The Crown at Wembley, the Knife at the Maracanã

A City With Two Crowns in Its Window

There are years a city wears like a well-cut suit, and 1963 sat on Milan the way spring sits on the Navigli — briefly, gloriously, and with the certainty of rain to follow. The city was the engine room of the miracolo economico, the economic miracle that had turned the Lombard plain into a workshop for half of Europe: cars and refrigerators rolling off the lines, trains from the south unloading new Milanese by the thousand, and on the clear days — rarer now, prosperity having its own weather — the Alps still visible beyond the golden Madonnina, indifferent as ever to everything conducted beneath them. Milan had money, it had work, it had risotto and fog and the constant percussion of construction, and in 1963 it acquired the one thing it wanted more than all of these together: the mastery of European football.

Consider what the city held in its window by December. In May the rossoneri had gone to Wembley and become the first Italian club to lift the European Cup. In the very same season, on the other side of the cathedral, Helenio Herrera's Inter had taken the scudetto with 49 points — the Grande Inter announcing itself with the subtlety of a factory whistle — so that one city could claim, without exaggeration, both the crown of Europe and the crown of Italy. No other place on the continent could say as much. And yet for the red-and-black half of that city the year was double-faced, a Janus in football boots: the greatest year the club had ever known, and among its most bitter, because what Wembley gave in May, the Maracanã would take away in November — and not cleanly.

The Long Road Out of the Fog

The road to Wembley had begun in September 1962, before the fog came down, and it began the way Nereo Rocco preferred all things to begin: without romance. Rocco was a Triestine, a man of the borderlands, and he practised the border-guard's art — catenaccio, the bolted door, defence elevated to a branch of moral philosophy — while permitting himself, further up the pitch, luxuries the purists never credited him with. Above him in the club's architecture sat Giuseppe Viani, the technical director; behind his defenders stood Giorgio Ghezzi in goal; and in front of everything moved a young man of ecclesiastical calm named Gianni Rivera — l'abatino, the little abbot, not yet twenty-one — who handled a football the way careful men handle porcelain. Rocco had arrived from Padova in 1961, taken the scudetto of 1962 at the first attempt, and plainly stayed on to finish something.

The first round was less a tie than a banquet. Union Luxembourg were dispatched 8-0 at San Siro on 12 September and 6-0 in Luxembourg a week later — fourteen goals to none across the two legs, a feast so lopsided it remains among the most one-sided ties in the club's European history. Then came the serious eating. Ipswich Town arrived in November as reigning champions of England, and Milan settled the argument at once: 3-0 at San Siro on the 14th, a scoreline stout enough to survive the 2-1 defeat at Portman Road a fortnight later. Through, 4-2 on aggregate, and into the winter.

Winter took Milan to Istanbul, where Galatasaray, champions of Turkey, were beaten 3-1 on 23 January; the return in March was 5-0, an aggregate of 8-1 delivered with the courtesy of an executioner who works quickly and goes home. April brought Dundee, champions of Scotland, who walked into a 5-1 first leg at San Siro on the 24th and discovered that the 1-0 they won at Dens Park on the first of May was a souvenir rather than a lifeline. Five-two on aggregate, and Milan were bound for Wembley — where, for the first time in the competition's short and Spanish-accented history, no club from Spain would contest the final.

Wembley, the Twenty-Second of May

The opponents were Benfica, holders of the cup for two years running, and they brought with them the most frightening young forward in the world. Eusébio needed less than twenty minutes to demonstrate why — the ledgers quarrel over whether it was the eighteenth minute or the nineteenth, as ledgers did in those days, but they agree entirely on the essential matter: Benfica led, Milan trailed, and the 45,715 inside Wembley settled in to watch the champions of Europe defend their title against a footballing nation that had never once held it.

What followed belongs to José Altafini, and we shall come to him properly in a moment, because a man who does what he did that night has earned more than a match report. Twice in the second half he scored: the equaliser on 58 minutes, the winner on 66, and both goals fashioned from the serving hands of Rivera — the abbot laying the table, the executioner clearing it. Two-one. When Arthur Holland of England blew the final whistle, he blew it on a new order of things: Milan were champions of Europe, the first Italian club to be so, and only the third club of any nation — after Real Madrid, after Benfica themselves — ever to hold the great trophy.

