michelangelo Rampulla, who got away with "only" 20 million lire) in the crak of Cofiri, a Tarquinia financial company, which one day disappeared mysteriously.
A similar mishap also for Tassotti, Donadoni and Galli, who invested their money in a finance company (500 million lire for the first, 1 billion for the other two) which closed its doors from one day to the next. The chronicles tell that Galli's wife fainted in shock after a lawyer, called to manage the bankruptcy of the group, warned the three that their money was practically pulverized.
