The Empty Cathedral of Rotterdam

The Fog Comes Down Early

There are years that arrive like guests and years that arrive like bailiffs, and 1974 came to Milan with an inventory in its hand. Italy had spent the winter learning the new arithmetic of the oil shock: petrol rationed by anxiety if not always by coupon, austerity announced from Rome, and Sundays made car-free by decree, so that the Navigli were given back for a few strange mornings to bicycles and the sound of their own water. Austerity is a northern virtue in theory and a northern grievance in practice, and the Milanese, who like their pleasures orderly and their risotto unhurried, bore it as they bear the fog that rolls down from the rice fields: with a raised collar, a shortened stride, and the private conviction that this, too, would lift.

It was a year in which the nation wrote its diary in a single month. On 12 May the Italians went to the polls and voted to keep the divorce law — a watershed, the moment a Catholic country admitted to itself that it had become modern — and on 28 May a bomb in Piazza della Loggia in Brescia reminded everyone what the years of lead were made of, and how short the distance was between a ballot box and a coffin. Between those two dates, on the 8th, Milan lost a European final that almost nobody attended. If that sounds like the smallest of the three events, be patient. Football has its own way of writing a nation's history in the margin, and the margin of May 1974 says more about what was ending in Milanello than any communiqué the club dared to publish.

For this was the trough of the wave. The Milan of Rocco — the Milan of the European Cups of 1963 and 1969, the Milan that had taught catenaccio to sing — was dissolving grain by grain, and nothing had yet arrived to replace it. The mid-seventies would be a fallow, unsettled stretch for the Rossoneri, a long corridor between two illuminated rooms, and 1974 was the year the door closed behind them. The reader who wants triumphs is advised to skip ahead a decade. The reader who wants to understand the club — who wants to know what the red and black cost, and why the faithful kept paying — should stay for this one.

Six Lashes in Amsterdam

The year opened with a lesson, and like most true lessons it was administered without mercy. Milan, holders of the Cup Winners' Cup, met Ajax, masters of everything else, in the European Super Cup — a two-legged tribunal convened in January to establish which of Europe's crowns sat on the harder head. The first leg, on 9 January at San Siro, gave the illusion of a case for the defence: a mere 12,856 came out into the winter — austerity keeps a man from his petrol and sometimes from his football — and Luciano Chiarugi, the season's one reliable flame, scored on 77 minutes under the Swiss whistle of Rudolf Scheurer. One to nil. A small lead, carried to Holland the way a man carries a candle into a gale.

On 16 January, at the Olympisch Stadion in Amsterdam, the gale arrived. Jan Mulder on 26 minutes, Piet Keizer on 35, Johan Neeskens on 71, Johnny Rep on 81, Gerrie Mühren from the spot on 84, Arie Haan on 87: six goals, six strokes of the cane, delivered before 15,350 Dutchmen who must have felt they were watching not a match but a demonstration, the way a professor demonstrates a theorem he has long since stopped finding difficult. Six-nil on the night, 6-1 on the aggregate, and a line in the ledgers that still stings to copy out: the worst defeat ever suffered by an Italian team in the final of a UEFA competition. The referee that night, one notes with the historian's cold shiver, was Rudi Glöckner of the German Democratic Republic. The East Germans had entered Milan's 1974 early, and merely as witnesses. They would return as executioners.

What did Amsterdam prove? That the football of the future was being played by someone else. Milan had built its greatness on the arts of position and patience, on defending as a form of intelligence; Ajax played as if the pitch belonged to them by deed and the ball by birthright. One does not enjoy being schooled at that age, with those medals in the cabinet. But the honest chronicler records that the six goals were not an accident of a cold night. They were a diagnosis.

The Paròn Leaves the Table

Every family has the dinner at which the father pushes back his chair, folds his napkin, and leaves without raising his voice, and for the family of Milan that dinner came in February. Nereo Rocco — the Paròn, the man from whose great Triestine hands had come the European Cups of 1963 and 1969, serving that season not as coach but as technical director, a patriarch promoted upstairs — resigned around the 12th of the month. Behind the resignation lay an unresolved dispute with the president, Albino Buticchi, and behind the dispute lay something a proud man forgives even less readily: the knowledge that the club was already courting Torino's Gustavo Giagnoni for the seasons to come. Rocco did not wait to be replaced at his own table. He left, and by the following season he was at Fiorentina, wearing another family's colours the way a widower wears a new coat — correctly, and without love.

