Silvio Berlusconi was good for football but the game served him well too

“Today’s sadness doesn’t erase the happy moments spent together,” read Carlo Ancelotti’s tribute to Silvio Berlusconi, who died on Monday. “There remains infinite gratitude to the president, but above all to an ironic, loyal, intelligent, sincere man, fundamental in my adventure as a football player first, and then as a coach. Thank you President.”

Within football, as the depth of tributes that poured in from the Italian game’s leading figures show, Berlusconi’s golden era is remembered as a time of progression and modernisation, rather different perhaps to that within political spheres. In many senses, “Don Silvio” was good for football but the game was good to him, too, providing a launch pad for wider ambitions.

Still, there are few questions against Berlusconi being a football man. Even as his health and political horizons dwindled, his money and influence helped to make Monza a Serie A club for the first time. That last December he was filmed promising Monza players “now you will play Milan, Juventus, if you win against one of these top teams, I’ll bring a bus of whores into the locker room” suggested the “bunga bunga” stylings that made him globally notorious had not dimmed.

Football established Berlusconi’s worldwide reputation, as the media tycoon who bought an ailing Milan in 1986 and, in choosing Arrigo Sacchi as his coach, soon established a dynasty. Sacchi, with no playing career behind him, was chosen after making the previous backwater of Parma a growing force. Parma beating Milan over two legs in a 1987 Coppa Italia tie made Berlusconi’s decision for him.

“When he brought me on board, I said to him: ‘You’re either crazy or a genius,’” Sacchi said on Monday in remembering his “brilliant friend”. The former shoe salesman proved an inspired choice. The team Ancelotti graced as an attacking midfielder contained three brilliant Dutchmen in Ruud Gullit, Marco van Basten and Frank Rijkaard at a time of limitations on foreign players, backed by a defence marshalled by Franco Baresi and Alessandro Costacurta and featuring a young Paolo Maldini, all three Milan youth products.

A Serie A title was collected at the end of the 1987-88 season before two European Cups in 1989 and 1990, Sacchi’s pressing game overpowering opponents, an attacking style revolutionary within Italian football, where defensive catenaccio had ruled for decades. Milan squeezed their opponents and their all-star attack, Van Basten at an all-too-brief peak, did the rest. In the 1991-92 season, with Fabio Capello having replaced an exhausted Sacchi, whose fire would never burn so bright again, Milan went the league season unbeaten, a run eventually stretching to 58 matches.

Silvio Berlusconi and Filippo Inzaghi celebrate after Milan’s European Cup final win in 2007. Photograph: Reuters File Photo/Action Images/Reuters

Milan offered a framework for the great teams that would follow, from Real Madrid’s collection of galáctico superstars to Barcelona under Pep Guardiola. Manchester City’s all-conquering coach has co-opted much of Sacchi’s pressing, based on the Dutch Total Football, honed in a cage built in a gym in the Milanello training complex that Sacchi said was “like being inside the Sing Sing maximum-security prison”. Guardiola has never disguised the influence of Sacchi on his coaching; the two remain confidants, regular dining partners.

Meanwhile, for Berlusconi, success in business and football set him on his way to a political career. His move into frontline politics in 1994 came while he was recognised as the owner of the club renowned as the biggest and best in the world. That May, Milan destroyed Johan Cruyff’s Barcelona 4-0 in the Champions League final in Athens, the Dutchmen now out of the picture, Dejan Savicevic, Zvonimir Boban and Marcel Desailly the new leaders.

Those bemoaning the overbearing presence of geopolitics within contemporary football may have forgotten that the Forza Italia leader, the four-times prime minister of Italy, his country’s presence in the negotiations before the Iraq War, also happened to own Milan, a club that collected five European Cups under his ownership.

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Serie A’s dominance of the European game, attracting global audiences to a division where the world’s prime talent had been collated, would pioneer a template followed by Spain’s Liga and the English Premier League. Milan would be overtaken by Juventus and Inter at home, and the English and Spanish clubs in the continental sense, but under Ancelotti’s coaching, with Andrea Pirlo, Andriy Shevchenko and Kaká, two more European crowns were collected in 2003 and 2007.

Berlusconi would remain forthright in his opinions, unafraid of the consequences of making big calls. “We lost the title because of Ancelotti,” he said in May 2009. Ties were cut soon enough, though bitterness between the pair was not sustained.

It was in 2017 that Berlusconi’s Fininvest holding company relinquished control of Milan, diminishing returns ending three decades of glory and, yes, regular scandal, selling to a Chinese consortium that would later default. His love of football would soon enough take him to Monza the year after, back in tandem with Adriano Galliani, his right-hand man at Milan since 1986, who on Monday echoed many within Italian football: “Devastated, speechless, with immense pain, I mourn my friend, the master of everything.”