Three Presidents and the Cloud over Seveso

The Tenth of July, at Seveso

A cloud left the ICMESA chemical works at Seveso on the tenth of July and went where the wind sent it, out over that gentle Brianza where the last of Milan's trams gives way to the first of Lombardy's vegetable gardens. It carried dioxin. It was one of the worst industrial accidents Europe had ever suffered, and it announced itself the way such things do — with no noise, no flame worth a newsreel, only an invisible poison laid politely over ordinary life and the slow discovery, in the kitchens of the hinterland, that the market gardens which had supplied the city for a century were now a question rather than an answer. Milan spent that summer learning words no city should need.

It had already been a punishing year for the peninsula. On the sixth of May the earth tore itself open beneath Friuli and around a thousand people died in the rubble of the north-east; on the twentieth of June the country voted in the fever of the anni di piombo, the years of lead, and watched Enrico Berlinguer's Communists make historic gains while the Christian Democrats clung to the wheel, the lira all the while misbehaving like a colt nobody had broken. Against such a backdrop it takes either arrogance or mercy to write about football. I choose mercy, because football was where the ordinary Milanese went to breathe, and in 1976 breathing was not a thing to be taken for granted.

And what did our man find when he escaped to the stadium? Justice, of a sort, though wearing another city's colours. Torino won the scudetto with 45 points, their seventh title and their first since the aeroplane fell at Superga in 1949 and carried the Grande Torino into legend; not even a heart striped red and black could begrudge them the poetry of it. Juventus finished second. Milan finished third, with 38 points — at once a small miracle and a large deception, the miracle being that anyone in that boardroom stood still long enough to count the points at all.

The Bench on Castors

Count the presidents. Across the single season of 1975-76, Milan contrived to consume three: Albino Buticchi until the 21st of December 1975, Bruno Pardi from the following day until the 3rd of May 1976, Vittorio Duina from the 4th of May onward. A club is a thing that must be held still long enough to be pointed in a direction; this one changed hands faster than a betting slip changes pockets on a Sunday evening. Duina at least would carry it into the following season, which in that climate qualified as dynastic stability.

The bench fared no better, though its churn produced the year's most expensive irony. Giagnoni's sacking on the first of the previous October had put the young Giovanni Trapattoni on the bench with Nereo Rocco installed above him as technical director — that changing of the guard belongs to the previous autumn's chapter — and Trapattoni held the job until spring. From June 1976 it passed to Paolo Barison — and Trapattoni, unwanted where he had been formed, boarded the train to Turin to manage Juventus, where a legendary era was about to begin. The reader who wishes to understand the next decade of Italian football need only hold on to this one fact: in 1976, Milan let Giovanni Trapattoni go.

A Spring of Small Mercies

And yet — here is the mystery of the year, and it does not resolve — the team played. Fifteen wins, eight draws, seven defeats; forty-two goals scored, twenty-eight conceded; 38 points and third place, enough to book passage into the following season's UEFA Cup. Romeo Benetti wore the armband that spring, and Benetti was the captain such a year required, all iron and tendon, a man who treated midfield as a border to be policed rather than a salon to be decorated. A club dissolving above the waterline was held together below it by his kind of stubbornness.

Better still, the city itself was won, twice. December's derby had already gone rossonero, as the previous year's pages have recorded; in the return on the 28th of March 1976 the neighbours were put down again, 1-0, the goal belonging to Alberto Bigon, and the archive reel that preserves it — filed with bureaucratic tenderness as Inter-Milan 0-1, Bigon — remains one of the few documents of the year a rossonero may watch without wincing. Whatever was rotting in the committee rooms, the derby of 1976 spoke a single language from the concrete, and it was ours.

Flanders, Where Order Won

Europe told the harder truth, as Europe generally does. Milan had made honest progress through the UEFA Cup — Everton beaten, then Athlone Town, then Spartak Moscow — and arrived in March at a quarter-final against Club Brugge, Belgians of little romance and considerable order. In Flanders on the third of March the order prevailed: 2-0, the goals from le Fevre and Krieger. At San Siro on the seventeenth, before some fifty-five thousand of the faithful, Milan rallied as proud sides do — Bigon from close range, then a Chiarugi free-kick, and for a spell the night believed itself — until Hinderyckx replied for the Belgians, 2-1 on the evening, 3-2 on aggregate, and the stadium emptied like a bath.

One measures a wound by what the side that dealt it does next: Club Brugge marched on to that season's final, where Liverpool beat them. There is no disgrace in falling by a single goal to a side of that calibre. There is only the older, subtler ache — the suspicion that a club governed with the composure of its own midfield would never have needed to rally at all, and that the difference between a quarter-final and a final is rarely talent and nearly always order.

Lo Sciagurato Egidio

Egidio Calloni was born on the first of December 1952, and he was the number nine of this piece — the centre-forward that a romantic, declining club, run by whichever president had most recently located the keys, happened to have on its books. In 1975-76 he finished top scorer with 13 league goals, 19 in all competitions. Read that sentence again, slowly. Through three presidents and a bench on castors, one young man scored enough to drag a mediocre side to third place in Italy. By any sober measure, a hero.

