The Devil at the Top of the World

Fog on the Navigli, Fire at the Factory Gates

The fog came off the Navigli that winter as it always had, indifferent to politics and to football alike, and a man walking through it toward San Siro could still persuade himself that Milan was the city of the miracle — the city that had rebuilt itself from rubble, hung its cranes with lights, and kept the Madonnina gleaming above the scaffolding as a promise that the feast would never end. But 1969 was the year the feast began to curdle. Through the autumn the great factories of the industrial north emptied into the streets, Milan and Turin at the centre of it, strikes and occupations rolling through the assembly lines as workers fought over contracts and conditions; they would call it the Autunno Caldo, the Hot Autumn, and it smelled less of roasting chestnuts than of burning patience.

And yet — and this is the paradox the chronicler of 1969 must hold in both hands without dropping either — the same year gave the city the purest, least complicated joy it would taste for a generation. Champions of Europe in May. Champions of the world in October. The Ballon d'Or in the arms of the captain. The year would close in horror, in a bank on Piazza Fontana, and we shall not look away from that when the time comes; but before the darkness the Diavolo burned with a light that carried from the Bernabéu to the Bombonera, and no season in the club's first seventy years had taken the red and black so far across the map of the world.

Third at Home, Sovereign Abroad

Read coldly, the domestic ledger says almost nothing. The championship that concluded in the spring of 1969 left Milan third: Fiorentina were champions with 45 points, and Milan's 41 tied them with Cagliari, only for the accountants of goal difference — plus nineteen against the Sardinians' plus twenty-three — to nudge the Rossoneri down a step. It scarcely mattered, and everyone from the president's box to the last bar on the Navigli knew why it scarcely mattered: the true business of the year was being conducted elsewhere, in the old silver competition where Nereo Rocco, the great exponent of catenaccio, was assembling his second masterpiece; and when the next European campaign came around in the autumn, Milan would enter it not by their league place but by the oldest right of all, as holders of the cup itself.

The road had opened the previous September in Sweden, where Malmö won the first leg 2-1 and taught the travelling Milanese the old lesson that no northern outing is a formality; San Siro corrected the arithmetic with a 4-1 on the second of October, Prati scoring twice across the tie, and the aggregate read 5-3. Then came one of those bureaucratic mercies that history files under luck: Milan advanced through the second round without kicking a ball, handed a bye by the strange arithmetic of that autumn's politics — the Soviet tanks that had rolled into Czechoslovakia in August scattered the draw, and a clutch of Eastern bloc clubs withdrew from the competition in protest at UEFA's hastily redrawn pairings — and so the Diavolo wintered with fresh legs.

The quarter-final against Celtic was a tale of two climates. At a snowbound San Siro on the nineteenth of February the sides waded to a 0-0 that satisfied nobody but Rocco, who understood better than any man alive that a goalless first leg at home is not a failure but a well-set table; and on the twelfth of March, before a seventy-five thousand sell-out at Celtic Park, Prati struck early and Milan closed the shutters, 1-0, the catenaccio doing in Glasgow what it was born to do — turning one goal into a fortress and ninety minutes into a siege the besiegers lost.

The semi-final brought the holders themselves, Manchester United, and the tie was settled where Rocco preferred to settle things: at home, in April, 2-0 at San Siro. At Old Trafford on the fifteenth of May, Bobby Charlton scored and the aggregate narrowed to 2-1, but the wall held; and if there is a truer portrait of that Milan than eleven men defending a slender advantage on English soil and emerging with the arithmetic intact, the museums do not own it.

Madrid: Three from the Boy Prati

So to Madrid, the Santiago Bernabéu, the twenty-eighth of May 1969, and a final that reads now like a hinge between football's ages: on one bench Rocco, keeper of the Italian art; on the other Rinus Michels, whose young Ajax carried in its ranks a slim boy named Johan Cruyff and, in its boots, the seeds of everything the next decade would learn to call the future. Milan lined up thus: Cudicini; Anquilletti, Schnellinger, Rosato, Malatrasi, Trapattoni; Hamrin, Lodetti, Sormani, Rivera with the armband, Prati. The referee was Ortiz de Mendíbil of Spain; the attendance, 31,782 — a modest congregation for a coronation.

