Third on the Pitch, Last in the Ledger

An Epiphany at San Siro

Every Milanese winter begins the same way: the fog climbs up out of the Navigli around All Saints and does not fully surrender the city until Lent, and beneath it the city carries on with its work, its trams, its risotto and its football, trusting that whatever the fog is hiding will still be there, unchanged, when the air clears. On 6 January 1980 — the feast of the Epiphany, when Italian children are told that an old woman on a broomstick brings sweets to the good and coal to the wicked — Milan beat Lazio 2-1 at San Siro on the fifteenth matchday of the championship. Stefano Chiodi scored both goals for the Rossoneri and Bruno Giordano replied for the Romans, and San Siro went home through the mist believing it had watched a football match.

It had watched a transaction. The result, it would later emerge, had been arranged between players of the two clubs — a fixture sold before it was played, merchandise with the price agreed in advance — and the bitterest part of it, the part that still makes an old Milanista set down his fork mid-meal, is that this Milan had no need of the arrangement. This was a team good enough to finish third in Italy on its own honest legs. The fix was not a crutch bought for the lame; it was a vice indulged by the healthy, and vice, unlike lameness, gets punished.

Giacomini's Good, Doomed Team

Consider what that team actually was, because the sentence that ended the year makes no sense without the season that preceded it. Massimo Giacomini had come down from Udinese that summer with Giuliano Zoratti at his elbow, a serious and modern-minded coach inheriting the first Milan of the after-age: Gianni Rivera, retired at the end of the previous season, had gone upstairs as vice-president, so that for the first time in a generation the club's poetry had to be written by other feet. Alberto Bigon wore the captain's band with Aldo Maldera as his deputy; Felice Colombo presided; and an average of some 40,660 souls filed into San Siro for the league afternoons, a public still warm from the championship won the previous spring.

What Giacomini's men gave them was, by the arithmetic of the pitch, a season respectable verging on good: fourteen wins, eight draws, eight defeats, thirty-six points and a goal difference of plus fifteen — third place, five points behind the Inter side that took the title with forty-one. Chiodi led the club's league scoring with seven goals, eleven across all competitions. There was even a small gift for the connoisseur of curiosities: on 25 November 1979, against Napoli, Milan sent its players out with their names printed across their backs, the first time such a thing had been done in Italian football — an experiment abandoned almost at once, as though the country had sensed that its footballers' names were about to become notorious enough without any help from the tailors.

Europe, admittedly, had already delivered its warning. In the European Cup, entered by right of that championship, Milan drew Porto in the first round, held them goalless in Portugal on 19 September, and then on 3 October at San Siro lost 1-0 to a second-half free-kick from Duda — a ball that arrived, was gathered, and then somehow was not, slipping from the hands of Enrico Albertosi and over the line, and taking with it a home unbeaten record in European competition that had stood for some twenty years. The Coppa Italia was no kinder in the end: the group was navigated comfortably enough, Monza and Pisa and Genoa beaten and Pescara drawn, but Roma came to San Siro in the quarter-final and won 4-0, then held Milan 2-2 in Rome, and at the time that felt like the humiliation of the season. At the time. The year was still young.

The Handcuffs of the Twenty-Third of March

The scandal did not begin in a stadium. It began, as Italian catastrophes so often do, around a table — with Alvaro Trinca, a Roman restaurateur, and Massimo Cruciani, the man who supplied his kitchen, who together had been running an illegal book on arranged matches and who, when the arrangements kept failing and the losses kept mounting, did what ruined gamblers have always done: they went looking for company in their ruin. On 1 March 1980 they walked into the office of the Rome prosecutor and named names — twenty-seven players and a dozen-odd clubs — and in the top division the list touched Milan, Lazio, Bologna, Avellino and Perugia.

On Sunday 23 March the police went to the grounds. Players were arrested in front of their own public — a dozen or so, for the counts never quite agreed even at the time — and with them the president of Milan, Felice Colombo, some of it unfolding while RAI's 90° minuto was on the air, so that a country sat down to its comfortable Sunday ritual of goals and moviola and watched it dissolve, live, into a newsreel of grey uniforms and lowered heads. Elsewhere in the dossier stood a young striker named Paolo Rossi, banned for two years; Italy would hear from him again in the summer of 1982, and the manner of his resurrection would tell you everything about this country's genius for absolution. But that belongs to a later chapter.

