lofted above their heads, spewing red smoke. Lasers focused a twirling image of the team’s cursive name and the European Cup hardware on the field. As classic rock anthems blared, with fans singing along, each player trotted onto the field through an inflatable tun-nel. The crowd would break from their singing to shout their names as they emerged. All around me, grown men grew teary. I’m told that this moment, as moving as I found it, couldn’t touch the truly epic spectacles that Berlusconi has produced over the years. Most famously, there was the episode dubbed “Apocalypse Now.” After Berlusconi bought the club, he introduced it by flying his players into the stadium on helicopters, with Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” blaring in the background.
At nearly every juncture in my dealings with Milan, I felt the organization’s manipulative touch. But why spend so much time trying to shape the opinions of the press? In Rome, I met a man called Mario Sconcerti HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE NEW OLIGARCHS
who explained the importance of winning over the media. Sconcerti has come at the issue from both sides.
He had edited the Corriere dello Sport, one of two daily national papers devoted largely to the coverage of soccer.
In 2001, he went on to run the day-to-day operations of the club Fiorentina, one of the more storied outfits in Italy. In his elegant, airy Roman apartment, inter-spersed among his floor-to-ceiling collection of modern art, he has a framed photo of angry Fiorentina fans holding up a banner filled with expletives directed at him.
Sconcerti has a reputation as a rebel in the chummy world of Italian soccer, a man who has just enough ego to speak truthfully about the power of the Agnellis and Berlusconi. Besides, he’s from Florence, and Floren-tines are famously skeptical about the fact that AC
Milan and Juventus have won so many championships, while their home team always seemed to be falling just short. If Sconcerti weren’t so respected, I would have found his view of the Italian game highly conspiratorial and too intricate to be plausible, the expression of his ticks and biases.
By Sconcerti’s estimate, the press can be manipulated to increase a team’s total by as much as six points, the di¤erence between a championship and second place. Once again, the manipulation hinges on pres-sure exerted on referees. He argues that the media can either turn away from or expose the preferential treatment that referees give to Juventus and Milan. If the press launches a crusade against a referee, it makes the referee extremely self-conscious. He will bend over backwards to avoid appearing biased, and may unconsciously bend even further than that. Watching Italian television, and shows like Il Processo, it is possible to see precisely how the media brings itself to bear on the refs. Sconcerti has done some of this manipulation himself. During the 2000
season, Sconcerti’s paper launched a campaign on behalf of Roma and Lazio. Every day, the Corriere dello Sport would rail against the favoritism shown to Berlusconi’s and Agnelli’s clubs. And at a certain point, Sconcerti and many others believe, they could see that the referees become more generous to Lazio and Roma. In 2000 and 2001 seasons, he humbly points out, the Roman teams won national championships. This is the rare opportunity when somebody has dared quantify the value of press manipulation. With Milan, it’s nearly impossible to pick out the areas where Berlusconi’s spin machine has produced favorable treatment. Sconcerti, however, is convinced that it exists. As we sat in his apartment and drank sparkling water, he listed the referees who have been hired by Berlusconi’s television networks as commentators, and the referees criticized on them.
It is easy to believe the worst about Berlusconi, in both soccer and life. But in part, Berlusconi raises suspicions because he doesn’t fit the classic archetype of the Italian elite. This can be seen from the start of his biography. In Italy nobody works summer jobs between school semesters, especially if they don’t need a salary to stave o¤ starvation. Even though Berlusconi hailed from a middle-class family, he paid his way through college and law school by toiling on his vacations, running a business that booked bands for cruise ships.
When he couldn’t find other acts, he crooned himself, HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE NEW OLIGARCHS
cultivating a Frank Sinatra persona. As an entrepre-neur, he always had a penchant for following an American model. He made his first major fortune building a suburb for yuppies outside Milan. His television empire owed its vast reach to the steady diet of Dallas and Falcon Crest that Berlusconi fed his audience.
While Berlusconi had been a major media mogul
before becoming a sports mogul, it was the purchase of the soccer club in 1986 that launched him to national prominence. When he entered politics in 1994, running for prime minister, the game undergirded his electoral strategy. In a matter of months, Berlusconi’s advertising firm Publitalia (one of his breathtaking array of holdings) went about the business of building him a political party. For the party’s base, it started with the several million fans of AC Milan. It converted supporters’ clubs into local headquarters for his party. Publitalia filched the party’s name from a soccer chant,
“Forza Italia”—“Go Italy!” In party literature, Publitalia dubbed the Forza Italia rank and file the “Azuri,” the same nickname given to the players on the national team for their blue uniforms.
Berlusconi invoked soccer so relentlessly because his club was in the middle of a spectacular run that included consecutive Champions League titles. He wanted to plant the idea in voters’ minds that he was a winner, at a time when the economy sputtered and all politicians in Italy seemed like corrupt losers. “We will make Italy like Milan,” he tirelessly repeated. There was also a populist brilliance to his use of soccer as a metaphor for society. It gave him