The bench he left behind had already become a relay station. The season had begun with Rocco as technical director; from the ninth matchday, on 16 December 1973, Cesare Maldini joined him on the bench and then carried the burden alone; and from early April the whistle passed to Giovanni Trapattoni, a loyal son of the house, promoted in mid-crisis the way armies promote lieutenants in a retreat. Three hands on one tiller in a single voyage: no ship steers true like that, and this one did not. Through it all one man remained constant, as he had remained constant through a decade of glories — Gianni Rivera, captain, the golden boy now golden no longer in years but still in the wrist, obliged to lead a crew that changed its officers by the month.

A moralist could pause here, and this chronicler is a moralist. Clubs devour their fathers; it is in their constitution. But there is a price for it, paid not in the week of the quarrel but in the years after, and Milan would pay it in full: the Paròn's departure was not a change of personnel but a change of era, and everyone at San Siro seemed to know it except the minutes of the board meetings.

Thin Broth in Serie A

The league season tells its story best in its own cruel bookkeeping. At the winter break Milan stood fifth, with 18 points from the andata — respectable, a table position you could serve to guests. Then came the spring, and the spring came apart. The final ledger read: 30 points from 30 matches, 11 won, 8 drawn, 11 lost, 34 goals scored and 36 conceded — a season of almost perfect, and perfectly damning, symmetry, a broth boiled so thin you could read the newspaper through it. Seventh place. For the club that had ruled Europe twice in a decade, seventh is not a position; it is an accusation.

There were mouthfuls of the old flavour. On 17 February, Roma were beaten 2-0, and for an afternoon San Siro remembered what appetite felt like. Then, on 24 March, came the derby, and the derby was a massacre: Internazionale five, Milan one. There is no dressing that wound in tactical analysis. A derby lost by four goals is not a defeat but a public reading of the will, the cousins gathering to hear what remains of the estate. The Coppa Italia offered no consolation either: in their second-round group Milan finished third with 5 points while Bologna took 9 and went through, Inter and Atalanta making up the company — an early exit, executed with the quiet efficiency of a season that had stopped believing in itself.

And yet the individual entries in the register deserve their lines. Chiarugi, all flame and unpredictability, finished with 17 goals in all competitions, 11 of them in the league — the one forward who kept producing while the house changed managers around him. Angelo Anquilletti, that most unglamorous and indispensable of defenders, made more appearances than anyone: 29 in the league, 43 in all. And the people — this is the entry that matters most — the people still came. An average of 47,466 at San Siro for a seventh-place team in an austerity winter. Love, in the Milanese dialect of it, is not a declaration. It is attendance.

The Empty Cathedral of Rotterdam

Through all of it, the club had one thread of silk left in its pocket: the Cup Winners' Cup, which it held, and which it set about defending with the last of the old craft. The route to the final was serious work seriously done. Dinamo Zagreb were beaten 3-1 and 1-0; Rapid Wien were held 0-0 at San Siro and then dispatched 2-0 in Vienna; PAOK of Salonika were taken 3-0 at home and survived 2-2 away; and in the semi-final Borussia Mönchengladbach — German, gifted, dangerous — were beaten 2-0 before the return was lost 0-1, the aggregate held with clenched teeth. The holders had reached the final again. On paper, the dynasty had one breath left in it.

The final was played on 8 May 1974 at De Kuip, the Feyenoord stadium in Rotterdam, under the Dutch referee Arie van Gemert, and the first tragedy of the evening was visible before a ball was kicked: the stands. Some 4,641 souls rattled around a bowl built for tens of thousands. A Cold War final against the East Germans of 1. FC Magdeburg had drawn almost no one; the vast concrete sang with emptiness. Milan came out led, as ever, by Rivera, with Trapattoni — a month in the job — on the bench, and a patched line-up that leaned on the young Aldo Maldera, a child of the house, and on Alberto Bigon, sent out with the rest to defend the family silver. It is one thing to lose a final in a furnace of eighty thousand. It is another to lose it in a cathedral where every shout comes back to you as your own echo.

On 42 minutes, Enrico Lanzi, a Milan defender doing a defender's honest work, turned the ball into his own net. On 74, Wolfgang Seguin scored Magdeburg's second. Nought-two, and the cup was gone — surrendered by its holders in near-silence, the way valuable things are usually lost: not torn away, but let slip. Lanzi's own goal, struck in front of those ghostly, echoing terraces, is the small private wound at the centre of Milan's 1974, and this chronicle refuses to make it a scapegoat. Own goals are football's tax on defenders who put their bodies where the danger is; the deserters pay nothing. But the image will not leave: an era that began in the roar of Wembley and the delirium of Madrid ended with a deflection in an empty stadium, applauded by no one, in the wrong net, in the rain of history if not of meteorology.

