Champions Connect Podcast

About Champions Connect Podcast

WHATS UP?! Im Luca Camilleri. You were the Disruptor in the Classroom? Good!!! Now we’re helping you become the Disruptor in your Industry.

Publisher

Luca Camilleri

Category

education

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

1 Feb 2025

Latest episode

9 Oct 2026

Latest episodes

43 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   9 Oct 2026

   What Family Business Taught Me (And Cost Me) | Simon De Cesare

   What does it really take to run a €300 million family business from one street in Malta? Simon De Cesare is the CEO of Eden Leisure Group, the De Cesare family business behind the InterContinental Malta, Eden Cinemas, Casino Malta, The Eden and 89.7 Bay. Partners: https://bestgymsmalta.com/ https://alliance.mt/ His grandparents opened the Eden Rock hotel in Sliema in 1967. In 1980 his father and uncle moved into St George's Bay, when it was a valley with a couple of houses, and opened Styx, the nightclub Paceville grew up around. Today the group has three hotels, well over a thousand staff, €318 million in assets and €56.1 million in revenue last year. Simon joined in 2000 and has been CEO since 2018. In this conversation he explains how the business really works. Why his real competitor is the €10 in your pocket, not another cinema. How you open a casino you don't understand, and why its board meetings are about keeping the wrong money out. Exactly how cinemas make money, when a €9.90 ticket loses 18% to VAT and up to 60% to the film distributor. Why you get paid before you do the work, why you never surprise your bank, and why the wave of new hotel beds coming to Malta terrifies him. He also takes you through the businesses they closed. Malta's only ice rink, his first job. Bay Mobile, a phone network sunk by a partner's technology. Why a new business gets about two years, who decides when to stop, and how it feels when the room tells you it is not working. What he feels once it is decided is relief. But the moment that stays with you has nothing to do with money. While he was pushing the voco hotel and The Eden over the line, his kids told him he looked grey, that he sighed all the time, that he was no fun to be around. The tests he did at 50 scared him into changing his life. A 25 item bucket list followed: Kilimanjaro, 28 years after his family failed to reach the top together, freediving to 33 metres, and Mont Blanc next. And when Luca asks what he wishes someone had told him as a teenager, his answer takes one line: that there were other options than going into the family business. Now his son is facing the same choice. Everyone sees what a family business builds. Almost nobody talks about what it takes out of the person running it. ______________________ 00:00 - 03:20 - From One Hotel To A Whole Street 03:20 - 05:47 - Your Real Competitor Is The €10 In Your Pocket 05:47 - 08:54 - How To Find A Gap In The Market 08:54 - 09:48 - Why Malta Is A Copycat Country 09:48 - 11:30 - The Ice Rink That Failed 11:30 - 15:03 - New Laws, A Casino & Anti Money Laundering 15:03 - 17:50 - How To Test A Business Idea Before You Invest 17:50 - 21:57 - Why Arcades Want Your Card, Not Your Cash 21:57 - 23:04 - Where The Best Business Ideas Come From 23:04 - 27:02 - The Two Year Rule & Closing Bay Mobile 27:02 - 29:57 - Who Decides To Close A Business 29:57 - 31:36 - Calculated Risk: Know Your Numbers 31:36 - 34:12 - Too Many Hotels In Malta? 34:12 - 38:19 - AI, Jobs & What He Tells His Son 38:19 - 40:52 - Get Paid Before You Do The Work 40:52 - 45:33 - How Do Cinemas Make Money? 45:33 - 48:04 - Banks, Debt & Surviving COVID 48:04 - 49:33 - €56 Million Revenue: Where It Comes From 49:33 - 51:29 - The Business That Kept Him Up At Night 51:29 - 55:34 - Stress, Health & A Wake Up Call At 50 55:34 - 1:00:20 - Kilimanjaro, Freediving & A 25 Item Bucket List 1:00:20 - 1:01:25 - Work Life Balance Has To Include You 1:01:25 - 1:03:12 - Taking Over The Family Business: Was It A Choice? 1:03:12 - 1:04:54 - Regret, Teaching & Giving Back 1:04:54 - 1:06:11 - Journal Question: The Apology He Never Gave 1:06:11 - end - Outro ______________________ Subscribe and follow Champions Connect: YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@ChampionsConnectYT Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/championsconnect_/ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@championsconnect_ Site: teamchampionsconnect.com #FamilyBusiness #MaltaPodcast #ChampionsConnect

2. 

