Ex-Goldman Sachs ED and girlfriend of Michael Ballack joins a crowdfunding company

Natacha Tannous, an ex-Goldman Sachs executive director (ED) who's better known as the girlfriend footballer Michael Ballack has followed a cause closer to her heart and joined a sports crowdfunding company.

Tannous works for Tifosy, a crowdfunding site which enables users to back professional sports clubs in return for equity, rewards or debt. She'll be leading the company's expansion into Germany and France.

She spent over eight years in banking, both at Deutsche Bank and Goldman Sachs before leaving Goldman in the middle of last year. Tannous says she loves finance and that her hero is Warren Buffett. However, she left Goldman's equities trading division in 2016 because she wanted a change. "I've done M&A. I've done markets (and trading which is quite the intense side of markets), and I wanted something where I can have a bigger impact than buying and selling paper (stocks)."

At Tifosy, she says she'll be able to combine her interest in finance with her passion for sport: "It's ideal."

Past successes at Tifosy include a £270k investment into an academy for Portsmouth FC and £100k for a charity dedicated to Fulham footballer George Cohen.

Tannous has been dating Ballack since around 2015. A former Chelsea midfielder and captain of the German football team, he's one of Germany's top goal scorers ever, but has been in retirement since 2012.

Tannous also runs a Youtube channel where she offers tuition on factorizing quadratic equations and interviews a combination of hedge fund managers and football icons (Ballack included). Tannous' charms are such that when she interviewed Warren Buffett in 2011 he got down on one knee and proposed. 

Contact: sbutcher@efinancialcareers.com

Photo credit: Exit by Quinn Dombrowski is licensed under CC BY 2.0.