This weekend I was in Italy for my brother’s 40th birthday. Is there a more enchanting country in Europe? No matter how scruffy the place might be, there is just something about it that seems alive – and free. If I am ever to be banished, I pray it is to Italy. Perhaps it is pure romanticism on my part, or nostalgia for holidays past. It’s probably just the weather and the food (or the wine). I remember travelling from Switzerland to Lombardy a few years ago and being desperate to cross the border: to enter a country where the shops were open and the cafés full; where I could actually afford a coffee and a beer. I don’t think that feeling has ever left me.
We were in Milan for the Derby della Madonnina, one of the great European football fixtures, pitting AC Milan against their city rivals Internazionale. Walking to the stadium, I was surprised by how dilapidated Milan had become. I have written before about my feelings of despair on returning to England from the Netherlands or northern Spain, where the cities are so obviously more prosperous than our own. But coming back from Italy is a completely different feeling. Milan is more run-down than London: grass verges unkempt, graffiti everywhere, children’s play areas broken and abandoned.
The San Siro, however, was magnificent: a giant brutalist cathedral of football rising from the city’s industrial outskirts. My brother and I approached it with reverential awe. The sound was immense: fireworks, flares, mopeds, singing. Inside, the atmosphere was even better, as rival ultras competed to make the most noise. Men walked between the aisles selling beer. Fans smoked freely in their seats. It is – easily – the best stadium I have ever been to. And yet it is being knocked down.
I left the San Siro with that familiar feeling of melancholy. Here was a place of beauty and romance that is going to be destroyed in the name of “progress”. The reason is simple. The Milan clubs are being left behind by their English rivals. These two giants of European football – like all Italian clubs – are now being outspent by the likes of Bournemouth and Leeds because of the TV money washing into the Premier League, which has helped build new stadiums like Tottenham Hotspur’s. And so, to compete, Italy is bulldozing its old cathedrals for modern, commercialised stadia to bring in more money.
How should we think about such things? To many on the free-market right of politics today, the Premier League is, I suspect, the model for Britain overall. To succeed, our entire economy should be run like Arsenal or Chelsea: competitive advantages exploited; American investment – and ownership – courted; European rivals swatted aside wherever possible.
I contemplated this on 9 March, back in London, at an event hosted by the Institute for Public Policy Research, titled “Has the left forgotten how to dream?” I had just finished reading John Bew’s essay in this week’s magazine (page 18), in which he argues that we are entering the fourth great geopolitical upheaval of the past 250 years, one that will transform everything about UK politics. The central thrust of his argument is that Britain’s political class must adapt to the reality of the world as it is today, not the one from 20 years ago they still imagine can be brought back.
Milan, it seems to me, stands as both a warning and a challenge to Britain in this regard. Although Italy seems to be on the up – its unemployment rate has fallen below the UK’s – its cities bear the marks of decades of economic failure. My fear is that if we do not manage to turn around our economic decline, we are destined to look, bit by bit, more and more like a run-down Milan. And yet, must progress and modernisation really mean turning San Siro into one of those soulless Premier League bowls? To succeed, must all European football be boiled down into one Americanised soup? To succeed economically, is there not an alternative to kowtowing to Trump’s American brutalism? Is there not space to dream of something better – to imagine a future prosperity that does not leave us feeling shallow and rootless? Please get in touch with your thoughts.
[Further reading: Don’t let Britain decline]
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This article appears in the 11 Mar 2026 issue of the New Statesman, The Great British Crisis
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