Twice he tried to buy the club, but the president Ivanoè Fraizzoli refused. Moratti: “Maybe his mother was an Inter fan, not him.” Galliani: “It’s just an urban legend”
Berlusconi with the Inter shirt given by Moratti
Berlusconi “inter milan supporter”? For years the president, who gave the Rossoneri Devil 29 trophies in 31 years, was accused of an alleged Nerazzurri faith. An urban legend or fake news hard to erase even now that the “Knight” is gone. “I became a Milan fan, Silvio has always been one,” Adriano Galliani (who was a Juventus player when he was young) said several times. “I have to deny an urban legend that Silvio was an Inter fan. It is not true. As a child he used to go to see the Gre-No-Li with his father Luigi”, explained the right arm of the Cavaliere (both at Milan and at Monza).
AC Milan and the “Milanesiness”
So one Rossoneri faith inherited from father Luigi at the time of the fantastic Swedish trio made up of Gunnar Gren, Gunnar Nordahl and Nils Liedholm in Milan in the 1950s. “With my father I also went to see the Nerazzurri. When Inter meet an opposing team, I tell you that I feel like a Nerazzurri player”, confessed Berlusconi. But, with a clarification: “I found myself unintentionally rooting for Inter, I’m someone who loves his city very much. Of course the heart in the derby is AC Milan. It is a Milanesity that came out naturally to me“.
“Perhaps his mother was an Inter fan”
But is there a fund of truth in the urban legend? “Perhaps his mother was an Inter fan (Rosa Bossi ed), who was my father’s secretary (Angelo ed). It may be that he was as a child,” revealed Massimo Moratti, a friend of Berlusconi and former president of Inter (on the Cavaliere’s own advice). “But he embraced Milan in a total and visceral way. So Berlusconi’s Interista story is not true and it does him no honour”, Moratti specified.
Was the “young Interist Berlusconi” Paolo?
According to other rumors the Paolo would have been the “young Berlusconi Interista”., Silvio’s younger brother and now honorary president of Monza. But also the manager of the Brianza club denies the Nerazzurri origins. “I come from Peppino’s times Prisco, who wished for the B for Milan, but as Serie B and not as Berlusconi. The link between Milan fans and Inter fans is very nice, it is teasing but in friendship and esteem that binds us”, explained Paolo Berlusconi.
The offers for Inter and the double refusal of Fraizzoli
The true story is that the entrepreneur Silvio tried to buy both Milan and Inter. In 1972 through a contact with Peppino Prisco met the Inter president Ivanoè Fraizzoli which he refused. In the 1979 made an offer to buy AC Milan from Felice Colombo but this too was rejected (apparently due to Gianni Rivera’s “no”). In 1982 then he tried again with Inter but Fraizzoli always refused to sell the club to an entrepreneur on the rise but a Rossoneri. In January 1984 he sold the Nerazzurri club to Ernesto Pellegrini while two years later (February 1986) Berlusconi would officially become owner and 21st president of AC Milan.