Give the victors their due, precisely measured. Magdeburg's triumph made them a singularity: the only club of the German Democratic Republic ever to win a European trophy, a distinction that half a century has not altered and now never will. Some chroniclers, in their enthusiasm, promoted them further, calling them the first Eastern European winners of a UEFA competition — an honour the record does not support, for Slovan Bratislava of Czechoslovakia had lifted the Cup Winners' Cup in 1969. The truth needs no inflation. One European cup, won by one club of a vanished country, taken from the hands of the great Milan in front of four and a half thousand people: history rarely writes anything stranger, and never anything lonelier.

An Autumn in Plain Italian

Defeats of that calibre are followed either by denial or by demolition, and to its credit the club chose demolition. The summer of 1974 rebuilt the squad from the spine outwards. Enrico Albertosi arrived from Cagliari to stand between the posts, a goalkeeper of theatrical authority; Aldo Bet came from Verona and Luciano Zecchini from Torino to remake the defence; Duino Gorin and the young striker Egidio Calloni came down from Varese. And one departure outweighed all the arrivals in tonnage of sentiment: Karl-Heinz Schnellinger, the great German who had guarded Milan's flank for some nine seasons, left for Tennis Borussia Berlin. With him went the last foreign passport in the dressing room. For the first time since 1944-45, Milan would field an entirely Italian roster — a club speaking, for a season, in plain Italian, as if the years of Babel and glory needed to be sweated out in the mother tongue.

The bench, at last, stopped revolving: Gustavo Giagnoni, the man the club had been courting since the winter of Rocco's leaving, took charge, with Buticchi still in the president's chair. The autumn's results read like a convalescence chart. On 6 October, a goalless draw with Sampdoria — the pulse steady, no more. On 13 October, defeat in Turin to Juventus, 2-1 by the accounts that have come down to us, though the record-keepers do not all initial the same page. Then the strength returned: Ascoli beaten 2-0 on 24 November, and on 22 December, a 3-0 dismissal of Bologna to carry into Christmas like a parcel of good panettone. The season those months began would end, in the spring of 1975, in fifth place — 36 points from 12 wins, 12 draws and 6 defeats — and a ticket back to Europe through the UEFA Cup. Not a resurrection; call it a recovery of appetite.

And there is one entry in the new ledger that a lover of symmetries cannot pass over. Calloni, the boy from Varese, finished that 1974-75 season as top scorer with 17 goals in all competitions, 11 of them in the league — figure for figure, comma for comma, the very numbers Chiarugi had posted the season before. As if the club, dismantling one era and ordering the parts for another, had requisitioned its centre-forward by catalogue number. Football does this: it repeats its arithmetic while changing all its meanings, and only the fans, who keep the accounts in their hearts rather than in the books, notice.

The Verdict

Set the year in its frame before judging it. That summer, West Germany hosted the World Cup and won it; Italy travelled, played, and was home after the first round, the whole peninsula's football pride sent back like a badly addressed letter. The country outside the stadiums queued through austerity, voted for divorce, buried its dead in Brescia, and carried on — because carrying on is the Italian art form that underlies all the others. In such a year, the collapse of a football dynasty is a small sorrow. But small sorrows are the ones a man actually lives with, daily, at the table and on the tram, and the rossonero people lived with this one for a long time.

Here, then, is the verdict on 1974, delivered without appeal. It was the year the old Milan died — not in battle, which would have been bearable, but of administration: a father let go in February, a bench passed from hand to hand, six lashes in Amsterdam taken almost without reply, a derby lost like an estate sale, and at the last, in Rotterdam, the family silver slipping into the wrong net before four and a half thousand witnesses in a cathedral built for worship and abandoned by the congregation. And yet the same year contains, for those who read to the end, the first sentence of the next book: an honest autumn, a rebuilt spine, a boy from Varese scoring the old numbers, and 47,466 Milanese a fortnight climbing the San Siro stairs for a seventh-place team, to say nothing of the scattered faithful in the world's far cities who would learn the scores days late and grieve them anyway. Clubs are like Milan the city: the fog comes down, the Madonnina disappears, and the unwise conclude she is gone. She is not gone. She is waiting for the weather to change — and the weather, though the queue outside the petrol stations did not believe it in 1974, always changes.