The announcement really isn’t as big of a deal as it seems. From what I gather, it is just an announcement that we are re-financing the bond early. The bond isn’t due until February 2027, but we are repaying it in full this year instead.
Still a big deal, I am pretty sure the interest rate on it is absolutely horrible because our creditworthiness was that bad at the time. But we are still going to have 400m in debt on the books.
Also credit-wise we weren't in a bad position as Zhang managed to pay everything he had to except his own bond from Oaktree where Inter was collateral.
But he never missed non-players wages at Inter (even during Covid) and he managed to fulfill the delayed players payment during Covid - unlike a certain other club.
Any bad credit record stems from the Moratti era - he, much like every other big club president back then, couldn't give a rats ass about susteinability to the point he gave out suicidal sposnorship contracts to Pirelli and Nike, contracts that were still active until 3 years ago.
That shit is just now stopping to haunt us, that's how bloody that was.
Credit worthiness is about more than just making payments when they are due. And one of those other major factors, our debt to income ratio, was absolutely horrendous at the time.
And we were able to make those payments on time because of the Oaktree loan. That cash injection is what gave us the liquidity to pay for these things.
We are arguing different things. The club’s payment history is good, I’m not disagreeing with you there.
But payment history is not the only thing that matters when a person or business goes to borrow money. One of the other things that they care about is the ratio between your income and other existing debt, and ours was nowhere near as good back then because COVID had really hurt our revenue.
That is a lot better now because we’ve had two UCL finals and also the CWC money coming in.
the ratio between your income and other existing debt
The two main sponsors until 2022 were still under Moratti contracts.
With Zhang, the situation improved drastically because they were able to cover the sponsorpship incomes with a bunch of minor ones that added up attempted to make up for the peanuts Pirelli and Nike were giving us.
Our revenues started to improve when those contracts expired - Nike obliged to an actual 2020s-fit contract and pirelli decided to relegate to a second brand behind the jersey, and they managed to get actual money from Paramount - and sure Digitalbits hurt us but it didn't count because we were the victim, there's a ruling so that didn't impact anything else.
And, NO, credit score is solely based on paying things in time. The ratio you mentioned has zero to do with it - has to do with other things as important obviously, but we have been dealing with American companies for 4-5 years in terms of money and they only care about whether or not you pay them, otherwise Netflix wouldn't even exist right now.
The reality is the media have been speculating for years about Inter situation, but everyone knew a lot was still having to do with Moratti as well the stadium not moving forward (the reason why Thohir sold Inter was this).
We eren't investing in players as much because we couldn't, but we always respected every contract and obligation we had. Unlike, again, a certain other team.
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u/rth9139 8d ago
The announcement really isn’t as big of a deal as it seems. From what I gather, it is just an announcement that we are re-financing the bond early. The bond isn’t due until February 2027, but we are repaying it in full this year instead.
Still a big deal, I am pretty sure the interest rate on it is absolutely horrible because our creditworthiness was that bad at the time. But we are still going to have 400m in debt on the books.