AS Bari Fans take out Newspaper Ad to Appeal to Russian Investors

By: Bob | March 20th, 2007

It works if you are desperately in need of a wife (or so I have been told) so why not give it a shot when your club is desperately in need of a new owner. Fans of the Italian Serie B club AS Bari have placed a classified ad in the Russian newspaper Izvestiya imploring Russia’s fat cats to consider purchasing their club and to save them from their misery.

In an open letter to Russia’s entrepreneurial crowd, the Bari fans say that now that their team is on the verge of being relegated to Serie C it is time to kick their current owner Vincenzo Matarreze to the curb. Through the magic that is Google translate:

Now that the team is on the verge of departure in a series of C Matarreze indicated a willingness to sell the club to anyone who wishes to receive it until the beginning of June and announced an indicative value of the transaction from 20 to 25 million euros. If the buyer is not found, the current owner “Bari” threatened to terminate funding for the club, which would deprive our city and state of the world’s most popular sport-football stadium and the St. Nicholas, 60 thousand visitors come to a halt.

We are 100% sure that the new owner of this club from Russia will be able not only to recoup their investment, but also benefit from the transaction and, more importantly, to be produced for thousands of fans of our team.

We encourage all those who believe in the benefit of investment in the development of sports, tourism and cultural exchange between our countries. Sincerely, fans played “Bari.”

Do you imagine that one of Russia’s new billionaires woke up this morning, opened the paper looking to find a good deal on some used furniture from IKEA and instead ended up thinking about buying an Italian football team? It could happen after all. it is a 100% guaranteed investment and is good for cross-cultural understanding. When you are as wealthy as some in the former Soviet Union you have to come up with creative ways to spend your money.

Thanks to Russian League Football czar Ivan for the tip. If he doesn’t post this week we can all just assume that he is the new owner of Bari.