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

“T oday’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