Milan reign has shaped modern football

Ten thousand Milan fans gathered with the city’s Arena Civica stadium, just over the Sempione Park in the iconic Sforzesco castle. Wagner faded to the background as

Silvio Berlusconi

Berlusconi stepped forward to take your hands on the microphone.

In 1980 Milan had been sent as a result of Serie B in disgrace included in the Totonero illegal betting scandal fallout, only a year after winning their 10th Scudetto

AC Milan in 1980

(along with it the ability to wear the gold star on their shirts). They came straight up again but, ridden with debt and struggling to bring in any decent players,

were duly relegated yet again.

The arrival in 1984 of Wilkins and Hateley (the former from Manchester United; the latter from Second Division Portsmouth, though Farina initially aimed to claim he

was really a Liverpool player) was greeted with surprising enthusiasm, given their British predecessors’ torrid time.

Talking to an Italian journalist inside the 1990s, Hateley was pretty scornful of Berlusconi: ?“I had a one-to-one meeting with him at Milanello. I used to be young,

nevertheless i was the son of the footballer and i also knew enough in regards to the game to learn that this so-called football man knew minimal. He wanted to be the

coach, he wished to try everything.”

In 2009, towards the end of Carlo Ancelotti’s time at Milan, Berlusconi took an escape from the diplomatic wingding in Egypt to produce a broadside at his

AC Milan in 2009

underperforming coach: “If we don’t win this year’s Scudetto it’s every one of the fault of Ancelotti with his fantastic bad tactics.”

In the early 1990s, with Italian politics still reeling from a number of corruption scandals, Berlusconi formed the Forza Italia party, filling a vacuum, in the same

way he had in 1986 when he took over Milan. “I never really spoke to him much from the 1990s: he was much a smaller club president, too busy with politics,” Baresi remembers.

However, lately the beleaguered former premier began to have to have the club more than ever, as a method of reminding an extremely dubious electorate of former glories.