It was Cesare Maldini, the captain, who climbed the steps and lifted it: the first Italian hands on the European Cup, a photograph destined for half the bar-room walls of Lombardy before the summer was out. Rivera, the abatino, had been the campaign's quiet fulcrum, the server of every feast; Rocco, down near the touchline, had bolted the door precisely as often as he had opened it. And Italy, which received the news like a country receiving confirmation of something it had long suspected about itself, had scarcely finished celebrating when the bells changed their tone: on 3 June, twelve days after Wembley, Pope John XXIII died, and a peninsula that had been singing found itself praying. Glory and mourning inside a single fortnight — 1963 was already showing its double face.

The Boy They Called Mazzola

He was born on 24 July 1938 in Piracicaba, in the state of São Paulo, and the Brazilians took one look at his build and his bearing and named him for a dead man: Mazzola, they called him, after Valentino Mazzola, the lost captain of the great Torino, whom he resembled the way a son resembles a father he never met. At nineteen, José João Altafini was already a world champion — part of Brazil's 1958 triumph in Sweden, the second-youngest man in that squad behind a teenager called Pelé, with two goals against Austria in the opening match to his name. Milan, who could smell a centre-forward across an ocean, had bought him before that tournament even began, for 135 million lire — one of the shrewder invoices in the club's long accounting.

He crossed the water and did not pause to acclimatise: a scudetto in his very first season, 1958-59, with 28 goals to his name, and in time an oath of allegiance to Italy itself, whose blue shirt he wore at the 1962 World Cup. But it is by the spring of 1963 that he must finally be judged. Thirty-one goals in all competitions that season, eleven of them in the league, and fourteen in the European Cup alone — a total for a single edition that no man had ever reached and that would stand as the mark for nearly half a century: equalled at last by Lionel Messi in 2011-12, surpassed only by Cristiano Ronaldo, with seventeen, in 2013-14, by which time nearly everyone who had witnessed the original had gone grey or gone altogether.

And then Wembley, where Benfica led and the night demanded an answer. Altafini gave the only kind he knew: two goals in the second half, the equaliser and the winner, both entries in the great ledger of 22 May 1963 written in his hand. The summit was also, as summits tend to be, the beginning of the descent — within two seasons the club would tilt its whole architecture toward the young Rivera, Altafini's room would narrow, and in 1965 he would carry his boots south to Napoli. It changes nothing. On the biggest night Italian club football had ever known, the boy they called Mazzola scored both goals, and no rearrangement of squads or seasons has ever managed to unwrite it.

The Ledger at Home, and the Changing of the Guard

Domestically, the season of the first cup was a season of near-miss, and the arithmetic explains it with Lombard bluntness: third place, 43 points from 34 matches — fifteen won, six lost, and thirteen drawn. Thirteen draws is a diet of half-portions, and nobody wins a scudetto on half-portions; Inter, six points clear at 49, ate whole ones. Milan scored 53 and conceded a mere 27, the figures of a well-governed house, but Herrera's machine across the city was entering its imperial phase, and the title stayed on the wrong side of the Duomo. The same city gained a European Cup and lost a scudetto in a single breath — Milan the pioneer, Inter the rival, the football capital of the continent arguing with itself over dinner.

Behind the trophies, the house itself changed hands. Andrea Rizzoli, president since 1954-55, chose the summit as his point of departure — and what a ledger he closed: four scudetti, in 1954-55, 1956-57, 1958-59 and 1961-62; the Latin Cup of 1956; and now the European Cup itself. He sold the club to the industrialist Felice Riva, who would hold the presidency until 1965, when Luigi Carraro succeeded him. And Rocco — Rocco went too, off to Torino with the paint still wet on his masterpiece, leaving the bench to the Argentine Luis Carniglia, a man hired to defend a cathedral he had not built. He would not last the winter after this one: sacked in March 1964, replaced by Nils Liedholm, that most Milanese of Swedes.

The squad, too, was rearranged like furniture after a wedding and a funeral held in the same week. In came Amarildo from Botafogo — a World Cup winner with Brazil in 1962 — who would finish as the side's top league scorer with 14; out went Paolo Barison to Sampdoria, Emanuele Del Vecchio to Boca Juniors, Giorgio Rossano to Juventus. The league's answer for 1963-64 would again be third place, this time with 51 points. And beyond football, Italy's year turned grave and consequential at once: on 9 October the Vajont dam disaster killed some two thousand people in the Belluno valley, a catastrophe no economic miracle could answer for; in December, Aldo Moro formed the first centre-left government, opening the Christian Democrats to the Socialists. The country was becoming modern in every direction at the same time, and paying for it in more currencies than the lira.

