corporations that derived more of their revenue from TV, merchandising and sponsorship than from tickets. The arrival of prosperity in Italy, where soccer was less influenced by class and had already done more to make itself attractive, brought an increase in the number of people who went to the games: the average First Division crowd jumped from 21,000 in 1960 to 30,000 in 1970. Violence grew in the 1970s, as it did in society as a whole. The gulf between the players and the fans widened, just when the fans’ need to identify with the team increased. The solution was the group of ultrà. These groups,while they supported their club generally, paid little attention to the game because they had their own tasks,which consisted of defending their territory behind the goal, chanting and singing and attacking their opponents,the other team’s supporters. They imitated English ‘hooligans’ but they carried the theatre much further by deploying more drums, banners and flares. Although they used English phrases, their political ties were to Italian extremist groups. The Lazio ultrà were neofascist, gave the Roman salute and could boast that Gianfranco Fini and his wife came to home games. Meanwhile by the 1980s the tendency was growing for owners to be entrepreneurs who ran their clubs like companies. The era of Berlusconi was at hand. Berlusconi and Other Matters: the Era of ‘Football-Politics’ Nicola Porro and Pippo Russo University of Cassino and Florence University Keywords Mass media, pay-TV, soccer, Berlusconi, Forza Italia. 1 Introduction In Italy, the 1990s were marked by the birth and development of a wholly new, disquieting phenomenon:the unprecedented hybridization of sport,mass media and politics. The key figure dominating the period was without doubt the Milan tycoon,Silvio Berlusconi, owner and manager of one of Italy’s largest entrepre- neurial networks, founder and leader of the movement-turned-political party, Forza Italia (FI), which burst onto the Italian political scene with the ‘critical’ elections of March 1994, only a few months after its creation. The first part of this article deals with the advent and development of Berlus- coni’s ‘football-politics’. The authors question the view that this was a one-off, unrepeatable episode produced exclusively by its charismatic leader and in no Special feature 348