MONZA, Italy — Filippo Antonelli remembers the days when his calls went unanswered. As sporting director of Monza — a soccer club with a shoestring budget and narrow horizons in Italy’s third tier — he had little clout with his peers. To discuss a player on another team, or to make an offer to sell or buy one, he usually had to phone “four or five times” before anyone deigned to pick up.
It is a little different now. These days, Antonelli finds that pretty much everyone answers on the first call. Most of the time, he said recently, they pick up on the first ring, as soon as his name flashes on the screen. But more often than not, “they call me first.” In Italy, everything changes, Antonelli has realized, when you work for Silvio Berlusconi.
At first glance, Monza is little changed from the club it has always been: a modest, provincial place, where parents of youth-team players, coaches and sundry older locals mill around the coffee bar that serves as the centerpiece of the training ground. They down espressos, grab pastries, flick through newspapers. People greet one another warmly before heading off to watch a training session.
Antonelli sits at a table, surrounded by colleagues. He has an office upstairs, in the club’s headquarters, but the coffee bar is as good a place as any to hold an impromptu scouting meeting, with schedules and lists strewn across the table. There is no sense of secrecy, no security at the gate, no parking lot full of sports cars.
But beneath the surface, it has been transformed. By 2017, Berlusconi’s public career appeared to be over, the former Italian prime minister mired in an endless slew of shame and scandal. He had been forced to resign that post when Italy was swept up in the Euro debt crisis; he was thrown out of Italy’s parliament after being convicted of tax fraud.
Forza Italia, the political vehicle that had propelled him to power, remained in place, though its electoral prospects have ebbed and flowed. After three decades, too, he had finally sold the jewel in his crown: A.C. Milan, the soccer team he turned into the best in the world in the 1980s and 1990s. It seemed Berlusconi was finished, destined for a gilded, disgraced retirement.
And then, in September 2018, Antonelli was informed that Fininvest — the holding company for Berlusconi’s $5 billion media empire — had completed a takeover of his club. He had known there was a buyer lurking, and that the club might soon change hands. He had been given no hint as to who it was.
A cadre of Berlusconi’s most trusted lieutenants was installed to run it — including his brother, Paolo, as president and Adriano Galliani, his longstanding consigliere, as chairman — and work began on improving the training facility and the stadium. Berlusconi had an ambitious goal in mind.
“The aim is to be in Serie A in 2021,” Galliani said, meaning Monza has to be promoted this season, and speed through Serie B in only a year — and to do it with a squad composed largely of young Italian players, a team that plays a “clean, epic and beautiful type of soccer.” Most of all, though, Berlusconi wants to see one thing in particular. “The dream,” said Cristian Brocchi, Monza’s coach, “is to see Monza play against A.C. Milan at San Siro.”
It is easy to suspect that this is the motivation for Berlusconi’s investment: that this project is about reclaiming his place in Italian soccer’s elite, to prove to his critics that he can do it all again, that he is just as powerful and smart as he used to be, that though he may look like he is finished, he is anything but.
And then, who knows? Perhaps that success might be used to continue the resurrection of his political career, especially after he was elected to the European Parliament last year. That, certainly, would fit Berlusconi’s playbook. A.C. Milan was always more than a toy, a trophy asset, in his eyes: He did not bankroll the club to five European Cups and eight Italian championships as an end in itself; he did it, at least in part, in pursuit of real power.
It was no coincidence that when Berlusconi formed his political party in 1993, he borrowed its name from soccer’s lexicon: “Forza Italia!” The label echoed a terrace chant, a deliberate attempt to leverage Milan’s success in the minds of voters. It worked.
“The success of A.C. Milan definitely helped propel Berlusconi’s political aspirations,” the political analyst Franco Pavoncello said in 2010. “It is doubtful whether he would be prime minister now without that link.” Soccer and politics have always been entwined in Berlusconi’s mind: soccer as a route into politics; the dynamics of politics as a mirror of the sport.
Those who know him best, though, insist Monza does not fit that pattern. “It is absolutely a decision of the heart,” Galliani said of Berlusconi’s investment. Specifically, it was a decision of Galliani’s heart: He grew up in Monza, supported Monza and worked as a director of Monza, all before Berlusconi recruited him to Milan. “I was at Monza for 10 years,” Galliani said. “And then I went on loan to Milan for 31.”
Buying the club was Galliani’s idea. He suggested it to Berlusconi, who owns a home in Arcore, a few miles away. Galliani did not, he said, see it as a way for Berlusconi to make money, or to win trophies, or to regain political prestige. “It is pure romanticism,” Galliani said. “Monza is a state of the soul.”
Indeed, it is Galliani who is in charge day to day: He speaks with Antonelli several times a day; he checks in with Brocchi to see how training has gone; he has opened the impeccable contacts book he developed while working at Milan to help strengthen the squad.
Last January, Monza completed more than 30 deals in a single transfer window, overhauling its team completely. “There was not much time for sleep,” Antonelli said. “It was like running a marathon, but at sprinting speed. Galliani made history. Working with him is like doing a master’s degree in soccer.”
The effect was immediate: Though it missed out on promotion to Serie B last year, Monza sits comfortably atop its division today. Promotion is almost a certainty. Suddenly, players want to join Monza, something that has not always been the case in Antonelli’s experience. “A lot of players in higher divisions would like to come here,” he said.
That is, in part, financial, of course, but it is also because of all of those little touches that Berlusconi prioritizes: things like making sure everyone has a designated parking space. Berlusconi and Galliani “make you feel valued, make you want to do well for them,” Brocchi said. “They make you feel special.”
Brocchi knows better than most. He has spent most of his career working for Berlusconi and Galliani, first as a player and later as a coach at Milan. “I owe them my life,” he said. He knows that both like to be involved, connected.
“I like it,” he said. “If I sensed coldness, that would put me off. I want to feel part of something, part of the club. Berlusconi calls before games. He likes to know how the team is doing. He is not like a distant powerful person. He has a charisma, an ability to find the right words. That someone so important has time for you means you go out feeling like a lion.”
Berlusconi attends most home games, according to Antonelli, the sporting director, and has appeared at a number of away matches, too. In Antonelli’s mind, Berlusconi was drawn to Monza not just because he wanted to fulfill Galliani’s dream, but also because he “missed soccer a little.”
It is this, perhaps, that is the most convincing explanation for his investment. Monza is not an attempt to revive his political career, or restore his name, or reprise his glory days. It is not simply a favor for a friend. For Berlusconi, soccer was always about power: not just obtaining it, but feeling it.
Berlusconi, those who work with him say, is always happy to pause and talk with fans, to meet and greet his public, to find time to bask in an echo of the adulation he got while he owned Milan, while he ran Italy. This is not a second chance to dominate the world, or to build a sporting empire. But it is the only way he knows to drink in the spotlight, to win favor, to feel what it is like, once again, to be the ringmaster.
Source: Soccer - nytimes.com
