Malpensa Airport Wears the Name Berlusconi: When 'The President' Steps Off the Pitch to Become a Place Name

A late-month evening in Nha Trang, and the sea was so calm I could hear every wave brushing the stone steps behind my house. I sat beside the old radio I have kept since my days as a young correspondent — the years when I landed in Madrid and learned to listen to a match before learning to write about it. The bulletin came through the speaker, the Italian anchor's voice slow and deep: Malpensa International Airport, a name generations of Vietnamese have known through flights and sports pages, had officially been renamed after Silvio Berlusconi.

I sat still. Outside, the waves kept at their rhythm. And in my head a stadium appeared — empty, yet somehow filled with the sound of a million hearts breathing. I had felt this before, on World Cup nights when the whole neighbourhood stayed awake, on V-League nights when an entire city held its breath. But this was different. This time the name being carved was not a player's, not a coach's, but a 'President'. A man who sat in the VIP stand rather than running on grass.

The event itself is simple enough to scroll past. Malpensa — the largest international gateway of Lombardy, tens of millions of passengers a year — now bears the name of the former AC Milan president. It is a civil decision that took a long road: according to the report, two years passed between the approval of the proposal and the official naming ceremony. Silvio Berlusconi died more than three years ago, aged 86, leaving a legacy that stretched across business, media, politics and football.

Speaking at the ceremony, his younger brother Paolo Berlusconi said his brother was now bound forever to his beloved city of Milan, and that he was 'more alive than ever'. Fans, players who wore the red-and-black shirt, and people who knew him only from the news all call him by a single affectionate title: 'The President'. No first name needed, no long job description. Just those two words, and all of Italy knows who is meant.

For someone in my trade, this is the kind of item usually filed under 'culture news', skimmed in three seconds and forgotten. But after nearly thirty years chasing a ball, I have learned something: some headlines hold no goals, no scorelines, no league tables — and yet contain more than an entire match. Because they speak to how a culture remembers a human being.

The first thing to understand is that Italian football does not run on the coach model, but on the 'owner' model — and Berlusconi is its most perfect embodiment. In many footballing nations power sits with the head coach, while the president simply signs the cheques. In Italy, and especially at AC Milan under Berlusconi, the order was reversed. He chose the coach, the players, even the philosophy of play. From Arrigo Sacchi to Fabio Capello, from Carlo Ancelotti to the signings that brought in Paolo Maldini, Alessandro Costacurta, Franco Baresi, Andrea Pirlo, Kaka, Andriy Shevchenko and Clarence Seedorf — everything passed through the hands and the eye of a man who had never spent a professional day as a coach.

I remember well those nights in my twenties, sitting in front of the screen watching Milan. Back then I did not fully grasp tactics; I only noticed something strange — that team played as if an invisible hand stood behind it, arranging every step. Only much later, once I had read enough and watched enough, did I realise that hand had a name. Berlusconi did not coach, but he built the conditions for the best coaches to work. He never ran on the grass, but he decided how that grass would be tended.

That style of leadership — the interventionist owner, magnetic in personality, binding the club's identity to his own person — produces a kind of legacy that cannot be measured in trophies. Milan won countless honours under him, but what outlived the trophies was an image: a red-and-black side always remembered as an emblem of elegance and ambition. People remember the goals, but I remember the moment when a man sat in the stands, eyes fixed on the pitch, lips moving as if whispering to every pass. That is the material of legend, not of a financial report.

And then the strangest thing happened: an airport took his name. Not a stand, not a statue inside a stadium. An airport. A place where people arrive and depart, where the exile takes off, where the returnee sets foot after years away. That name will be read aloud every day, thousands of times, by people who may never have watched a single match. A football president walked out of his own world and became a place name. It is a kind of immortality few in sport ever reach.

This is precisely the point that data cannot capture: football, at its deepest level, is a collective ritual — and that ritual can turn a man into part of a map. In my experience of watching matches, I have always believed that a club's true value lies not in the number of trophies in its cabinet, but in how deeply it enters the life of a city. AC Milan is not merely a team from Milan. It is part of how that city defines itself. And when an airport — a symbol of global connection — bears the name of the president tied to that club, club identity and civic identity have become one.

One detail I want to anchor, because to me it matters more than any figure: the crowd called him 'The President', not 'Mr Berlusconi', not 'the former prime minister'. Just two words, intimate, close, the way you name someone in your own family. I have seen the same thing back home: Khanh Hoa fans call their former players by nicknames, call the 19/8 stadium by an endearing name. When a community gives someone a private name, it is a sign of a relationship that has crossed the line between audience and celebrity.

But if I stopped at admiration, this story would be nothing but a hymn of praise. And I do not write to praise. I write to look straight at things.

The blind spot of collective memory lies exactly here: when a person becomes a symbol, we tend to wrap him up in beautiful adjectives and forget every contested edge. The report on Malpensa called him a 'successful entrepreneur' and an 'objectively innovative politician'. Those are evaluative descriptions presented as self-evident fact. Yet anyone who has followed Italy knows Berlusconi was one of the most divisive figures in the country's modern history. Naming an international airport after such a man, in a nation whose public memory still carries raw fault lines, is not a neutral act.

This is where I must be careful with myself. My trade taught me that whenever a story is told too smoothly, too warmly, a piece of the truth has usually been left behind. No one objected at the ceremony. No dissenting voice appeared in the report. And it is that silence that deserves attention. A tribute event with no opposing voice at all is an event that has been carefully edited — not one of absolute consensus. I say this not to bring him down. I say it because I believe a man large enough to have an airport named after him is also large enough to bear being seen with both faces.

The second, more paradoxical thought is this: Italy could have named an airport after a great coach, or after its all-time top scorer. Instead it chose an owner. That says something about Italian football culture — and perhaps about football culture everywhere — that the imprint of the builder runs deeper than that of the performer. A goal is a moment. A philosophy of squad-building is a decade, sometimes several. And here it is more than that: it is a name living with the city, read aloud every day on a departure board.

I find myself wondering about Vietnam. If one day a person who devoted a lifetime to our football — someone who lifted a small club to the top, who built a whole system from nothing — had a public place named after him, how would our community take it? Would we be able to speak of a whole human being, with both the beauty and the controversy, or would we once again keep only the part that fits a slogan? That question has no ready answer. But it is worth asking ourselves on a calm evening by the sea.

One thing I am sure of. Football has a power few other fields can match: it turns private memory into collective memory, and collective memory into physical space. Malpensa is no longer just a point on an aviation map. It is a statement: a society has chosen whom to carve into the gateway that millions pass through each year.

For me, a man who has chased a ball for 44 years, from my first commentary shifts to World Cup nights in Nha Trang, the biggest lesson was never in the scoreline. It was that in the end I realised I was running toward people, not toward goals. An airport bearing a football president's name is a reminder that what endures after a match is not the result, but the way people choose to remember one another.

If you ask me whether this decision is deserved, I will not answer yes or no. I will answer with another question, addressed to you: what do you want your city to remember you for — the number of times you won, or the people with whom you walked through the longest winters?