The controversial politician owned AC Milan from 1986 to 2017 and owned Monza in Serie A at the time of his death.
The former Italian Prime Minister and AC Milan owner had been hospitalized for leukemia in recent weeks. After selling AC Milan in 2017, Berlusconi decided to acquire Monza one year later with the ambition to bring the club in the first division, and it happened last year as Monza were promoted to the Italian Serie A for the first time in their history.
To do so, he brought former AC Milan CEO and lifetime friend Adriano Galliani with him. The Berlusconi-Galliani era was probably one of the most successful in the history of European soccer. From the late 80’s they won 29 trophies in 31 years, including eight Serie A titles, five Champions Leagues, one Coppa Italia, five Supercoppa Italiana, three FIFA Club World Cups and five UEFA Super Cups.
Silvio Berlusconi was to a middle-class family and created his empire as an entrepreneur of construction during the late 1960’s when he built Milano Due, a development of 4,000 residential apartments close to Milan. That was the beginning of his legacy, that became much more popular during the 70’s when he entered the world of media at first with a small private TV channel, but then expanded into a country-wide network of local TV stations which had similar programming. That system allowed Berlusconi’s channels to have all the same shows at the same time, creating a sort of single national network for all the private TV’s around the country.
This was seen as breaching Italian public broadcaster RAI’s statutory monopoly by creating a national network, which was later abolished.
The change of the law happened thanks to his friendship with the former Italian PM Bettino Craxi, officially opening a new era for Italian television and innovation that saw Silvio Berlusconi as one of the most innovative and popular businessmen of the country thanks to Mediaset, his broadcasting company.
In 1986 he acquired AC Milan, while the club was coming out of some difficult years during which they had been forced down to play in the Italian second division. Galliani and Berlusconi worked to make Milan incredibly successful and brought world class players such as Marco van Basten, Ruud Gullit, Ronaldinho, Ronaldo, Robinho, Kaka, Andriy Shevchenko, Zlatan Ibrahimovic, Pato, Cafù, Gennaro Gattuso, Andrea Pirlo, and Clarence Seedorf, just to name a few. But Berlusconi eventually decided to sell AC Milan when he understood that he was not financially able to compete with the other top European clubs.
Even if his last years at AC Milan were not as successful as before, his legacy will stay forever and fans will always thank him, as they did last year for the last time in public when they were celebrating their first Scudetto in eleven years in the main square of Milan. Berlusconi was at the club’s dinner and when he waved, the fans were all singing his name and the chant: “There is only one President”.
