Sold in a Hundred Minutes

Seven Points of Daylight

Seven points. In a championship that paid two for a victory, that was the size of Milan's lead when 1965 opened — not a margin so much as a climate, the kind of advantage a supporter stops consulting and simply begins to live inside. On Sunday evenings the classifica reached most of Italy through the crackle of a transistor, and all that winter the crackle said the same thing.

This chapter of our story wears the name of Nereo Rocco, and the paròn was not there. He had gone in 1963, the first European Cup scarcely fingerprinted, and he would not come back until 1967-68; but eras keep the name of the man who laid the foundation stone long after he has left the site. The Milan of that winter belonged instead to Nils Liedholm, who in another footballing life had conducted this team's midfield from inside it and now conducted it from the bench, with Giuseppe Viani — Gipo, the old fox — installed upstairs as technical director, Felice Riva in the president's chair, Cesare Maldini wearing the armband and Luigi Radice as his deputy. Under this management the team went nineteen matches without defeat, and the scudetto seemed less a hope than a formality awaiting its stamp.

The goals came principally from Amarildo, the Brazilian who had won the World Cup in 1962 and who would finish this season with fourteen, every one of them in the league; Paolo Ferrario added thirteen — twelve in the championship and a solitary one in the Fairs Cup — and Bruno Mora six. It was not an avalanche, but avalanches were not the fashion. The fashion, north of the Po, was control: a shape chalked up on a board, wiped, chalked again, and then defended for ninety minutes. And control Milan had, or believed it had, which is not the same instrument at all.

The Renewal That Was Never Signed

Every winter of content has a crack in it, and ours had a name: José Altafini. Understand what this man was to us. Top scorer of the 1961-62 scudetto; author, at Wembley in 1963, of both goals that beat Benfica and won the club its first European Cup — the hero, in short, of the greatest single evening in our history to that point. But heroes have contracts, and contracts have renewals, and across 1964-65 the conversation between Altafini and president Riva about that renewal cooled, then soured, then stopped altogether, conducted in rooms where the courtesies grew thinner with every meeting and everybody went on insisting that nothing whatever was the matter.

The striker, unrenewed and unloved, boarded a plane for Brazil without agreeing terms — a gesture that in the theatre of Italian football sits somewhere between a sulk and a declaration of war. Riva eventually recalled him, and then made the error that costs most: he confused a man's presence with a man's condition. Altafini was thrown back into the side underprepared for the home match against Lanerossi Vicenza on 7 February 1965, and Milan — seven points clear, nineteen matches unbeaten — lost it 0-1. One match, one goal conceded; and yet something structural had given way, as when a beam settles in an old house and every door along the corridor changes its fit.

The Spring Inter Took It All Back

What followed belongs to the melancholy science of collapse. On 28 March came the derby, and it was not a defeat but a flaying: Inter 5, Milan 2 — the neighbours' name stands first in every summary, for the derby fell at their nominal home that season, and the humiliation reads the same in either order. There was a flicker of the old authority on 25 April, when Juventus were beaten 1-0, but on 16 May, matchday thirty-one, Roma came to San Siro and won 2-0, and with that home defeat Inter's comeback was complete. Twenty-one wins, nine draws, four defeats: fifty-one points, three fewer than Inter's fifty-four, with fifty-two goals scored and twenty-three conceded. And here, for connoisseurs of cruel symmetry, is the sting inside the sting: twenty-one, nine and four, fifty-one points — that is the exact line of results which had produced only third place the season before. Same virtue, same points, different heartbreak. Serie A grades on a curve. Seven points of mountain range, surrendered peak by peak between Candlemas and Pentecost.

The cups offered nothing softer. In the Coppa Italia, Milan were removed at the first hurdle by Monza, 2-1; in the Inter-Cities Fairs Cup, at the first hurdle again, by Strasbourg, 2-1 on aggregate. And then, on 27 May at San Siro — our own ground, our own grass — Helenio Herrera's Inter beat Benfica 1-0 to lift a second consecutive European Cup, having already added the Intercontinental Cup to the sideboard. The Grande Inter, they were called, and the adjective was earned; but for those of us who remembered that this same Benfica had been beaten at Wembley two years earlier by a Milan of comparable grandeur, it was a peculiar evening to sit through. Our lights, our turf, somebody else's lap of honour.

Two Out, Three In

The summer of 1965 did what Italian summers do to defeated squads: it took them apart. The hero of Wembley went first. Riva sold Altafini to Napoli for 280 million lire, and the negotiation — this detail deserves a case of its own in the club's cabinet of ironies — was famously concluded in about one hundred minutes. A hundred minutes to dispose of the man who had won us Europe; commerce is swift where sentiment is exhausted. Altafini went south and stayed seven seasons, becoming a cult hero in Naples, adored there as he had once been adored here — proof that a striker's heart is portable even when ours is not. Mario David followed him out of the door, to Sampdoria.

