The First Star and the Long Goodbye

A Star Above the Madonnina

There are years when a city receives the ornament it has been quietly saving a place for, and for Milan 1979 was such a year: a small golden star, stitched above the red and black, one star to stand for ten championships — the first ever earned by an Italian club. The fog of the Po valley hides the Madonnina from San Siro for half of every winter, and it hid her that winter too; but by the first warm Sundays of May the whole city carried itself as though the little gilded Virgin on the Duomo's highest spire had leaned down through the mist and pinned the decoration on with her own hand. Ten titles. One star. A whole history compressed into a piece of embroidery smaller than a tram ticket.

The team that earned it belonged to Nils Liedholm, the Swede who had been a great Milan player before he became a great Milan thinker, and to Felice Colombo, the president who signed the cheques and would, in time, pay dearly for other men's arithmetic. Milan won the 1978-79 Serie A with 44 points, three clear of Perugia — and here the moralist in every Italian must pause and remove his hat, because Perugia achieved something no club had achieved before: they went through the entire thirty-match championship unbeaten, and finished second. Football rarely writes its parables so cleanly. Prudence perfected wins admiration; Milan, who dared to lose three times, won the scudetto. The gods of this game, like the gods of antiquity, reserve their gifts for those willing to tempt them.

The Swede's Patient Kitchen

Look at the numbers the way a cook looks at a recipe, because Liedholm's title was made the way this city makes its risotto: without haste, without panic, the stock added a ladle at a time, the stirring constant and unglamorous, the saffron — the one moment of gold — saved for the end. Seventeen wins, ten draws, three defeats; forty-six goals scored and a mere nineteen conceded across the thirty rounds. Ten draws! The purists of attacking football sniffed at such caution; the Lombard merchant in me admires the ledger. A defence that concedes nineteen goals in a season is not negative football, it is solvency, and championships, like fortunes, are built first on not losing what you already have.

The goals, when they came, came most often from Alberto Bigon — twelve in the league, seventeen in all competitions — an honest artisan of a forward rather than a matinee idol, which suited the team's temperament exactly. The league's own crown of capocannoniere went elsewhere, to Lazio's Bruno Giordano and his nineteen; Milan had no gunslinger to worship and needed none, because this was a co-operative of a scudetto, a rotating credit society of a title. Around Bigon stood the old and the new in strange, fertile proximity: Enrico Albertosi in goal, a veteran of a thousand battles; Fabio Capello in midfield, already carrying himself like a man taking notes for a future profession; and, learning their trade in that champion dressing room, two young men named Franco Baresi and Fulvio Collovati, of whom history was quietly preparing to ask far more than anyone in 1979 could have decently predicted.

The Arithmetic of the Sixth of May

The coronation, when it came, was pure Liedholm: the sixth of May 1979, the penultimate Sunday of the season, San Siro filled with 65,044 souls, Bologna the guests, and the final score a goalless draw. A scudetto sealed nil-nil — the aesthetes wince, and I let them wince, because there is a deep Lombard honesty in clinching your tenth title the way a merchant closes his ledger: no flourish, no waste, every column accounted for. The crowd had not come that afternoon for a goal; it had come for a certainty, and at the whistle it had one — mathematical, irrevocable, the kind of certainty this anxious country had been short of for a decade. The star was no longer a hope. It was a fact.

Five Hundred and One

One week later, on the thirteenth of May, the season closed in Rome against Lazio, one goal apiece, and hidden inside that unremarkable scoreline was one of the most freighted afternoons in the club's history: the 501st Serie A appearance of Gianni Rivera, and the last. He was thirty-five, in his nineteenth season, and he had given the stella campaign thirteen league appearances and a goal — the contribution no longer of a protagonist but of a patriarch, blessing a harvest he had spent a lifetime planting.

At half-time Liedholm withdrew him and sent on Fabio Capello — thirty-two himself, a season from his own farewell, but already halfway to the dugout in his bearing — and if you want a single image of how a great club breathes, exhaling one age and inhaling the next in the same gesture, you will not find a better one. The Golden Boy, the Abatino, the most argued-about footballer Italy ever produced, walked to the bench at the interval of a drawn match in Rome, and the guard changed with no ceremony beyond a substitution. Football's true liturgies are always this modest. The grand farewells are for the newspapers; the game itself says goodbye in the small print of a team sheet.

Mendoza

But the small print had a final page, and it was written a long way from home. That June the champions of Italy flew off on a post-season tour of South America — Uruguay, Paraguay, Argentina — the kind of expedition clubs undertook in those years for money and goodwill, and which on this occasion delivered neither: six matches without a single victory, four draws and two defeats, seven red cards, a champion side unravelling in winter stadiums on the wrong side of the equator. And then, on the fifth of June in Buenos Aires, something far worse than any result: Alvaro Gasparini, of Milan's touring staff — the record-keepers still argue over his precise title, an assistant in one account, the man standing in for Liedholm in another — died suddenly of a heart attack. He was forty years old. Gianni Rivera and the team doctor, Giovan Battista Monti, were at his side.

