The Rise of Milan: Sacchi, Berlusconi, and the Influence of Football

In the 1990s, Milan took over football. Arrigo Sacchi was a revolutionary who changed the culture of soccer Italian and the principles of pressure creating a team that defended forward, that attacked whoever had the ball, that crushed the rivals like flies against the touch line. He was admired and imitated, achieving the best thing a coach can achieve through a team: influencing forever.

If in football terms that Milan belonged to Sacchi, in political and social matters it was, indisputably, Berlusconi’s, who bought that Milan for greater personal glory and turned football success into a promotional platform with political objectives. Sacchi may have changed football, but Berlusconi changed the way of understanding politics. He was not the first to know the advertising possibilities of football, but he was the one who did it with the most intelligence and impudence. When football was already very popular, but still somewhat redneck, Milan walked around with a glamor until then unknown. The players dressed like they were for a fashion show, they were the first sports delegation to stay at the exclusive Ritz hotel in Madrid and the players sold success every time they looked at the television screens. Meanwhile, Berlusconi managed his own image using all the principles of business marketing.

It was a new Agnelli, but with big differences. The Agnellis exhibited an almost aristocratic power; there was a mystery in the entire family that made them unattainable. Berlusconi had too much sense of spectacle to appreciate the advantages of mystery. If he had to visit the players in Milanello (Milan’s sports city) he did it by helicopter, interrupting training and with great journalistic expectations. His television channels made the training a mine from which he extracted money and popular prestige. Furthermore, as we know, he flaunted an unapologetic machismo by exhibiting young and beautiful women as another demonstration of his power. His electorate seemed delighted, perhaps because we had fully entered the society of the spectacle and he had understood it sooner and better than anyone.

He exuded authority, so much so that when he turned it into political capital, he became accustomed to abusing that power. But at short distances he was not a monster, on the contrary, he had the sympathy of the gambler, the classist humor of the nouveau riche and the cynicism of those who feel above good and evil. Berlusconi was a walking spectacle.

One of the moments of greatest glory for that Milan occurred in Barcelona on May 24, 1989, in the final of the still European Cup against Steaua Bucharest. Before the game, Berlusconi passed by the chapel at the exit of the Camp Nou locker room tunnel and stayed there, collected, for a long time. When he later passed by the locker room, he told Sacchi that there was a chapel in the stadium and that he came from there:

—Did you go to pray, president? Sacchi asked.

“No,” Berlusconi replied, “I went to tell him that they are communists.”

There is Berlusconi in full body, taking advantage of the divine and the human with his unalterable smile.

That final was won 4-0 by Milan in one of those matches in which Milan and football itself reached their full potential. To the forcefulness of the result they added a game of unsurpassed appeal. The individuals were inspired and the team functioned like an orchestra. The next day the Gazzetta dello Sport titled: “This is how you play in paradise.” Surely without knowing what the owner of Milan had whispered to the owner of paradise.

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