The Star They Were Sewing

The Fog Lifts Slowly on a Year Cut in Two

The calendar and the football season have never agreed with each other, and in 1978 their quarrel mattered more than usual, because the year fell across two campaigns the way the Po falls across Lombardy: the same water, two different landscapes. Spring belonged to the last months of 1977-78, Nils Liedholm's first season back on the Milan bench; autumn to the opening of 1978-79, the season that would end, the following May, with the tenth scudetto and the first star sewn above the badge. The Swede had been ours before — a player from 1949 to 1961, a coach again in the mid-sixties — and his return in 1977 had the quality of a man coming home to a house he had helped build and finding the furniture rearranged. Above him sat the president Felice Colombo; out on the pitch the armband still lay where it had lain since the sixties, on the arm of Gianni Rivera.

Beyond the touchline, Italy in 1978 was a country holding its breath. On 16 March the Red Brigades ambushed Aldo Moro in Rome, killed the men of his escort and carried the former prime minister into fifty-five days of darkness; on 9 May his body was found folded into a car, and the anni di piombo had their blackest date. Before the year was out the Church would bury two popes and elect two — Paul VI dying in August, John Paul I reigning thirty-three days, Karol Wojtyla emerging in October as John Paul II — while in Argentina Enzo Bearzot's Italy charmed the World Cup and finished fourth, a placing that felt like a promise. Milan, the industrial capital, lived all of this with its collar turned up against more than the weather. What the rossoneri were quietly assembling would give the city one of its few uncomplicated joys.

A Spring Eaten Slowly, Like a Risotto Stirred Too Long

The 1977-78 season closed with Milan fourth on 37 points — twelve wins, thirteen draws, five defeats, thirty-eight goals scored and twenty-five allowed — and those thirteen draws tell you the flavour of the thing: a risotto stirred too long, correct in every ingredient and short of salt. The side had gone its first ten matches unbeaten and briefly sat on top of the table before fading, and by the time the new year's fixtures began the question was no longer whether Milan could win the title but whether they could keep their appointment with Europe.

January was a penance: a 1-1 with Verona at home on the 8th, a 2-0 defeat in Rome to Lazio a week later, a 0-1 at San Siro against Napoli on the 22nd — and then, as if the team had grown bored of its own austerity, a 5-1 demolition of Fiorentina on the 29th, the one afternoon of the spring when the scoreboard behaved like an opera. February and March returned to Lent: 1-1 at Genoa, 0-0 with Juventus, a 1-0 over Roma, a 0-0 derby with Inter on 12 March in which two great houses exchanged formalities and little else. April brought a fine 1-0 at Perugia and a 1-1 with Torino, but also the strangest entry in the ledger: both of Milan's defeats in the second half of the season came at home, 0-1 to Atalanta on 16 April and 0-2 to Lazio on 30 April, as though San Siro itself had grown weary of the diet. The campaign closed 1-1 in Naples on 7 May; two days later the country found Moro's body, and football put its voice down to a whisper.

The arithmetic of the attack was itself a small essay on Liedholm's Milan: the leading league scorer, with eight goals, was Aldo Maldera — a left-back. Rivera, from midfield, added six. When your most dangerous finisher is a defender arriving from behind, either your forwards have retired or your coach has understood something about geometry that the rest of the league has not; with Liedholm it was always the geometry. Enrico Albertosi kept the goal, Fabio Capello and Rivera kept the accounts in midfield, and fourth place carried its practical reward: a passage into the UEFA Cup.

The Boy from the Bentegodi

The season's true event, though nobody printed it in headlines at the time, happened on 23 April 1978 at the Stadio Bentegodi in Verona, in the third-last round. Maurizio Turone, the regular sweeper, was suspended, and Liedholm — who trusted young legs the way a vintner trusts young vines, on evidence rather than sentiment — reached into the Primavera and brought out a slight boy of seventeen, two weeks short of his eighteenth birthday, born in the May of 1960: Franco Baresi. Milan won 1-2, the goals from Bigon and Buriani, and Serie A had acquired, without ceremony, the man who would define the art of the libero for a generation.

The detail that gives the afternoon its ache is what came before it. Inter had looked at the boy and sent him away — too frail, they judged — while keeping his elder brother Giuseppe, Beppe, for themselves. So Franco crossed the city to Milan instead, and the scales of that decision would take twenty years to finish tipping. Liedholm offered the debut no ceremony at all — the boy was simply told he was playing, was named in the starting eleven, and went through his ninety minutes with a calm that made the veterans around him look like the nervous ones. From that April afternoon Baresi stayed a rossonero for the next twenty years: more than seven hundred games, six scudetti, and the captaincy that made him, simply and forever, il capitano.

Summer Carpentry

The summer's business was carpentry, not marble. Out went Giuseppe Sabadini and Turone, both to Catanzaro — the sweeper's April suspension having opened the door through which his successor had already walked — and out too went Egidio Calloni, to Hellas Verona. In came Walter De Vecchi from Monza, Walter Novellino from Perugia and Stefano Chiodi from Bologna: three workmen's names, not one of them a headline, all of them chosen the way a Lombard cook chooses ingredients — for what they do in the pot, not on the label. Liedholm was not assembling a galaxy of stars; he was tuning an orchestra, and the autumn would show how finely.