The Ambush at the Maracanã

As champions of Europe, Milan were owed a meeting with the champions of South America, and the champions of South America were Santos — which is to say Pelé, which is to say the finest footballer alive. The first act, at San Siro on 16 October, was everything the fixture promised. Giovanni Trapattoni scored after three minutes; Amarildo, against his own countrymen, added two more, on 15 and 67; Mora struck on 82; and in between Pelé scored twice, once from the penalty spot. Four-two to Milan, before 51,917, under the whistle of the Austrian Alfred Haberfellner — a first leg won honestly and in the open, the way Milan preferred to believe a world title would be decided.

The second act, at the Maracanã on 14 November, began the same way and ended otherwise. Altafini on 12 minutes, Mora on 17 — two-nil to Milan inside the opening quarter of an hour, in front of 132,728 souls, and the world title very nearly in the hold of the ship home. Then the match turned, and turned, and kept on turning: Pepe twice, Almir, Lima — four goals between the 50th minute and the 68th — and Santos had it 4-2. The series stood level, the tie went to a playoff, and the name of the referee appointed to it, Juan Regis Brozzi of Argentina, did not yet mean anything to anyone in red and black.

Two days later — 16 November, same stadium, same referee, 120,421 in attendance — there was no Pelé, injured and absent, which ought to be recorded as Milan's great opportunity and instead became the frame for the bitterest hour of the club's year. Around the half-hour Brozzi awarded Santos a penalty for what a large part of the press corps judged to be a dive by Dorval; Dalmo converted it on 31 minutes; and in the protests that followed, Cesare Maldini — the captain whose hands had lifted the European Cup at Wembley in May — was sent off, so that the same hands that had raised the club's greatest trophy were, six months later, waved from the pitch in its darkest farce. One-nil. Santos were champions of the world.

The aftertaste never sweetened. Rivera would later describe the officiating as inconceivable — and the abatino did not traffic in strong words, which is precisely what gave that one its weight — while Brozzi was afterwards disowned by his own federation, a sentence that reads like satire and is merely the record. Milan had sailed to Rio with the European Cup and come home with a grievance, and there is a school of thought — this chronicle belongs to it — that a grievance honestly earned becomes part of a club's patrimony too, an heirloom of the second drawer. But nobody in that dressing room was philosophical. The world title had been on the table, two goals up at the Maracanã, and it was carried off amid a controversy that has never entirely quieted.

What Remains When the Clocks Disagree

Even before that wound had closed, the calendar demanded the defence of the European crown begin. On 27 November, eleven days after the Maracanã, Milan drew 1-1 away to IFK Norrköping; on 4 December, at San Siro, they finished the job 5-2, through 6-3 on aggregate — the title defence alive as the year died, though the following winter Real Madrid would end it in the quarter-finals. That, however, is another chapter's grief.

How, then, to weigh 1963? On one side of the scale: the first European Cup ever brought to Italy, won at Wembley against the holders, by a side built on Rocco's bolted door and Rivera's porcelain hands and Altafini's fourteen-goal spring. On the other: a scudetto conceded to the neighbours, a president departing at the summit, the maestro of the whole enterprise leaving for Torino, and a world title lost two days after it was two goals from won, to a penalty half the press box did not believe in. For those of us who keep the faith from Adelaide — where the Diavolo's nights still arrive in the small hours, and where it is worth recording that the club itself would not set foot in Australia until the tour of May 1980 — five matches across four states, among them a 3-1 win over a South Australian XI in Adelaide itself on 28 May — Wembley is the founding document, the reason the alarm is set at all.

So let the verdict be entered plainly. In 1963 Milan learned, in a single circuit of the sun, both the taste of the summit and its price: that Europe can be conquered by intelligence and patience, and that the world beyond it answers to referees as well as to genius. The cup that Cesare Maldini raised on 22 May was the first of its line in Italy, and every continental trophy the club has lifted since is a descendant of that one evening in London — when the little abbot served, the boy called Mazzola finished, twice, and the old Triestine on the bench finally allowed himself to believe that the door he had bolted all his life had been guarding something worth the keeping.