Promoted in June, Last by November

The Geography of Serie B

Taranto. Rimini. Pescara. Monza. Say those four names in a Milanese bar in the winter of 1981 and you would have been asked, kindly, to say them again. They were the fixture list — the first Serie B fixture list in the club's whole history, the wages of Totonero — and the red-and-black half of the city spent that winter learning the geography of towns that had never before had June business with the Diavolo. Milan climbed back out by June, at the first attempt. Then, inside the same calendar year, they opened a Serie A campaign that would end the following May in a second relegation. One year, two directions, and between them a single summer, brief as a Lombard thaw, in which everything seemed possible and almost nothing was done well.

To understand the shame you must first measure the stage. Serie A in 1981 was the richest league on earth, and Italy itself stood one year short of the World Cup it would win the following summer; the peninsula was tuning its orchestra for a triumph, and Milan — soon to be twice relegated within three years — sat in the cheap seats. The city went on making money as it always has, and the betting slips went on being filled in across the tobacconists' counters, because scandal punishes clubs and not habits. The Diavolo's people went about their winter with the timetable of the lower peninsula folded in a pocket.

Spring in Purgatory

Purgatory had at least been furnished with serious men. Massimo Giacomini sat on the bench; Gaetano Morazzoni sat in the president's chair — a placeholder, in truth, for Felice Colombo, banned in the Totonero judgment yet still holding his majority stake, an arrangement with all the elegance of a man forbidden to enter his own restaurant who goes on writing the menu from the pavement. Aldo Maldera wore the armband. Around them stood a squad remade by necessity: Bigon and Chiodi sold to Lazio, Capello retired hurt, Albertosi banned; in their places came Tassotti from Lazio, the goalkeeper Piotti from Avellino, Cuoghi from Modena — and among them, already, the boy Franco Baresi, of whom more, and sadder, later.

The spring told its story in instalments. Taranto were dismantled 4-0 at San Siro on 10 May; Cesena held Milan goalless a week later; Pisa, impertinently, came to Milan on 24 May and won 1-0; Lazio took a point at the end of the month, and at Rimini on 7 June the sides shared four goals under the Adriatic sun. Roberto Antonelli's fifteen goals — the leading tally in the whole division, struck by the same man who had put Milan ahead against the Socceroos in Sydney on the previous May's tour — had carried the season on their back; Ruben Buriani's forty-two appearances had stitched it together thread by thread. And on 14 June, against a Monza already condemned to drop, a single goal at San Siro settled it: Milan were going home.

Whereupon, this being Milan in the early eighties, even the going home was botched. Giacomini, who had steered thirty-seven of the thirty-eight matches, resigned in mid-June over disagreements with the board; Italo Galbiati was handed the final afternoon as caretaker, and Milan lost it, 1-0 at Pescara's Stadio Adriatico on 21 June — champions all the same, with 50 points from eighteen wins, fourteen draws and six defeats, forty-nine scored against twenty-nine conceded, two points clear of Genoa and Cesena, who came up alongside them. Even the promotion, you notice, was collected with a defeat and a resignation. The gods of that era had a taste for finishing every dish with vinegar.

A Ghost in Rossonero

Two days after Monza, San Siro hosted a vision. On 16 June, in the Mundialito per club staged for the cameras of Silvio Berlusconi's Canale 5, Johan Cruyff — thirty-four years old and fresh from a season with the Washington Diplomats — pulled the red-and-black shirt over his head and wore it for forty-five minutes against Feyenoord. The match finished 0-0 and the Dutchman touched few balls and left no mark on it, giving way to Francesco Romano at the interval while the Guerin Sportivo sharpened the question of whether Cruyff was finished; and yet the evening said more about the future than any scoreline of the year, for it put together in one frame the two forces that would define the decade to come: the greatest imagination in European football, and the television money that would one day buy the club outright.

Berlusconi would not buy Milan for another five years, but his instinct for spectacle was already circling the building; Colombo, meanwhile, was living out his last months as owner, and in January 1982 the club would pass to Giuseppe Farina. The summer market was conducted in the same key of almost: Milan tried for Cruyff and failed, tried for Zico and failed, and settled instead for Joe Jordan of Manchester United, Adelio Moro from Ascoli and Dario Dona from Varese, with Maurizio Venturi following from Brescia once the autumn had set in. To the bench came Luigi Radice, a Milan player of the fifties and sixties fresh from rescuing Bologna, a serious man handed an improvised instrument. The mood in the city was euphoric, and euphoria, as every innkeeper alive can tell you, is simply the interval before the bill.

Lo Squalo

Of all the purchases, one at least was unforgettable. In July Milan paid Manchester United 700 million lire for Joe Jordan, twenty-nine years old, with 500 million more promised to the player across a two-year contract; a thousand supporters met him at Linate beneath a banner reading 'Welcome, Big Joe', and at his first press conference the granite Scot announced, in substance, that he had few teeth left but enough of them to bite Inter. Milan surrendered to him on the spot, and has never entirely taken the surrender back.