What followed was not a siege but a recital. Prati struck in the opening minutes — the clocks of the various archives disagree by sixty seconds, and we will not litigate a minute — and struck again before the interval, both times served by Rivera, whose passes that night had the precision of a jeweller and the patience of a moralist. Ajax answered once, a Vasović penalty around the hour, and for a moment the Dutch future flickered; then Sormani restored the distance, and Prati, with roughly a quarter of an hour remaining, completed his hat-trick. Four to one. The abatino had conducted; the boy had finished; the old art had beaten the coming age by three clear goals.

It was Milan's second European Cup, six years after the first at Wembley in 1963, and it carried a statistic that has only grown heavier with the decades: no man since Pierino Prati has scored three goals in the final of Europe's premier club competition. More than half a century of finals has passed, and the record still belongs to Rocco's boy. Let the reader pause on that. Records of power are broken annually; records of occasion almost never.

Blood at the Bombonera

There remained the world. In 1963 Milan had gone to the Intercontinental Cup and lost it to Santos, and the wound had six years of scar on it; 1969 offered the return, against Estudiantes de La Plata, holders of the Copa Libertadores. The first leg at San Siro on the eighth of October was a settling of nerves and very nearly a settling of the tie: 3-0, Sormani opening early and closing the scoring in the second half, Combin striking between them on the stroke of the interval, 60,675 souls in attendance and the risotto never tasting better on the walk home.

The second leg, at the Bombonera in Buenos Aires on the twenty-second of October, has another name in the histories, and it is not a football name: the Bombonera massacre. Estudiantes did not so much contest the tie as assault it. Their men kicked, punched and bit: Manera bit Malatrasi and shoved Cudicini; Aguirre Suárez broke Combin's nose and hurt Prati; the goalkeeper Poletti punched Rivera — the goalkeeper, punching the finest playmaker in Europe, an image the era never quite washed out. Somewhere inside the violence a match took place: Rivera scored on the half-hour, Conigliaro and Aguirre Suárez replied just before the interval, Estudiantes took the night 2-1, and Milan took the world, 4-2 on aggregate.

The reckoning was extraordinary. The Argentine government itself intervened: Poletti was banned for life, Aguirre Suárez for five years from international fixtures, and the stain spread beyond the River Plate — the brutality of that October night fed the growing European reluctance to contest the Intercontinental Cup at all in the years that followed. Milan came home champions of the world with the trophy carried like a soldier's medal, which is to say: earned, and paid for.

Combin, or the Prodigal Arrested

And here the chronicle must slow down, because inside the general violence of the Bombonera there is one man's story, and it is the strangest football story of 1969. Néstor Combin was born on the twenty-ninth of December 1940 in Las Rosas, in Argentina's Santa Fe province, but his career was built in Europe, and through a French grandmother he had pulled on the blue of France eight times. On the twenty-second of October 1969 he returned to the land of his birth as a striker of the champions of Europe, one leg from being champion of the world.

Aguirre Suárez shattered his nose and cheekbone. He left the pitch on a stretcher, his face — the accounts agree on the image — a mask of blood. And then came the crueller blow, the one no defender inflicted: as he was carried out, Argentine police arrested him. Not his assailants: him. The charge was desertion — the Argentine-born forward had never completed his military service — and so a man bleeding and concussed was taken from a stretcher to a cell and held there overnight, a champion in a police cell in the country whose earth he was born on.

He was released on the twenty-third, after an international outcry, and after his Milan team-mates — let this be written in the club's golden book alongside the goals — refused to leave Buenos Aires without him. Years later a rival account surfaced, attributed to Estudiantes' Madero, claiming Combin had provoked his marker with a taunt about wages; the versions have never been reconciled, and this chronicle will not pretend to adjudicate what was said between the two legs, at San Siro or in the din of the Bombonera. But the moralist may still keep his ledger: whatever words were exchanged, the night's entries read one broken face, one prison cell, and one team that would not board an aeroplane without its wounded. A man came home a champion of the world and was jailed there as a deserter; football has written many parables, and none more bitter.

