Silvio Berlusconi's footsteps in domestic ice hockey

Silvio Berlusconi died on Monday at the age of 86. Hardly any other personality in Italy has been as controversial as him in recent decades. With skill and cleverness he built great things, but at the same time caused outrage, scandals and lawsuits. He was despised and admired at the same time. This also applied to his detours to the big sports stage.

He has for decades won almost everything there was to win in international football with Milan. He helped shape football. At the same time, however, his involvement in basketball, volleyball and ice hockey were not always successful. At the beginning of the 1990s, Berlusconi turned the pure football club AC Milan into a Polisportiva, a cross-sport club that had long existed in other countries. The result? Milan became Italy's sports capital, with victories and triumphs on the pitch, on the parquet and on the ice.

However, Berlusconi has not influenced any sport in such a short space of time as much as ice hockey. For the 1989/90 season he re-founded the HC Devils Milano, which was so successful in the post-war years, and subordinated it to the Polisportiva Mediolanum. The club name subsequently changed again and again, from Devils Mediolanum to Lion Milano (due to Nestlé sponsorship) to AC Milan. One thing always remained the same: the successes. The Devils were Italian champions three times in a row between 1992 and 1994 and also won an Alpine league.

Gates Orlando lifts the championship trophy in 1992, patron Silvio Berlusconi (r.) beams.

Berlusconi's intention was to make ice hockey a major sport in Italy; true to the American model, he shelled out horrendous sums of money on the ice. The fastest team sport in the world should get out of the narrow Alpine valleys and into the arenas of the big Italian cities. Because of this intention, the Milanese entrepreneur immediately felt a lot of headwind - also from South Tyrol. When he entered politics, Berlusconi's interest in ice hockey suddenly waned; in the summer of 1996 he finally turned off the money and the Devils' license was sold to Courmayeur. Three years later the club was dissolved.

Berlusconi brings in the NHL superstar What remains from Berlusconi's time are the memories of thrilling duels between the Devils against Bolzano, Val Gardena, Merano and Brunico, and derbies against Saima Milano in front of 11.000 fans (a record attendance in Italian ice hockey to this day). But for a long time there remained a trend that Berlusconi fueled like no other: that of the big stars from overseas in domestic ice hockey. Although it was not uncommon for other clubs at that time to lure players from the NHL to Italy, the Milanese team topped everything in those years.

Jari Kurri moved to the fashion metropolis as assistant captain of the Edmonton Oilers, as the newly crowned Stanley Cup winner and the best European NHL scorer of all time, and led the Devils to the title in 1991 with 75 points in 30 games. The transfer fee for Kurri is said to have been over one million euros Dolomites reported an annual salary in the NHL sphere at the time. Later, the Milanese team with players like Roberto Romano, Gates Orlando and Mike Robert Napier even defeated teams like Sparta Prague, Bern and Düsseldorf on the international stage.

The heyday is followed by the fiasco In Bolzano and other ice hockey strongholds, people didn't want to stand idly by. There, too, people dug deep into their wallets. On the one hand, in order not to have to let all top performers move towards Milan, and on the other hand, they wanted to continue to meet on equal terms in terms of sport. This led to the heyday of Italian ice hockey, an era that is still referred to as the “Golden Nineties”. However, this process initiated by Berlusconi also had a dark side and, at the same time, bitter consequences: the high was followed by the deep fall. Where previously there was bragging and showing off, there was soon no penny left. There was a financial collapse, from which some clubs never recovered at all, others only recovered gradually. This is also symbolic of Silvio Berlusconi, a man with light and shadow.

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Silvio Berlusconi's footsteps in domestic ice hockey

Silvio Berlusconi is dead. The news went around internationally on Monday morning. The politician, entrepreneur and billionaire has left his mark on many things - including ice hockey in this country. In a positive and negative sense.

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