Folklore, however, has filed him under a different heading, and the thumbprint on the file is Gianni Brera's. Lo sciagurato Egidio, Brera called him — the wretched Egidio — the name borrowed from a minor sinner in Manzoni's I Promessi Sposi, and the terraces went further still, christening his spectacular misses le callonate, as though they were a category of weather. For that was the paradox of the man: croce e delizia, cross and delight, the scorer of the goals that kept Milan afloat and the squanderer of chances so open they seemed to have been arranged by the municipality. He would lead the line again in 1976-77, a season whose accounting the next chapter keeps; across four rossonere seasons he scored 31 goals in 101 league matches — 54 in 143 games once the cups are counted — roughly one every three games.

And yet he is remembered less for the tally than for the ache of the ones that got away, which tells us more about ourselves than about him. We forgive the mediocre everything and the gifted nothing; we count a man's spilled wine and never his harvest. Calloni carried a sick club on a young back through the most misgoverned season in its memory, and his reward was a nickname out of Manzoni. Brera gave it to him, and I do not entirely disown the inheritance — literature must eat — but let this chronicle at least set both side by side: the misses that made the legend, and the thirteen goals that made the season.

The Summer They Traded the Engine

Summer brought surgery. Benetti — the captain, the engine — was traded to Juventus, following Trapattoni to Turin as though the club were dismantling itself along the autostrada, and coming the other way in the exchange was Fabio Capello: iron swapped for intelligence, an engine for a metronome, the whole affair concluded in the manner of that era's market, which is to say between the clubs, over the players' heads, with the men themselves consulted about as thoroughly as the luggage — as neat an epitaph for the footballer's condition in those years as the archive offers.

Giorgio Morini arrived from Roma, Giorgio Braglia from Napoli; Luciano Chiarugi, scorer in the Brugge rally, departed for Napoli. And the vacant armband returned to the arm where sentiment had always insisted it belonged: Gianni Rivera, the golden boy, captain once more, with Bigon his deputy and Giuseppe Marchioro appointed to the bench. On paper it read as renewal — a metronome exchanged for an engine, an elder statesman restored, a new tactician installed. But paper, in the Milan of 1976, had a way of catching fire.

Thirteen Points by Christmas

The new season began, in fact, with a whisper of what would eventually redeem it. In the Coppa Italia's opening group, from the end of August into September, Milan beat Catania 2-0, edged Lazio 2-1, drew 1-1 with Atalanta and dismissed Novara 3-0 — and progressed. Nobody in the thinning September light could know what those four results were the first page of. File the detail away; the winter will need it.

Because the league, from October, turned the colour of slate. Marchioro's Milan beat Perugia 2-1 on the third of October and then forgot, for the remainder of the calendar year, how winning was done: goalless at Sampdoria, goalless with Fiorentina, beaten 3-1 at Napoli, beaten 3-2 at home by Juventus on the seventh of November — Benetti's Juventus now, Trapattoni's Juventus, and the reader may imagine with what serenity San Siro digested that — then 2-2 at Bologna, 1-1 in the derby on the 28th of November, 1-1 at Roma, 2-2 with Genoa, and, as a final indignity before the panettone, defeat 2-1 at Foggia on the nineteenth of December. Milan reached the winter break eleventh, with thirteen points — a winter whose full bill the next chapter presents.

Europe, meanwhile, offered gallantry without reward. Dinamo Bucuresti were edged 2-1 on aggregate after a goalless night in Romania; Akademik Sofia were survived 5-4, the 4-3 defeat in Sofia redeemed by a 2-0 at San Siro; and then came Athletic Bilbao, who won 4-1 in the Basque country on the 24th of November and defended the ruins at San Siro, where Milan's 3-1 on the eighth of December fell precisely one goal short — 5-4 on aggregate, out at the round of 16. Bilbao, like Brugge in the spring, marched on to their edition's final. Twice in one calendar year, then, Milan were eliminated from Europe by the eventual finalist — a statistic that is either consolation or condemnation, depending on the hour of the night at which one considers it.

Three Years Short of a Star

How, then, to file 1976? As a hinge, I think — the sort of year historians skip and novelists linger over. It was Rocco's twilight and Rivera's autumn; it was the year Trapattoni was let go and Capello was brought in, the year the armband passed from iron to gold; the year three presidents sat in one chair and the chair itself seemed the only fixed point. Milan ended it eleventh in the table and poisoned in the air, three years short of a star and four short of a scandal, holding unrecognised in its hands the group-stage stub of something the following summer would have to name.

A city can survive poisoned air, and did; a club can survive poisoned governance, and — narrowly — would. What neither survives indefinitely is the poisoning of patience, and patience was what 1976 spent: on boardrooms with revolving doors, on a wretched and wonderful number nine, on draws that arrived as regularly as the pay packet. And still, every other Sunday, they climbed the concrete — men who had passed the summer reading about a cloud and the autumn watching a team forget how to win, and who came anyway, which is the only kind of faith worth writing down. Filed away in the club's papers, meanwhile, unregarded, lay four results from a September group: Catania, Lazio, Atalanta, Novara. That was the trophy. Nobody knew it yet. Nobody ever does.