Mendoza, and the Last of the Abatino

One Star for Ten Titles

The star was a piece of gold embroidery smaller than a tram ticket. Five points, stitched above the red and black, and it certified one thing only: ten championships won, and the mark of them worn until then by Juventus and Inter alone. A whole history you could cover with a thumb. Men who had been climbing the same concrete steps at San Siro since before the war stopped at shop windows that summer to look at it on the new shirts — not for its beauty, of which it has none, but for the proof.

The team that earned it belonged to Nils Liedholm, 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 what other men did with them. Milan won the 1978-79 Serie A with 44 points, three clear of Perugia — and here all Italy stopped and removed its hat, because Perugia had done what no club in the country had done before: thirty matches of a championship played without a single defeat — eleven won, nineteen drawn, forty-one points — and second place to show for it. They remain 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 particular heartbreak of those forty-one points remains Perugia's alone. Football rarely writes its parables so cleanly. Prudence perfected won admiration; Milan, who dared to lose three times, won the scudetto. A title is not awarded for what a team avoids.

Seventeen, Ten, Three

Liedholm worked the way a patient man works a tuning dial on a winter evening: small movements, held a long time, until the picture stops rolling and stays still. 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, and the Lombard in me admires the solvency. A defence that concedes nineteen goals in a season is not negative football; it is safekeeping, 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, every man putting in his share and every man drawing out at the end. 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 decently have predicted.

Nil-Nil, and Enough

The coronation, when it came, was pure Liedholm: the sixth of May 1979, the penultimate Sunday of the season, 65,044 souls packed onto the concrete at San Siro, Bologna the guests, and the final score a goalless draw. A scudetto sealed nil-nil — let the aesthetes wince. 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. Consider who was walking off. The golden boy of Italian football, whom sterner critics had christened the abatino, the little abbot, as though elegance were a vice and a man had to sweat visibly to be believed: for nineteen years Rivera had been made to answer that charge, and now he would never have to answer it again. He went 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.

Winter on the Wrong Side of the Equator

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, Liedholm's allenatore in seconda all season and, the Barone having already gone to Roma, the only name written against All. in every line-up of the tour, died suddenly of a heart attack. He was forty years old. Gianni Rivera and the team doctor, Giovan Battista Monti, were at his side.

What was done next tells you more about the age than any scoreline. Milan did not go home. There were fixtures contracted, aeroplanes booked, promoters to be paid and promoters to be satisfied, and so the champions of Italy played out the tour with nobody official on the bench at all: a squad of professionals in a foreign winter, in mourning, coaching themselves. Write that sentence twice and it still does not soften. The tenth scudetto of Associazione Calcio Milan was barely a month old, the gold thread was being stitched onto the shirts in Lombardy, and the men who had won it were changing in provincial dressing rooms half a world away with an empty chair where their coach should have sat.

Two days later, in Mendoza, with the Andes at their backs and grief in their luggage, Milan lost 3-2 to Andes Talleres — a neighbourhood club out of Godoy Cruz, founded in 1933, the kind of ground you find by following the noise rather than the signposts. Some three thousand people came, and most of them were Italian emigrants: men who had left Lombardy and the Veneto and the Mezzogiorno with a cardboard suitcase and now had, for one winter afternoon, the champions of the country they had left standing on grass in front of them. In the tribuna sat Roberto Perfumo — a World Cup captain of Argentina, the records say — as guest of honour. Hermes Turatti scored twice for the hosts and Jorge Funes once; De Vecchi replied and Chiodi converted a penalty; and the finale turned sour in the way these matches always turn sour, with Bigon and Boldini both sent off. And because there was no coach on the bench, the substitutions were made by the number ten himself, Rivera calling them from inside the pitch, running the last match of his life the way he had run everything else: from the middle, with his head up.

For that, and 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, in front of three thousand exiles who had come to see the old country and got instead the sight of it grieving.

There is a crueller footnote yet, and honesty requires it. Of the seven dismissals that disfigured that tour, two belonged to Rivera. Twenty years of professional football, nineteen seasons in the same shirt, a whole career spent being accused of not sweating enough and not fighting enough — and in all of it not one red card, until the last three weeks of it, when he was sent off twice. The abatino, the little abbot, finally lost his temper at the very end, in the heat of a South American winter, with a colleague newly dead behind him. I do not moralise about it. I record it, because the pious version of a farewell always leaves out the part where the saint is human.

On the twentieth of June, less than a fortnight after Mendoza, he announced his retirement: 658 appearances, 164 goals, all of them in red and black, and no man had yet played more matches for the club — 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 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.

The Architect Goes to Rome

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 with him the forward Giuseppe Galluzzo, a young centre-forward out of Lecco — the lake, not the heel.

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.

The Star on the Chest

The new season began in the August heat with the Coppa Italia 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 light went out of the year, and the calendar 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 had its say. 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.

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 seats in 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, and that year it was worth a great deal more than any placard carried through a piazza. Across town, meanwhile, a builder named Silvio Berlusconi was raising his Milano 2 residential development and assembling, frequency by frequency and aerial by aerial, 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 likes 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 somewhere in the fixture list of the coming January there already sat an afternoon at San Siro that would one day be read out from a prosecutor's dossier instead of a match report. What was done that day, and what it finally cost this club, is the whole business of the next chapter, which will have to be written with the hat off. None of it belongs to 1979's calendar, and I will not smuggle next year's grief into this year's account. I note only where the clouds were forming.

What 1979 leaves, then, is a first star — earned by Liedholm's patience, Bigon's honesty, Rivera's long and luminous twilight — and, within months of the sewing, no architect, no number ten, no fortress in Europe and no peace of mind. It would have to be carried through what was coming by the young men who had watched the fathers win it, Baresi and Collovati among them, and that is a story for the seasons ahead. In May none of it had happened. There was a full San Siro breathing out its certainty; a week later, in Rome, an old number ten walking to the bench at half-time and taking an entire age of football with him; and above the badge a scrap of gold thread the size of a tram ticket, which nobody yet understood was less a decoration than a weight.