Silvio Berlusconi: A political laboratory built on the grounds of the AC Milan stadium | sports

On the afternoon of July 18, 1986, a helicopter appeared in the rainy Milanese sky while he was ride of the valkyries from Wagner. The apparatus descended, and while the columns were still raising dust in the old Milanese stadium, the stars of the team, bought a few months ago, began to descend the stairs …

On the afternoon of July 18, 1986, a helicopter appeared in the rainy Milanese sky while he was ride of the valkyries from Wagner. He touched the device, and while the pods were still gathering dust in the old Milan Arena, the stars of the team, the stylish businessman in Italy, the owner of a new media empire, began to descend the stairs. Fininvest (the parent company) is called Mediaset). A club that went bankrupt shortly before and struggled woefully in the second division. Milan has nothing to do with what one can imagine today. It was so bad that her former boss, Giuseppe Farina, hired Milanello to celebrate the wedding and christening. That afternoon, however, it forever changed the team’s luck and history calcium. And maybe Italy too.

Berlusconi is a Rosetta stone for deciphering almost every phenomenon of modern Italy. But it is also a synthesis of the importance of football in the public life of the country and how the stadium can serve to decipher the interests and desires of a large part of the population. The owner of Mediaset realized that the euphoria, networking, and collective success of soccer was the perfect vehicle for riding into other public spheres. It could be said that he was prime minister thanks to his record of service as president of Milan.

And Berlusconi bought the club in 1986, after his failed attempt to acquire Inter Milan, from the Farina family for 20 billion lire (10 million euros). The club’s sporting glory at the time was a wasteland. But he invested and immediately chose a new kind of football with legendary and counter-cultural teams in Italy. Catenaccio, where the trainers like Saki were Martians. He won five Champions Leagues – out of his seven – and built a winning machine that was the envy of the world over. The Italians thought that if he could, how could he not put the seventh world economy back into orbit after years of stagnation?

He was passionate about sports, competition and above all the business it generates. Life, politics and business in the twenty-first century will be Displays Or they won’t be, the telecoms great believed. At the end of the eighties he felt that the European Cup was dying. The old player challenged UEFA long before the triumvirate of the Botafomero apprentice: a stake that led to the current Champions League. It can be said that all this was a matter of money. But in the first ten years of his tenure, Berlusconi played in five Champions League or European Cup finals, from which he returned three times. He won eight international titles, as well as three European Super Cups and two Intercontinental Cups. Paris Saint-Germain achieved the sheikhs’ Champions League final, unprecedented in 12 years.

The Milan extravaganza was the soundtrack to the best years calcium Italian, where the club model was closely associated with the luck of the businessman who bought it. Good, handsome, magnetic players who have introduced the brand to Milan and Italy internationally. It was the golden years. Until there was a shortage of money in the fund and the strength of other leagues, such as the Spanish, began to diminish in strength Rossoneri. Milan’s failures led to the chronic decline of the team and its president, and were also affected by the global financial crisis and the troika’s persecution of his political work. And so Berlusconi, so affected by it all and worried about the economic losses the team was causing, lost his desire to go down to the locker room to tell jokes up the skirt. Too many scandals, thousands of political chaos, countless legal challenges.

No one in the family wanted to deal with the club anymore and they decided to get rid of it. But the last trick was missing, which was to put him on a Chinese ghost for 740 million (including his debts). No one was able to find out who this businessman was. La Gazzetta dello SportIn fact, he went to China to ring his doorbell, but found no one. The man, coincidentally, had already paid almost all the money and then disappeared. The shadow of money laundering, like many other times, flew over the process. Then the club passed into the hands of an American investment fund, which succeeded in raising a new fund scudetto. And here his relationship with football ended. or almost.

Berlusconi is 84 years old. He became a vegetarian, lost 10 kilos, had a girlfriend of 30, longed for the smell of wet grass, the sweat of the locker room and the off-color jokes with the players, he decided to let himself be persuaded by his friend Adriano Galliani to get Calcio Monza, the club that was signed Bought it just three years ago when it was struggling in the third division, choking on debt. Two years ago, it ratified its promotion to Serie A for the first time on the centenary of its history. A feat that he repeated day after day until he finished the season eleventh in the classification of the main tournament in Italy.

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