For Milan the sporting sentence read like a verdict in a language one understands all too well. The club was re-ranked to the foot of the table and sent down to Serie B — the first relegation in its entire history — together with Lazio, its partner in the January arrangement, and alongside poor Pescara, who at least had earned their descent honestly, on the pitch, the old-fashioned way. Torino inherited Milan's UEFA Cup place. Colombo was banned from football for life, a sentence later softened on appeal; Albertosi was suspended for four years, Giorgio Morini for one, Chiodi for six months; and the summer's agreed signings, Bruno Giordano and Paulo Roberto Falcao, were cancelled in the fallout — two futures returned to sender, unopened. Here the chronicler must pause over the record books, which quarrel with one another to this day: some tables show Milan third, others show Milan last, and both are telling the truth. Third is what the team did; last is what was done to the team. Football is played on grass and judged on paper, and in 1980 the paper won.

Ricky

Every tragedy needs a face, and this one wore the long, weathered face of Enrico Albertosi. Understand first who the man was: champion of Italy with Cagliari in 1970, in that improbable island miracle, and Italy's goalkeeper at the World Cup of the same Mexican summer, all the way to the final against Brazil — one of the great keepers of his generation, of any generation. He was born in November 1939, which made him forty years old during that final Milan season, whatever kinder retellings have shaved off since; and a forty-year-old goalkeeper is a particular category of athlete, part custodian and part relic, kept on because the eyes still read the game even after the hands have begun to negotiate their terms.

The hands. It was the hands that let Duda's free-kick squirm through at San Siro in October, ending two decades of European inviolability at home; and it was the name, five months on, that slipped into Cruciani's dossier and could never be gathered back. Four years' suspension — among the harshest handed down in the whole sports trial — is not, for a man of forty, a punishment; it is an execution, and his top-flight career ended overnight. Only after the summer of 1982, when Italy won the World Cup and the nation fell into a mood to forgive everyone nearly everything, was he pardoned, and he finished his playing days far from the great arenas, in the lower divisions with Elpidiense. The moralist should tread carefully here. It is easy to despise a man who helped sell a match; it is harder, and more honest, to admit that a great career and a great disgrace can inhabit the same pair of hands, and that a chronicle of Milan owes the reader both — the save and the slip, the trophy and the trial. Ricky was not a monster. He was a man, and that, as every confessor from here to the Alps could tell you, is precisely the trouble with men.

The Long Voyage South

And now the chronicle performs the strangest pivot of its year, because while Italy was preparing the tribunals, Milan boarded an aeroplane and flew as far from Italy as football can go. In May 1980, the season finished and the sentence hanging, the Rossoneri undertook a five-match tour of Australia — five states in a little over a fortnight — the kind of end-of-season voyage most clubs treat as a paid holiday, and which this club, in this year of all years, must have received as something closer to sanctuary. Reports have it that word of the Totonero convictions reached the squad while the tour was in progress: judgment pronounced at home and received on the far side of the planet, half a world from the nearest handcuff.

The football itself was entirely real. On 18 May, at the Sydney Sports Ground before some 15,000, the Socceroos beat Milan 2-1 — Roberto Antonelli put the Italians ahead in the 24th minute, Gary Cole levelled from the penalty spot three minutes before the interval, and Mark Jankovics won it just after the hour, with Jimmy Rooney captaining an Australia side that treated the evening as the honour it plainly was. On 21 May, at Olympic Park in Melbourne, Milan beat Victoria 2-0 before a crowd of about 18,000. On 25 May they were held 2-2 by Queensland. On 28 May they beat South Australia 3-1 in Adelaide — hold that fixture in your mind, for we shall come back to it — and on 1 June, on the cricketing turf of the WACA Ground in Perth, they closed the tour by beating Western Australia 3-2, surviving a late two-goal rally from the locals, Smerilli in the 84th minute and Fidoe in the 87th, the sort of finish that keeps a touring defence honest to the final whistle.

The touring party included Fulvio Collovati, Roberto Antonelli and Fabio Capello — and note that last name and its timing, because injury would force Capello's retirement that very summer, which means he played out some of his final football in a Milan shirt not at San Siro but under the pale sun of an Australian autumn. And now the discrepancy the reader deserves to see laid squarely on the table: when the club announced its return to Australia in 2024, its official account reached back only as far as 1993 — "the last visit", it said, meaning the Baresi-led trip of that year — as if the itinerary had never held an earlier line. The Australian archives — the match records, the football historians, the Italian compilers of Milan's own game-by-game annals — hold the receipts: five matches, five states, May and June of 1980, thirteen years earlier. Institutions forget what embarrasses them, and 1980 embarrasses. But the record is the record, and a site kept by Milanisti in Australia is honour-bound, of all the world's chroniclers, to keep this one.

