Finally, Vittorio returned the phone to his pocket.
Because I was too embarrassed by my ignorance of our destination, I didn’t ask the obvious, clarifying questions. But soon, Vittorio had told me enough that I realized we were going to Milan’s training grounds, a facility that goes by the name Milanello.
“When will we be going back to the city? I have appointments this afternoon,” I asked.
“Who knows?” He turned around in the front seat and smiled broadly. “Don’t worry. The AC Milan press oªce will take very good care of you.” Vittorio slapped my knee. HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE NEW OLIGARCHS
AC Milan likes to cultivate an image of glamour.
Milanello, even in its lush-sounding name, exudes it in spades. With the low-slung buildings surrounded by trellised terraces, a rose garden, and beautifully landscaped groves, it wouldn’t have surprised me if Milanello had belonged to a viscount with a sizeable trust fund.
“You will take a stroll around,” Vittorio announced, placing a hand on my back. “But first lunch.” After ordering me an espresso at the team bar, he guided me into an executive dining room where teenage players were taking leisurely lunches in high-backed modern chairs.
The entire building had been impeccably decorated.
Doors are painted a lacquered red with black trim, the team’s colors. White couches glow in their minimalist surroundings like the ones at an Ian Schrager hotel.
After lunch Vittorio sat me in a room with French doors opening up on the Milanello campus. “Wait here,” he told me. Two days earlier, in Manchester, Milan had won their sixth European Champions
League title, sealed in penalty kicks after 120 minutes of scoreless soccer. As I waited for Vittorio, Milan’s tri-umphant coach Carlo Ancelotti entered, carrying the team’s massive, newly acquired trophy. He was followed by a horde of applauding maids and other Milanello employees. While he took photos with them, the team began trickling into the room. I had opened up a book and made a pretense of reading. But in truth Vittorio had stage-managed a scene that most Italian men would have killed to watch. A parade of the world’s greatest players—Manuel Rui Costa, Paolo Maldini, Alessandro Nesta—walked up to me and shook my
hand. They took turns hugging Ancelotti and lifting the cup. They were in an exuberant mood, and, after my brief interactions with these gods of football, so was I.
I went to find Vittorio, who was sitting at the team’s bar drinking another co¤ee.
“One favor. Can I go to tomorrow night’s game?
Can you help me get a credential or ticket?” I desperately wanted to see Milan play in their futuristic home stadium, the San Siro. And the next evening they played Roma in the finals of the Coppa Italia, a year-long tournament that yields the second most important title in the country.
“Come on!” he told me, shrugging his shoulders.
“The AC Milan press oªce can get you whatever you want.”
While nobody can be sure how Juventus gets such nice treatment from referees, soccer pundits have a good sense of how Milan does it: It manipulates the press. The club is famous for the sort of openness that they gave me. Where Juventus only reluctantly lets its players speak to reporters, and sometimes not even that, Milan releases its team to schmooze for hours.
Even Berlusconi, famously distant from political reporters, will always field questions about his beloved Milan. Standing with Israeli president Ariel Sharon, fresh from a discussion about Mid-East peace, Berlusconi once began talking about his lack of interest in buying David Beckham from Manchester United.
I’ve traveled with the White House and American presidential campaigns, but not even Karl Rove and Karen Hughes play the media with the skill of Milan. HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE NEW OLIGARCHS
When I went to the Coppa Italia finals, a press oªcer greeted me at a gate with a ticket. She kissed me on both cheeks and promised to keep tabs on me. The Milan press box, midfield in open air, truly gives the scribblers the best seats in the house. Pretty women in blazers with the Milan insignia—there were about as many of them as reporters—continually pass through the box, like stewardesses on an airliner, asking after your comfort.
As a television man, Berlusconi has always been obsessed with surface appearance and seduction of the audience. This is why he labors so assiduously to maintain a year-round suntan, and why he wears double-breasted suits perfectly tailored to obscure his Napoleonic stature. At the Milanello training ground, the head of the facility spoke to me at great length about Berlusconi’s interest in the minute details of landscaping. He had insisted on the rose garden and ordered the terraces. When he comes to visit, the landscaping crew removes the cars from the front lot so that Berlusconi can more fully enjoy the beauty of the grounds.
But this aestheticism is merely one feature of Berlusconi’s knack for producing great spectacle—a hallmark of the new oligarchs. This talent can be witnessed in AC Milan, his greatest spectacle of all.
Although the team still isn’t as o¤ensive-minded as the specimens that can be found in Latin America or Spain, Milan represents a major break with the long Italian history of defensive-minded catenaccio. When Berlusconi bought the club in the mid-eighties, he imported Dutchmen like Marco Van Basten and the dreadlocked Ruud Gullit and Frank Rijkaard, players with an irrepressible instinct to move forward in attack.
The whole team was built to entertain and play a brand of soccer more beautiful than anything Juventus could deliver. And in the end, it delivered Champions League titles and Scudettos, the Italian championship trophy.
Sitting in the San Siro, watching the finals of the Coppa Italia, I had a glimpse of how powerful and touching this spectacle can be. After the match, when the team had already racked up its second major trophy of the week, the lights in the stadium went dim. The darkness highlighted
