Twelve years ago, long before he entered politics in the spring of 1994, Silvio Berlusconi was invited to address Rome's resident foreign press corps. He was invited along in his role of media magnate and leading entrepreneur for a news conference intended to concern itself with business, economic and current affairs issues.

As preparations for the news conference went ahead, however, it emerged that a number of colleagues were keen to question Mr Berlusconi on his highly successful football team, AC Milan. Would he have any objection to setting aside a few minutes to answer questions on football?

"No problem whatsoever. I'll talk about anything related to football. I know everything there is to know about football . . ."

No one has ever accused Silvio Berlusconi either of false modesty or of lacking enthusiasm for, and knowledge about, football. That enthusiasm, however, walked the centre-right opposition leader into a major row this week when he had the temerity to criticise Italian team coach Dino Zoff just hours after Zoff had led Italy to within 30 seconds of winning the Euro 2000 football championships in Belgium and the Netherlands.

For once, it seemed that Mr Berlusconi (62), the populist demagogue, the man with the common touch, had completely misread the national mood. Italy's last-gasp soccer defeat by France in Rotterdam last Sunday had left a 23 million-strong televisual audience bitterly disappointed, but it had also brought Italians together in their enthusiasm for the national team in a way that only football can.

Mr Berlusconi's criticism of Zoff became a cause celebre when Zoff responded by handing in his resignation, arguing that he had been offended both by the tone and content of the Berlusconi diatribe. Among other things, Mr Berlusconi had suggested that Italy "could and should have won" if French ace Zinedine Zidane had been closed out of the game, adding that even an "amateur" coach could have won the final for Italy and concluding that Zoff's handling of the side was "unworthy".

The Berlusconi-Zoff clash says much about the fundamental role of football in the Italian fabric. That, however, is no new discovery. More importantly, the BerlusconiZoff clash may say something about Mr Berlusconi, the man almost certain to be elected prime minister when Italy goes to the polls next spring.

It is not simply that Mr Berlusconi finds it difficult to resist the outstretched microphone. His self-belief is such that he finds it only fitting and correct that he express his forceful opinions on everything from the economy to the national soccer team. He usually does so with a mixture of wit, charm, smarm and lowest-common-denominator populism that many Italians find hard to resist.

Mr Berlusconi considers himself a self-made winner, an Italian success story similar to that of Microsoft magnate Bill Gates (he has often made the comparison). If he offers his outspoken opinion on football, he considers that only legitimate, since he is the man who took over debt-ridden AC Milan in early 1986 and swiftly turned it into arguably the most successful club side in world soccer for almost a decade.

If he finds it difficult to hide his contempt for many of his current political foes, that may be because he was able to convincingly beat them at their own game, at the first time of asking, when in a matter of months in 1994 he turned his Fininvest Group machine into a political party organisation (Forza Italia) to win a remarkable general election victory and propel himself into the prime minister's office.

THAT contempt for political rivals, too, owes much to his own sense of being self-made. Unlike senior centre-left leaders such as Massimo D'Alema and Walter Veltroni, who were both born into centre-left families and who came up through the (ex-communist) party ranks without ever holding a job or working in the "real world", Mr Berlusconi can point to his huge business experience and commercial success.

After paying his way through law studies at Milan University by selling vacuum cleaners and working as a cruise-ship crooner (Mr Berlusconi is still able to prove himself the perfect host by sitting down to tickle the old ivories at the end of a dinner party in his residence outside Milan), he launched his own building company, Edilnord, back in September 1968. From that base, over a 20-year period, he built up his current Fininvest empire, which controls, among other things, three nationwide TV channels.

After experiencing a lifetime of grey, dull and distinctly non-televisual politicians, be they from the right or the left, who tended to talk only in the byzantine "politik-speak" of a political class more interested in its own power games and self-preservation than in the national good, Italians found that Mr Berlusconi struck an entirely different tone when he plunged on to the political scene in 1994. He says it as it is. Or, at least, he appears to.

And, there's the rub - namely, conflict of interests. If, as in the analysis offered regarding Dino Zoff's shortcomings this week, he appears to get it entirely wrong, he has a readymade media machine to plead his case and prove the contrary.

On Wednesday night, for example, he intervened in a soccer programme on one of his channels to use replays of Sunday's final not just to prove his point but to further criticise Zoff.

If the subject is football, the use of his own TV channels might seem relatively harmless. When the subject matter is politics, then Mr Berlusconi's ability to sell his political line via his own airwaves is much more serious. In November 1994, on the day that a reported one million or so trade unionists protest at his government's intended pension policy, his Rete 4 channel ignored the event, reporting only that there had been traffic problems in Rome.

More recently, the centre-right's outstanding success in April's regional elections was, at least partly, due to a nightly televisual campaign waged by Mr Berlusconi in person, a campaign which an alarmed and hapless centre-left government belatedly blocked with legislation banning TV ads during the electoral campaign.

Mr Berlusconi's ability to use the TV media is not to be underestimated. A couple of years ago, he persuaded Italians to vote in a referendum for longer commercial breaks during films than allowed under EU regulations because he argued that shorter breaks threatened his TV empire's survival.

Political analysts are curious as to how Mr Berlusconi's probable government platform of stricter immigration policies, tax cuts and hints of devolution for the rich north will work. Likewise, will he be able to hold together his coalition of post-fascists (already contested by German Chancellor Gerhard Schroder), the Federalist Northern League (political allies of Austrian Freedom Party leader Jorg Haider) and his own Forza Italia party?

An equally intriguing question, though, is how he will handle the apparent conflict of interests between being prime minister and owning most of Italy's private sector TV. Not everyone is optimistic. Commenting on this week's events, former prime minister Mr D'Alema said: "If winning eight regional presidencies last April has produced this outburst of arrogance and ill-tempered language from the honourable Mr Berlusconi, it is not difficult to imagine the consequences of an eventual general election success for him."