The Milano Rossoblu hockey club will make a final decision in April on whether to join the KHL hockey league, club president Ico Migliore told RIA Novosti.
The long-mooted addition of the Italians to the nascent competition hangs on their financial security, and Migliore is loathed to enter his club next season without guarantees it can remain long term.
"The final decision, in my view, should be made by the end of April to leave time to equip the team [before the start of the 2012-13 season]," Migliore said in a recent interview.
"We don't want to enter for a year and then disappear. For us this is a long-term project that we need to approach very seriously."
"One step remains - to solve the financing issue, and this is exactly what we're working on," he said.
His club's addition to the KHL would mark a significant westward expansion of a league that has dreams of competing with the NHL in terms of global prestige. Of the current 24 teams, 23 are from the former Soviet Union, with Slovak club Lev Propad the only outsider.
The KHL requires teams to be financially stable to join, and one way Milano plans to generate additional income is to tour Italy for home games.
Migliore wants to take Milano's domestic games to five other cities: Turin, to make use of the 2006 Olympic stadium, Rome, Bologna, Catania and Cortina. Half of the games will be played in Milan, a co-host of the 1994 IIHF World Championships won by Canada, with the rest shared out among the other cities, Migliore said.
Hockey watchers in Italy have noted that the 2006 Turin Games failed to increase the popularity of the game there as was widely hoped, and that the KHL provides a second shot at that.
The Rossoblu have a rich hockey history, winning 15 Italian championships and two Spengler Cups since being founded in 1924. They play in the second-tier Serie A2, where they are in the playoffs for promotion to the top-tier Serie A.