In the other direction came three names. From Sampdoria, Angelo Sormani; from Roma, Karl-Heinz Schnellinger and Antonio Angelillo. Sormani's arrival carried its own novel under its arm: in 1963 Roma had paid a world-record 500 million lire for him — Mister Mezzo Miliardo, half a billion made flesh — and the career had promptly stalled beneath the weight of the price tag, the way a mule stalls under a load decided by a man who has never walked beside one. Milan, buying him at the discount that disappointment applies, was making the oldest wager in football: that a man freed of his own legend might remember how to play.

The Cotton Comes Down

But the year's true drama was played out not on grass but in ledgers. Felice Riva was heir to the Cotonificio Vallesusa, a cotton empire of the sort on which the Lombard bourgeoisie had built its confidence, and in 1965 that empire came down — a deficit reported at forty-six billion lire, a figure beside which the 280 million banked for Altafini looks like the contents of a child's tin. On 8 October 1965 Riva's presidency of Milan ended. The season chronicles record an arrest that very day; his biographers place the handcuffs years later, in February 1969, and unlocked within weeks when the warrant was annulled. What is certain is that on that October day the crisis broke in public and the cotton king ceased to be president; who then held the keys, and under whose regency the house was kept until a new president could be installed, is business for the following year's chapter.

It is worth lifting the eyes from the club for a paragraph, because Riva's fall was not a private misfortune but a weather report. Italy in 1965 was cooling from its great boom — the miracolo economico that had drawn southern accents into the northern factories, filled the streets with small new motorcars — and the strains beneath the miracle, in credit and cotton and confidence, showed first in houses like the Rivas'. Milan the football club, so often a faithful mirror of Milan the city, reflected the moment exactly: rich in memory, suddenly uncertain of income, and obliged, like more than one Lombard family that autumn, to keep up appearances on Sunday.

Keeping Up Appearances

And appearances were kept, fitfully, in the manner of a house that entertains beautifully on some evenings and cannot find the corkscrew on others. On 26 September Sampdoria were beaten 2-0. On 10 October — two days after the presidency broke, and against, of all opponents, Napoli, where the hero of Wembley now drew his wages — Milan won 4-1, the fixture list revealing its taste for irony. The derby of 21 November finished 1-1, an armistice rather than a battle; Roma were beaten 3-1 on 28 November; then Bologna administered a 4-1 correction away on 12 December before Juventus were beaten 2-1 on 19 December, and the calendar year closed on 26 December with a 1-0 win at Torino: small, cold, well made, the last useful thing done in an unhelpful year.

The revelation of the autumn was Sormani. Freed of the half-billion, he played like a man handed back his own boots, and the goals came all autumn. What the full tally read at the season's end is for the next chapter to total up; the answer to the men who had priced him in 1963 was already legible by Christmas, delivered not in interviews but in the only currency the game respects. The wager had come off. The animal chosen for its carrying capacity turned out to have been bred for speed.

And then there was Rivera, l'abatino, whose season would amount to thirty-one league appearances and seven goals, with four more outings and a goal in the Fairs Cup: numbers that measure his presence the way a ruler measures a violin. Cesare Maldini still wore the armband through that autumn, captain and consul as he had been since 1961; how the cloth came off his arm and onto the boy's, and where the libero from Trieste went afterwards, is business for the next chapter and will be honoured there. Note only this. Dynasties rarely announce themselves in advance; in the middle of a year of collapse and clearance they simply keep the man who will carry the club longest out on the pitch on Sunday, and get on with the fixture list.

A Dismantling in Instalments

The season that straddled the year's end will not be closed here, and it should not be. Liedholm's last months on the bench, the grey league placing with its careful little total, the cup surrendered in the first week of the New Year, and above all the coin that spun under the San Siro floodlights in March to put Milan out of Europe — that story belongs to the chapter that follows, which takes its title from it. All 1965 can say is that the second half of that season was no better than the first; the account is left open at the page.

A dismantling does not always announce itself; sometimes it arrives in instalments. Three points in May, one hundred minutes in the summer heat, forty-six billion lire in October, and Inter lifting on our own grass the cup Milan had carried home first. Every element of it was human work — a renewal left to sour, a striker sent out unready, a fortune spun from cotton and unspun the same way. Yet the same twelve months brought Schnellinger and Sormani through the door and left the cloth of command within reach of the arm that would carry it longest, and a club is not finally its trophies, which rivals and bailiffs can both carry off, but its continuity, which they cannot. And off-stage, on no team-sheet of 1965, the paròn was waiting.