The Abatino's Golden Ball

The year's individual honour found its natural resting place. Gianni Rivera — l'abatino, the little abbot, the frail aesthete whose critics had spent a decade demanding he sweat more and whose answer was always another pass nobody else had seen — won the Ballon d'Or, polling 83 points from the 26 national journalists against 79 for Cagliari's Gigi Riva and 38 for Bayern's Gerd Müller. Four points between the abbot and the thunderer: the closest of arguments, settled, for once, in favour of intelligence. He was the first Italian-born player to be named European Footballer of the Year — Sívori, honoured in 1961, had been born Argentine — and he had worn Milan's armband since 1966, entrusted with it at twenty-three.

Around him stood a side worth naming the way one names a good cellar. Cudicini in goal, the Ragno Nero, the Black Spider, all reach and darkness; Anquilletti, Rosato and Malatrasi in the trenches alongside Schnellinger, the West German who defended like an alp; Trapattoni, Lodetti and Fogli carrying the water and, when required, the war; Hamrin the Swede and Sormani ahead of them, Combin's courage, Prati's finishing, and Rivera above it all like a spire. Behind the eleven, the institution matched the team: Franco Carraro, the young president who had taken the chair after his father Luigi and held it from 1967, presided over the 1968 scudetto, the European Cup and now the Intercontinental crown, while Rocco, in his second spell at the club, added a second European Cup to the one he had won in 1963. Catenaccio is often described as pessimism organised; in Rocco's hands, in 1969, it looked remarkably like joy.

Autumn, the Bomb, and the Verdict

The new championship opened in September 1969, and honesty obliges the record to note that the league would again elude the world champions: the season that began that autumn would end with Cagliari champions of Italy for the only time in their history, 45 points, four clear of Inter and seven clear of Juventus, Riva thundering to the Capocannoniere title with 21 goals while his defence conceded a record-low 11 all season. Milan would come fourth, enough for Europe, and a Milanese of taste could raise a glass to the islanders without much bitterness; a man who has dined at the Bernabéu and the Bombonera in a single year can afford to let somebody else have the risotto.

The Diavolo's wanderings that year held one further curiosity: an exhibition in New York, where Milan beat Inter 6-4 — the derby exported across an ocean, ten goals under an American sky. Australia, it must be honestly recorded, saw nothing of them; the club would not set foot on Australian soil until the great tour of May and June 1980, when the Rossoneri carried the red and black through Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth. In 1969 the news of Madrid and Buenos Aires reached the far side of the world the slow way, by wire and newsprint and letters from home, and the Australians who would one day rise before dawn for the Rossoneri were still waiting for their club to come to them — and the waiting, as Adelaide can testify, only deepened the devotion.

And then, on the twelfth of December, the year showed its last face. A bomb exploded in the Banca Nazionale dell'Agricoltura on Piazza Fontana, in the heart of Milan, killing 17 people and wounding around 88, and the country passed through that doorway into what history calls the anni di piombo, the Years of Lead. It is not the business of a football chronicle to explain such things; it is its business to remember where they stood in relation to the games. They stood at the end. First the fog, then the strikes, then Madrid, then Buenos Aires, then the Golden Ball — and then Piazza Fontana, twelve days into the last month of the year.

So let the verdict on 1969 be a double one, as the year itself was double. It was the year Italy's long feast turned over into its long fever; and it was the year Milan — the team, the idea, the red and black of it — stood at the very top of the world: champions of Europe by four goals to one, champions of everything by four to two, the best footballer in Europe wearing the armband and the shrewdest old fox in the game on the bench. Cities are sustained through their winters by the memory of their summers. Milan's winter was coming, longer than anyone then knew; but the summer of 1969 — Prati's three in Madrid, Rivera's jewelled passes, Combin's broken, unbowed face — burned bright enough to be seen from the other side of the world, where, half a century on, its light has still not gone out.