Autumn: The Machine Finds Its Stride

The new season opened, as Italian seasons then did, with the Coppa Italia's late-summer groups, and Milan treated them with the distraction of a man reading the newspaper at a family lunch: a 3-2 win carried off at Lecce on 30 August, a 3-0 over Foggia on 3 September, a 3-1 defeat at SPAL on the 10th, a 2-2 with Catanzaro on the 17th — five points, second in the group behind Catanzaro, eliminated. Nobody mourned. There are years when a cup is a garland and years when it is a distraction, and Liedholm had evidently decided which kind of year this was going to be.

The league was another matter entirely. From October to December Milan played twelve and lost once: 1-0 over Avellino, 3-0 over Roma, a 0-0 with Ascoli, a 3-1 won away at Atalanta, a 4-1 over Fiorentina that echoed January's opera. The single stumble came in Turin on 5 November, Juventus 1-0 in the top-of-the-table meeting — a reminder, delivered in the old rival's dry handwriting, that nothing would be given. Milan answered as champions answer: 1-0 over Inter in the derby, a 3-2 carried off at Vicenza, draws in Naples and at home with Perugia, 1-0 over Torino, and a 3-1 at Verona on 17 December to close the calendar. When the winter break came, Milan sat at the head of the table with 25 points: campioni d'inverno, winter champions — a title the Italians invented precisely because hope needs a name in December.

The goals, meanwhile, had found new addresses. Bigon would finish the season with twelve in the league; Chiodi, the quiet signing from Bologna, with seven in the league and eleven across all competitions; and Maldera went on being the most dangerous left-back in Italy, arriving late from the shadows like a thief who holds a season ticket. But the deeper truth was defensive: across the whole campaign this Milan would concede only nineteen goals, and a side that concedes nineteen does not need poetry in attack — it needs punctuality, and it had it.

The Derby of the Brothers

Of all the autumn's afternoons, keep 12 November. San Siro held about fifty thousand for the derby, and more than thirteen thousand others watched on a giant screen at the neighbouring Palasport — the overflow of a city that could not fit its own passion into one building. Inter lost Alessandro Altobelli in the 40th minute, sent off for reacting to a foul by Collovati, and early in the second half the game found its sentence: De Vecchi, the summer workman from Monza, delivered the cross, Chiodi rose to flick it on, and Maldera — who else, in this of all years — headed the only goal. Milan 1, Inter 0.

History was writing a second story in the margin. This was the first Milan derby to put the Baresi brothers on opposite sides — Franco in red and black, Beppe in blue and black — the two halves of one Lombard footballing family divided by a scout's misjudgement. Football is full of parables and most of them are false, but this one was walking around the pitch in boots: the club that measures a boy's frame gets a good player; the club that measures his understanding gets a monument.

The Cold at Maine Road

Europe, meanwhile, administered its customary lesson in humility. The UEFA Cup run had begun nervously — a 1-0 over Lokomotíva Košice at San Siro on 13 September, a 0-1 away a fortnight later, survival only on penalties — before finding better manners against Levski Sofia: a 1-1 in Bulgaria on 19 October, then a 3-0 at home on 1 November. Then came Manchester City in the third round, and the two away goals of a 2-2 draw at San Siro on 23 November hung over the return leg like a bad debt. At Maine Road on 6 December, in the kind of English cold that makes Lombard fog seem hospitable, City won 3-0 and Milan's European year was over. The elimination was received at home with something close to serenity: the side had one obsession now, and it wore the number of a tenth title.

The Star, Already Being Sewn

Everything 1978 built was cashed the following May. On 6 May 1979 a goalless draw with Bologna at San Siro made the arithmetic safe: 44 points from seventeen wins, ten draws and three defeats, forty-six goals scored and nineteen conceded, three points clear of Perugia — and here history permitted itself one of its crueller jokes, because Perugia went the entire season unbeaten, eleven wins and nineteen draws, and still finished second, the only side in Serie A's annals to pass a whole campaign without defeat and hold no title to show for it. The unbeaten feat itself would later be matched, by Milan in 1991-92 and by Juventus in 2011-12, but the peculiar heartbreak of Perugia's 41 points remains theirs alone. Milan's tenth scudetto earned the star that Italian football awards for ten titles — only Juventus and Inter had sewn one on before: the stella, stitched above the badge, where it has outlived everyone who stitched it.

It was also a farewell. Rivera — the golden boy whom sterner critics had christened the abatino, as though elegance were a vice — passed from thirty-four to thirty-five across the year, and the stella campaign would be his last; he retired at its end as the club's record appearance-holder, 658 competitive matches, an entire ecclesiastical career spent in a single parish. And above it all sat Colombo, president of the tenth title, whose name history was holding in reserve for the betting scandal of 1980 that would drag the champions down to Serie B — a shadow the reader knows and the men of 1978 did not, which is precisely what makes their year so poignant to look back upon.

So the verdict on 1978: no trophy was lifted inside its twelve months, and yet it may be the most consequential trophyless year of the club's first century. It gave Milan a seventeen-year-old sweeper at Verona in April and a winter crown in December; it took a country's worst spring and answered it with a city's best autumn. The star that was being sewn through those foggy months is on the shirt still — worn now on the far side of the world, before dawn, by people who follow the Diavolo across every clock face — and each of its points catches a little of the light of that year: the year in which Milan, in a country holding its breath, quietly taught itself to breathe.