Two days later, in Mendoza, with the Andes at their backs and grief in their luggage, Milan lost 3-2 to Andes Talleres in a chaotic match in which De Vecchi scored and Chiodi converted a penalty — and that, not the drawn afternoon in Rome, was the true last match of Gianni Rivera's career. Consider the shape of it. The most refined number ten the club has ever possessed, a man whose game was all velvet and geometry, finished not beneath the towers of San Siro but on a dusty Argentine ground, in defeat, mourning a colleague. Sometime that June — the tenth of the month by one account, the twentieth by another; even his ending resists tidy filing — he announced his retirement: 658 appearances, 164 goals, all of them in red and black, from the boy of sixteen who arrived from Alessandria to the patriarch of thirty-five. Milan offered him a vice-presidency and he accepted; the Abatino went upstairs. The boy who had arrived with the face of a seminarian left with the title of a director, and between those two facts lies the whole of an era.

Removals and Arrivals

The Swede left too. Liedholm and the club could not agree terms — a contract disagreement, say the records, with the dryness records reserve for wounds — and so the architect of the star departed for Roma in the very season of its unveiling, replaced by Massimo Giacomini, hired from Udinese and himself an old Milan player of the late sixties. Colombo stayed on as president, presiding over a summer of removals: Giovanni Sartori to Sampdoria, Simone Boldini to Ascoli, Rivera to a desk. In came Francesco Romano, a midfielder from Reggiana, and the forward Giuseppe Galluzzo, whose previous address the ledgers cannot agree upon — Lecce in one register, Lecco in another, a single vowel's worth of geography separating two different Italies — and I record the dispute rather than resolve it, because a chronicler who invents certainty is worse than one who admits the fog.

The armband, which had lived so long on Rivera's sleeve, passed to Bigon, with Aldo Maldera as his deputy — the scorer-captain and the marauding full-back, honest men both, inheriting a shirt that now carried a star and, though nobody could yet see it, a reckoning in incubation.

Autumn of the Champions

The new season began in the August heat with the Coppa Italia's group stage — Monza beaten 2-0 on the twenty-second, in a group that also held Pisa, Genoa and Pescara — and the league followed in mid-September, the star on the chest and the points arriving at a champion's steady, unspectacular rhythm: goalless with Roma, Chiodi seeing off Avellino, goalless again with Cagliari, and then, on the seventh of October at San Siro, the afternoon that made the autumn believe in itself — Juventus beaten 2-1, Novellino and Antonelli the scorers. A draw with Perugia followed, and Ascoli were swept aside 3-0 with Romano on the sheet and Chiodi twice; through October the champions looked entirely like champions.

Then the neighbours called. On the twenty-eighth of October, at San Siro, Inter won the derby 2-0, and Milan learned again the oldest lesson in this city's football: the star impresses everyone except the people who live across the street. Fiorentina were beaten 2-0 and Udinese held goalless as the autumn thickened into fog, and the calendar year closed, with a certain irony, in defeat — 2-1 against Pescara on the thirtieth of December, the champions of Italy ending their year the way the year, in truth, had earned.

Because Europe had already delivered its own verdict. The European Cup, the great prize for which a champion's autumn is supposed to be the overture, lasted precisely two matches: a goalless first leg away to FC Porto at the Estadio das Antas on the nineteenth of September, 55,000 watching, and then, on the third of October, before 60,000 at San Siro, a single Porto goal — Duda, on the hour — and elimination, 1-0 on the aggregate of two miserly legs. With that solitary strike fell something larger than a tie: roughly twenty years of Milan never losing a European match at home, a record that had survived the great Cup-winning sides of the sixties, gone in ninety minutes. Champions of Italy in May; out of Europe by the first week of October. The gods, as I have said, keep strict accounts.

Lead and Gold

And what of the country in which all this was performed? Italy in 1979 was still deep in the Anni di Piombo, the Years of Lead, twelve months after the murder of Aldo Moro had hollowed out the republic's chest; a general election in June rearranged the arithmetic of parliament without changing the weather of fear. In such a country a golden star on a football shirt is not a trivial thing — it is a small, defiant assertion that some institutions still finish what they begin. Across town, meanwhile, a builder named Silvio Berlusconi was raising his Milano 2 residential development and assembling, frequency by frequency, a private-television empire; football paid him no attention in 1979, and would spend the following decades unable to pay attention to anything else. History loves to seat its next protagonist quietly at the back of the theatre.

But I owe the reader the truth about the shadow, too. Beneath the year's gold, lead of another kind was accumulating. The betting men were circling Italian football, and the match on which the tribunals would later fix their attention — Milan against Lazio, won 2-1 — carries the date of the sixth of January 1980, with the scandal itself breaking that March: Totonero, the affair that would see President Colombo banned for life, softened on appeal, and Milan, champions of Italy, sent down to Serie B. None of this belongs to 1979's calendar, and I will not smuggle next year's grief into this year's account. But a chronicler may note, without melodrama, exactly where the clouds were forming.

So let the verdict be this. In 1979 Milan sewed on the first star in the history of Italian football — earned by Liedholm's patience, Bigon's honesty, Rivera's long and luminous twilight — and within months had lost its architect to a contract, its greatest player to time, its European fortress to a single goal on the hour, and its peace of mind to men with betting slips. The star, we would all learn soon enough, is not a decoration; it is a responsibility, and it would shortly have to be carried through the mud by the young men who had watched the fathers win it — Baresi, Collovati, the generation in embryo in that champion dressing room. Ten titles bought Milan a star. What came next would have to be earned back from disgrace, and that story belongs to the seasons ahead. In May 1979, under the fog-filtered sun of the Po valley, none of it had happened yet; there was only a golden star, a full San Siro breathing out its certainty, and — a week later, in Rome — an old number ten walking to the bench at half-time, taking an entire age of football with him.