   24 Sept 2026

   People In Football Cannot Say What I Am About To Say | Michael Valenzia

   What does it cost to give eleven years of your life to a football club? Michael Valenzia was president of Birkirkara FC until he resigned in May 2026. He arrived in 2015 for what was meant to be a few months as team manager. He describes three bubbles in his life, his family, his business and the club, then admits without being asked that the club was always the first one. He calls that a sick thought. In this conversation he explains what a Maltese football club actually is. Not a company. A voluntary organisation turning over one and a half million euros, run by ten unpaid people, carrying forty fully paid professionals with no HR and no accounts department. He tells you why one in five Maltese players says they have been approached to fix a match, why he thinks the real number is higher, and why refusing to be bought made him enemies rather than allies. He tells the story of the phone call from his wife, screaming that their daughter was unresponsive, and what he said to his players from outside the hospital: go and win the game, I will deal with this. They lost. He missed one match in ten years, and people wrote that the president had abandoned his team. He walks through the fake transfer that nearly took two hundred thousand euros from the club. Real tickets, a real hospital, an agent who had done deals worth millions. It collapsed over a request for seven thousand euros, caught by a volunteer who was paid nothing. On the call, the man on the other end refused to switch to video and started laughing. Then he takes you through eight days in May. A league decider lost. 187 unread messages on Mother's Day. A stranger phoning at half six in the morning to say one of his players had been out until five. A cup final handed to the one referee his club had asked in writing never to officiate them again. A red card after five minutes. His daughter hit in the stands. Losing in the last five minutes, driving home, and collapsing on his wife and daughter at the front door. But the moment that stays with you is smaller than any of it. Three weeks before this conversation he was in a swimming pool with his nine year old, throwing a ball. She said: Dada, you are always laughing now. He asked what she meant. She said: because you used to come home sad. He brought a winner's medal to the studio and explained it has almost nothing to do with the cup. That year was the hardest of his life. In the end I won, he says, and I am not talking about football. This is not a football episode. It is an episode about what a man gives away without noticing, and who finally tells him. ABOUT CHAMPIONS CONNECT Champions Connect is Malta's home for the long, honest conversations you won't hear anywhere else. Hosted by Luca Camilleri, every episode sits down with the people shaping the island, the entrepreneurs, leaders, artists and changemakers, and goes past the headlines into the real story: the failures, the fears, the turning points, and the lessons hiding underneath the success.

New episodes every week. Watch on YouTube, listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts, and get inspired.

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3. 

   27 Aug 2026

   I've Never Met an Evil Person | Mark Laurence Zammit

   What if the man who has covered 14 years of crime on this island told you he has never met an evil person? Mark Laurence Zammit is Malta’s most influential Journalist. Before that he spent years at Xarabank under Peppi Azzopardi, where he learned his craft on the hardest stories in the country. In 14 years of journalism he has sat across from the people we read about in headlines, the ones the comment section calls monsters. He has never found one. In this conversation he explains how a story can be factually correct and still not be true. He breaks down the gap between accuracy and honesty, and why that gap is where the real damage happens. He talks about how we went from two news bulletins a day to a feed that never stops, and what that volume is doing to us emotionally. He explains why party media is loyal to the leader and not to the people. And he tells you the three questions you should ask before you believe anything you read. He tells the story that changed everything. A boy the whole country wanted locked away. A crime that made national news. Mark walked into the interview room expecting evil. By the end of that conversation he told himself: if I had gone through all of this, I would have probably done the same. That interview was blocked by court order. It never aired. But it rewired everything he believed. He describes the afternoon Daphne Caruana Galizia was killed by a car bomb in Bidnija. The text message that confirmed what nobody wanted to believe. And the quiet shift in his daily life since that day. He still checks under his car before work. He shares the story of a deepfake video that used his face and the Prime Minister's to promote a scam. People were about to invest real money. He spent a week glued to his phone telling everyone it was fake. His conclusion: the collapse of trust could end civilisation before climate change does. But the most striking moment had nothing to do with headlines or politics. It was a quiet statement from a man who has seen more of this country's darkness than most people ever will. After all of it, he says there are no evil people. Only good people who did very bad things. Only childhoods nobody asked about. Only systems that failed before the crime began. This is not a journalism episode. This is an episode about what you find when you sit across from the people everyone else has already judged. The most dangerous thing about a headline is not what it says. It is what it leaves out.

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