Seven Points, One Hundred Minutes, Forty-Six Billion Lire

Fog on the Navigli, Milan on Top

There is a January particular to Milan, when the fog climbs out of the rice paddies south of the city and lies along the Navigli like the lid on a pot of risotto, and the town conducts its business by ear — tram bells, foghorns on the dark water, arguments in the bars — and in the January of 1965 the sound underneath the fog was, for once, deeply contented. Milan led the championship. Not narrowly, not nervously, but by seven points, which in an age that paid two points for a victory was not a lead so much as a landscape, visible on the rare clear morning the way the Alps are visible beyond the Madonnina: distant, white, apparently permanent.

The honest chronicler must clear his throat before proceeding, because 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, like cathedrals, 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 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 — and control Milan had, or believed it had, which in football as in banking is a different instrument entirely.

The Hero of Wembley Wants His Due

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 went from cool to curdled, the way milk turns in a warm larder while everyone in the house insists they can smell nothing.

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 here the presidency committed its sin against good cooking: a centre-forward, like an osso buco, cannot be rushed to the table. 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 the discerning ear heard something structural give way, as when a beam settles in an old house and every door in the corridor changes its fit.

The Spring the Neighbours Took Everything

What followed belongs to the melancholy science of collapse. On 28 March came the derby, and it was not a defeat but a flaying: the record books show Milan 2, Inter 5 — the Italian summaries prefer to phrase it as a 5-2 loss, and I note only that the two tellings agree perfectly on the humiliation. 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 the comeback of the neighbours was complete. The final ledger read twenty-one wins, nine draws, four defeats: fifty-one points, three fewer than Inter's fifty-four. Seven points of mountain range, surrendered peak by peak between Candlemas and Pentecost.

The cups offer the historian no consolation, only comedy of the bleaker sort. 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, as if the season had been scripted by a moralist with a taste for cruelty, 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, the evening tasted of a meal cooked in our own kitchen and served, steaming, at the neighbour's table.

One Hundred Minutes

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 chosen by an accountant rather than a muleteer. 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.

Cotton and Ashes

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; the prudent historian says only that on that October day the crisis broke in public and the cotton king ceased to be president. Federico Sordillo stepped in as regent, holding the club the way one holds a house through probate, and in April 1966 Luigi Carraro assumed the presidency.

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 and 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.

The Autumn of the Abatino

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 — a small, cold, well-made victory, the kind one eats standing up.

The revelation of the autumn was Sormani. Freed of the half-billion, he played like a man handed back his own boots, and by the season's end he would stand at twenty-one league goals, twenty-four in all competitions — the finest possible answer to the accountants of 1963, delivered not in interviews but in the only currency the game respects. The wager had come off: the mule, relieved of the ledger, turned out to be a thoroughbred.

And then there was Rivera — l'Abatino, the little abbot, as the christening had it — 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. At the end of that season Cesare Maldini, captain and consul, departed for Torino, and the armband passed to Rivera, beginning the long reign of Milan's leader-in-chief. In the middle of a year of collapse and clearance, this is the detail the historian underlines twice, because dynasties do not announce themselves with trumpets: they pass a strip of cloth from an older arm to a younger one, and get on with the fixture list.

The Verdict

The season that straddled the year's end must be closed for the record, and it closed greyly. Liedholm gave way in the final stretch to Giovanni Cattozzo, and Milan finished the 1965-66 championship seventh, with thirty-eight points from thirteen wins, twelve draws and nine defeats, forty-three goals scored and thirty-three conceded. The Coppa Italia ended in the quarter-finals, 3-1 to Fiorentina on 6 January 1966. The Fairs Cup, at least, improved on the previous autumn's pratfall against Strasbourg: Milan reached the last sixteen before Chelsea went through on 2 March 1966 by the toss of a coin, after a playoff at San Siro that stood 1-1 through extra time — eliminated, that is, not by a goal but by a spinning piece of metal, which is either the cruellest way to leave a cup or the kindest, depending on whether one prefers to indict fate or the finishing.

So what was 1965? It was the year the first European Milan was dismantled — by three points in May, by one hundred minutes in the summer heat, by forty-six billion lire in October — and the year the neighbours stood on our grass and lifted the cup we had carried home first. The moralist notes that every element of the collapse was human: a contract allowed to curdle, a striker rushed back like an undercooked roast, a fortune spun from cotton and lost the same way. And yet the same twelve months, read with the patience the fog teaches, contain every seed of what follows: Schnellinger and Sormani arriving, Rivera taking the cloth of command, and the era's presiding name, Rocco, waiting off-stage for the return that belongs to a later chapter. Wherever the rossoneri gather to keep the faith — under the Madonnina, or on the far side of the world's clocks where the devotion is measured in lost sleep — 1965 is kept for exactly this reason: it is the proof that a great club is not its trophies, which can be carried off by neighbours and bailiffs alike, but its continuity, which cannot. The armband had found the right arm. The rest, as the risotto teaches, was a matter of patience and heat.