The nickname followed the dentistry. Lo Squalo — the Shark — was born of the two upper incisors Jordan had lost in his early Leeds years, a boot to the mouth as he went down to head a low ball; off the pitch he wore a prosthetic like any respectable citizen, and before matches he pulled it out, so that the snarl, the long hair and the heavy frame composed together something genuinely oceanic. In a pre-season romp over Asiago on 30 July, won fourteen-nil, he needed only ten minutes to score his first two goals in rossonero, and for a few warm weeks Milan permitted itself to dream of a September of goals.

September had other plans. His official debut came in the Coppa Italia against Verona on 23 August, a 2-0 defeat on the neutral grass of Mantua; his Serie A debut at Udine on 13 September ended goalless; his first league goal did not arrive until the 1-1 with Como in November — and the full accounting of that barren season, goals and appearances both, is drawn up in the chapter that follows. And yet the Curva adored him, because he never once stopped running, and to a support that had lately been lied to by cleverer men, honest running is a kind of poetry. When the season failed him, the ultras answered from the concrete with a banner of their own, declaring that the Shark still bit for them. They were right, as it happens; but his redemption belonged to another Serie B, the promotion year of 1982-83, and that is a story for a later chapter.

The Autumn of Zeros

The alarm had rung before the league even began. In the Coppa Italia's opening group, played out across late August and the first days of September, Milan lost 2-0 to Verona, thrashed Pescara 5-0, edged SPAL 1-0 and drew 2-2 with Inter — and finished third, a single point behind Inter and Verona, eliminated before the championship's first Sunday. An exit before the season proper is the kind of result that fools nobody except the man who drafts the press release.

Then the league arrived, and with it the zeros. Goalless at Udine on 13 September; goalless with Fiorentina a week later; one single, precious win at Napoli on 27 September — and then it turned black: beaten 1-0 at home by Juventus on 4 October, goalless at Bologna, beaten 1-0 in the derby by Inter on 25 October, humiliated 3-0 at Catanzaro on the first of November. The 1-1 with Como on 8 November brought Jordan's goal and no comfort; Ascoli won 1-0; a point was salvaged at Roma; Genoa left San Siro with a goalless draw on 13 December, and Avellino won 2-0 on the 20th to close the calendar. By late November Milan lay last in Serie A, with six points from nine matches and — here is the figure that condemned an entire summer's planning — two goals scored. Not two a game: two, strung across an autumn like the beads of a very short rosary, while the terraces went home in the dark with nothing to argue about.

Behind those zeros sat a mystery crueller than mere form. In early October, around the Juventus match, Franco Baresi fell ill and began visibly to grow thin, and a defence that had learned to think through him was suddenly obliged to think for itself — the moral older than football, and one Milan kept learning the hard way: build your house upon one young man's health, and you have built it upon the weather. What the illness was, how long it kept him and what it cost in points is an accounting the following year must settle, and settle it that year does.

For consolation there was the Mitropa Cup, a venerable old competition now peopled by second-tier and provincial sides, which Milan entered rather as a nobleman takes lunch at a railway buffet. Haladás were beaten 2-0 at San Siro on 4 November; Osijek held Milan 1-1 in Yugoslavia on 25 November; and in the fullness of time, the following May, the thing would actually be won — though that final, and the fall it stood four days before, are the next year's business. History keeps its ironies well sharpened, and this is among the tartest: the club of the European Cups spending a winter polishing Mitteleuropa's silver.

The Distant Faithful

It is worth pausing on what following the Diavolo from abroad meant in 1981: no satellite feed, no highlights with breakfast, no signal on earth that could carry Lombardy across the oceans — only results arriving days late in the agate type of the sports pages, and letters from cousins in Lombardy that took a fortnight to say what the heart already feared. For the emigrant milanista, the Serie B title mattered twice over — once as a result, and once as proof, carried across two oceans, that the fall of 1980 was not final. They could not know that a second fall was already being prepared; distance, for one merciful summer, let them enjoy the promotion neat.

Fifty Points, Two Goals

Two numbers hold the whole year, and they will not sit in the same sentence comfortably. Generously first: the club won the only competition it absolutely had to win, at the first attempt, by honest graft — fifty points of it — and gave its people back their top-flight Sundays. Then honestly: the summer that followed was improvised where it needed to be designed; a shark was bought when the team wanted for a brain; a serious coach inherited a squad whose one irreplaceable player fell mysteriously ill in October; and after nine rounds the champions of Serie B stood last in Serie A with two league goals to their name and a cup exit already filed before the season proper had begun.

January 1982 would bring Farina; May would bring the second relegation. Promotion is a result, and resurrection is a project, and it would take the club the better part of a decade to tell the two apart. Meanwhile, behind the shutters of the city that December, the sets glowed in their thousands against the cold, tuned to the man whose cameras had already borrowed San Siro for one June evening of Cruyff — and who had five years yet to wait.