Zanetti: "Suning are ambitious and respect our history"

MILAN – Javier Zanetti attended the Lombardy Sports Journalists' Union annual award ceremony on Monday night to collect a prize on behalf of Jindong Zhang.

The Suning chairman was chosen as Personality of the Year, because “with his acquisition of a majority stake in F.C. Internazionale and the investment he is making he has opened new horizons for the Italian game”.

“I'd like to thank you for this award on behalf of the Zhang family – a family with great human values that has come to Italy and is now a part of Italian football. They've seen the potential in Inter to achieve something big and build something that can stand the test of time, not just in football,” vice president Zanetti said as he picked up the award.

"Suning are an ambitious group and they have a lot of respect for our club's history. I hope this is the start of many years of awards.

"Everyone who works at Inter has a very good feeling about our new owners and they're demonstrating just how ambitious they are. It takes time to build a team but we're putting everything we have into it so that we can obtain great results as soon as possible.

"We respect the coaches we had before but we're all delighted with the job [Stefano] Pioli is doing. He's a very experienced and capable coach. We've been involved in some evenly balanced matches recently and yesterday's defeat doesn't change our targets or alter our path. We have to win as many matches as we can and see where it takes us. We must keep focusing on our own path and look forward with confidence.

“Yesterday we played as Inter Forever and beat Roma Legends. It's important that we always honour the shirt.”