III.
The Italian intelligentsia paints an ominous portrait of Silvio Berlusconi. To launch his early real estate projects, they assert, he indentured himself to the Mafia for seed money. Berlusconi only ran for political oªce, they allege, after his political patron fled to Tunisia to evade jail, leaving his corrupt businesses exposed.
When the journalists he employs challenge him, he often squashes their careers.
With this damning image in mind, it wasn’t a
promising development when AC Milan kidnapped
me. The event transpired two days after the club won its sixth Champions League title—a pedestal that only Real Madrid had ever reached. That morning in my hotel room, I called Milan’s communications director, a jovial fellow called Vittorio. Like almost everyone in the organization, he is a Berlusconi man. He goes back years with Fininvest, the holding company that contains the whole of the Berlusconi empire, starting as a reporter for an entertainment digest, then winding his way through the AC Milan bureaucracy.
“Take a taxi and be here in fifteen minutes, okay?”
He gave me an address on one of Milan’s fanciest streets. I had other appointments scheduled that day, but couldn’t refuse his help.
When I arrived, a bearded man in a leather jacket shook my hand firmly. “Frank? Excuse me. One
moment, please.” He picked up his cell phone, turned his back to me, and began talking quickly but softly. A German car pulled up beside us. “Let’s go,” he said, prying the bottom of the phone from his face. I had anticipated that we would have a co¤ee or sit down in his oªce. Now in a car racing through Milan with typical Italian velocity, I was unsure of our destination. On the phone, he hadn’t mentioned anything about any trips, certainly not any involving the many kilometers of autostrada we were now crossing.
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 the flares that ultras—the highly organized, highly enthusiastic members of fan clubs—
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 crow
d 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 a vocabulary that resonated with the lower middle class, the group that he wanted to cultivate as a political base. Explaining the rationale for his candidacy, he told voters, “I heard that the game was getting dangerous and it was being played in the two penalty areas, with the midfield being left desolately empty.”
Franco, Mussolini, and a high percentage of all modern dictators have made the link between sport and populist politics countless times. To Berlusconi’s left-wing critics, the resemblance to these tyrants is not coincidental. He is their scion. Like the Latin American caudillos, they say, he is thoroughly corrupted. At the same time he has assumed responsibility for governing Italy, he has maintained a vast business empire that profits from the state’s largess and reluctance to regulate. Predictably, when his personal interests conflict with the commonweal, he backs himself. Despite serious allegations about his own corruption, in 2003 he orchestrated the passage of legislation granting himself blanket immunity from prosecution. He has decrimi-nalized the o¤ense of false accounting, which his company is accused of committing.
His soccer dealings have the same taint. He may not be making Agnelli-like behind-the-scenes overtures to referees and politicians, but the system always looks stacked to promote his interests. In soccer, Berlusconi’s deputy at AC Milan, Adriano Galliani, has become the chairman of the Italian league—with a portfolio that includes the meting of discipline and the negotiation of television rights.
In the United States, the case against Berlusconi might be too much for the polity to tolerate. But in Italy, the electorate doesn’t penalize Berlusconi for his HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE NEW OLIGARCHS
conflicts of interest. This brand of corruption is too widespread to be pinned on a single man. The critics who point out his conflicts sound like hypocrites. They don’t want a world with media beholden only to journalistic truth and objectivity. They idealize the days when the Socialists and Christian Democrats each controlled one of the state-run television networks. Nobody, on either side of the spectrum, has any real interest in rationalizing government contracts, the prime vehicle for corruption.
Taking into account this consensus against reform, it’s hard to single out Berlusconi for rage. Compared to the old oligarchy’s back channels, Berlusconi manipulates in the wide-open, as he does with AC Milan’s press operation. In 2003, when he pushed the legislature to pass a law granting him blanket immunity from prosecution, Italians could follow the proceedings in their newspapers and on television. A few activists took to the streets, but only a small sliver of Italy cared.
IV.
One rainy night I met up with Tommaso Pellizzari, a young reporter with the newspaper Corriere della Sera and rabid fan of AC Milan’s fierce cross-town rival, Inter. I searched out Tommaso because he is one of the most vociferous critics of Berlusconi’s club. In 2001, he published a polemic called No Milan, modeled after Naomi Klein’s anti-globalization tract No Logo. The book is a clever, somewhat jokey, mostly rageful attack on all things Milan. It lists the ten all-time Milan play- ers he hates most—and the ten he likes most, because they aªrm the inferiority of their club.
His charming argument finishes with a counter-
intuitive flourish. In the last chapter, Pellizzari admits gratitude for Berlusconi’s ownership of his enemy. To most Inter fans, this confession would be anathema.
Berlusconi’s essentially bottomless bank accounts have financed an implacable foe. But Pellizzari cares as much about the soul and moral health of his club as he does championships. And thanks to Berlusconi’s association with AC Milan, he argues, Italians can no longer turn a blind eye to the wickedness of Milan. It has become objectively odious. Indeed, Pellizzari sees a
“boomerang e¤ect.” Italians have rallied against AC
Milan, because they see the club as a symbol of the corrupt, conservative regime.
Broadly speaking, there’s not much evidence of the boomerang arcing back toward Milan. In fact, the opposite has happened. Because of Berlusconi’s glamour players and championship trophies, Milan has developed a national following that may soon eclipse Juventus’s broad base. In certain intellectual circles, however, Milan has become just as despised as Tommaso hoped.
To illustrate this point, he took me to a bohemian theater and cultural club called Comuna Baires. Ever since Berlusconi returned to power in 2001, the Comuna Baires has formed an alliance with Inter Milan. It hosts literary evenings with the team. At its readings, foreign Inter players (from Colombia, Turkey, and so on) share the stage with writers from their home countries. After the events, Inter players, coaches, and team oªcials join pro-Inter intellectuals for dinner around a long HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE NEW OLIGARCHS
How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization Page 16