Twenty-Eight May: An Afternoon in Adelaide

For those of us who follow the Diavolo from South Australia, one line of that itinerary glows like a struck match in a dark kitchen: 28 May 1980, Milan 3, South Australia 1, Adelaide. It is the earliest known appearance of Associazione Calcio Milan in this state — the club's Italian match archive records it, with the economy of all ledgers, as Sud Australia against Milan, one against three — and it took place thirteen years before the earliest visit the club's official telling cares to remember. A contemporary press notice in the Canberra Times of 19 February 1980 records, moreover, that an Adelaide Italian-community soccer club was involved in bringing Milan out to Australia at all; which is to say that this city was not merely a stop on the itinerary but, in some real measure, a reason the itinerary existed.

Honesty compels a confession that a lesser chronicle would bury: the surviving sources do not tell us which ground hosted the match. Adelaide's football homes in that era were Olympic Sports Field and Hindmarsh Stadium, and the writer who names one over the other is guessing, and this chronicle does not guess. What may be written without guessing is what the afternoon must have meant. Adelaide in 1980 held a great Italian emigrant community — people who had carried their dialects, their recipes and their football loyalties across the world intact, and who now watched the red and black walk out in the flesh, in their own city, at the lowest moment in the club's history: condemned, demoted, disgraced, and received the way emigrants have always received the old country, without illusions and without conditions. Anyone who has risen in an Adelaide winter at some black hour of the morning to follow a Milan match knows the arithmetic of that devotion: the distance is real, and the love is not diminished by it. For one autumn afternoon in 1980, the distance was abolished.

Autumn in the Second Tier

The Italy to which the team flew home was a country whose true miseries made even Totonero look like what it was — a matter, finally, of sport. On 27 June a DC-9 airliner fell out of the sky into the sea off Ustica with everyone aboard; on 2 August a bomb tore through the waiting room of Bologna's railway station and killed eighty-five people. These were the anni di piombo, the years of lead, and a football chronicle passing this ground is obliged to lower its voice: the fog over Lombardy that year was not only weather.

The squad was rebuilt for the descent. Captain Bigon and the twice-scoring Chiodi both departed for Lazio — for Lazio, of all destinations, the companion in punishment — and Fabio Capello, his injuries having decided the matter, retired. In the other direction came a goalkeeper, Ottorino Piotti from Avellino; a midfielder, Stefano Cuoghi from Modena; and, from Lazio, a young defender by the name of Mauro Tassotti. And two young defenders of the house stayed when leaving would have been the easier choice: Fulvio Collovati, fresh from the Australian voyage, and Franco Baresi, who looked at a club condemned to the second division and did not move. History keeps a ledger too, and it is kinder than the federation's.

So it was that in the autumn of 1980 Milan kicked off in Serie B for the first time in its history — the great shirt in the provincial league, San Siro opening its gates to the second tier. Giacomini stayed to lead the expedition, and lead it he did: the campaign would end, the following spring, with fifty points from eighteen wins, fourteen draws and six defeats, forty-nine scored against twenty-nine conceded, first place, and promotion alongside Genoa and Cesena, with Antonelli — the same Antonelli who had scored against the Socceroos in Sydney — finishing as the division's leading marksman with fifteen goals. The return was sealed at home against Monza; Giacomini, his work complete, departed before the final day, and Italo Galbiati took the team to Pescara as caretaker for the last match. But those are the Befana's sweets of the following spring. The coal belongs to 1980.

Enter the year in the ledger honestly, then. Milan finished third and were placed last; won a fixed match they would very likely have won unfixed; lost a president to a life ban, a goalkeeper to disgrace, and the top flight to a sentence — the first descent in the club's history, ordered not by any opponent on the grass but by men with files. The Long Decade opens here, in handcuffs and fog, and six more years would pass before a new proprietor arrived to end it. And yet consider: in the very season of its condemnation this club crossed the world and played football in Adelaide, and was loved there; thirteen years later it would forget it had ever come; and nearly half a century later its Adelaide faithful are still setting their alarms for the black hours. The institutions forget. The emigrants remember. The fog lifts, as it always does, by Lent — and the grass, which had been third all along, simply waited underneath it for spring.