They Won at Cesena and Went Down

The Star Was Three Years Old

The gold star above the crest was three seasons old. Milan had sewn it on in 1979 for a tenth championship, had been sent down once already since, and in the spring of 1982 went down again — which is where the resemblance between the two falls ends, and where this chapter begins.

One must be precise about them, because the distinction is moral and not merely legal. The relegation of 1980 had been administrative — Totonero, a scandal assembled out of betting slips, a sentence handed down by men at tables, a punishment the tifoso could rage against as injustice even while swallowing it. The relegation that arrived in the spring of 1982 was different in kind: it was earned, point by unscored point, on the grass, the first in the club's history to be won honestly, if the word may be permitted its full cruelty. A tribunal can be appealed. A goal difference cannot.

The city around the club was in rude enough health. This was the Milan of industry and ambition, of the Craxi-era Socialist ascendancy, a place that made money and made noise and believed, as Milan always believes, that it was the true capital of Italy in everything but paperwork; a place of glass towers going up along the ring road and placards at the factory gates. Its red-and-black half was learning what famine tastes like, and learning it in public, three years removed from a scudetto and sliding toward the trapdoor for the second time in three seasons.

The Famine

The numbers deserve to be read slowly, the way one reads a doctor's letter. Twenty-four points from thirty matches; seven victories, ten draws, thirteen defeats; thirty-one goals conceded, which was survivable, and twenty-one scored, which was not — the meanest harvest Milan had ever gathered in a single round-robin, a negative club record that still makes the archivist wince. Fourteenth of sixteen, down with Bologna on twenty-three points and poor Como on seventeen, while at the other end of the table Juventus took the title with forty-six, a single point ahead of Fiorentina, in a race Milan watched the way a man in a hospital bed watches dancing on television.

The attack had been entrusted, in the summer of 1981, to Joe Jordan, the Scot bought from Manchester United after the club had courted grander names and been refused — Zico stayed in Brazil, the Belgian Ceulemans stayed in Belgium — and so Milan consoled itself with a centre-forward built for storms, all shoulders and appetite. Storms he gave them; goals he mostly did not. Two in twenty-two league appearances, six across all competitions, and yet the Scot became a favourite of the curva anyway, because a terrace will forgive a barren season sooner than a lazy one, and no man ever accused Jordan of economy of effort. The sharpest statistic of the year is gentler still and therefore worse: Roberto Antonelli finished as Milan's leading league scorer with four goals. Four. A capocannoniere with four goals is not a top scorer; he is a witness for the prosecution. Around these two the season assembled its litany of small deaths — the autumn instalments of it counted out, date by date and zero by zero, in the chapter before this one — relieved by bright days so scarce they can be named individually, like islands: a one-nil over Cagliari on the third of January, and little else. Even the Coppa Italia declined to offer distraction, Milan winning twice, drawing with Inter and losing to Verona in its opening group, and missing the next stage by a single point, which is the tournament equivalent of dying of a cold.

The Sweeper's Missing Winter

The season turned in the first days of October 1981, days before a match with Juventus, when Franco Baresi — twenty-one years old, already the most intelligent sweeper in Italy, a boy who arrived at the ball a half-second before the ball knew it was wanted — fell gravely ill with a mystery of the blood, probably viral, that medicine of the day could name only vaguely. He lost weight and strength together, visibly and alarmingly, and he was sent from examination to examination, and the examinations disagreed: English accounts of the illness speak of a rare blood disease, the Italian narratives of a mysterious wasting and of tests that at least ruled out the incurable, while the corridor talk ran from pubalgia all the way to the whispered end of a career. There were weeks — terrible days, he would call them afterwards — when he feared that end was his own, the career over before it had properly begun. He was gone for roughly three and a half months, from the start of October to the end of January, more than ten league matches watched from a distance by a young man learning that the body, like the league table, does not negotiate.

In his place Milan fielded Maurizio Venturi, bought from Brescia, a professional and an honest one, and the comparison is offered here without cruelty because it was simply the comparison between a man and the absence of a different man: Milan gathered only about eight points in the dozen matches Baresi missed, and eight points across a dozen matches, in a season lost by the width of a single result, is the whole story wearing a disguise. The counterfactual is forbidden to historians and irresistible to supporters, so let it be stated once and abandoned: with a healthy Baresi from October to January, Milan almost certainly do not go down. He returned at the end of the winter, pale and lighter and the same player in the ways that mattered, and it was too late, and he knew it was too late, and he played anyway.

Three Handovers in a Single Winter

A club in trouble does what a household in trouble does: it moves the furniture. On the nineteenth of January 1982 the presidency passed from Gaetano Morazzoni to Giuseppe Farina, lately of Vicenza, a man arriving with the brisk confidence of the new owner of a flooded house. Five days later the axe found the bench. Luigi Radice — Gigi to the city — had been appointed for the season after Massimo Giacomini's departure, and was dismissed on the twenty-fourth of January with twelve points from sixteen matches, the final insult a home defeat to Udinese, one-nil, at a San Siro that had begun to whistle out of grief rather than anger. Italo Galbiati took the team for the remaining fourteen rounds, assisted briefly by Francesco Zagatti, and the truth of the caretaker months is that the patient was already on the table and Galbiati was handed a spoon.

Even the armband changed hands mid-season, passing from Aldo Maldera to Fulvio Collovati, as if the captaincy itself were looking for someone to blame. Two men, at least, never left the field: the goalkeeper Ottorino Piotti and young Sergio Battistini played all thirty league matches, ever-present through the whole slow shipwreck, which is its own kind of sentence. There were flickers — Milan took Juventus to the edge in Turin in February and lost two-three in a match that showed what the season might have been — and there were confirmations, like the two-nil surrender at Como in March, that it would not be.

A Trophy in a Minor Key

And then, because football is an ironist before it is a sport, Milan won a cup. On the twelfth of May 1982, at San Siro, the Rossoneri beat the Czechoslovaks of TJ Vítkovice three-nil to claim the Mitropa Cup: a Baresi penalty after twelve minutes, Alberto Cambiaghi's goal five minutes into the second half, and a second penalty, converted by Jordan, thirteen minutes from the end. Read quickly, it is a trophy. Read slowly, it is a photograph of the era: the Mitropa, which between the wars had been Mitteleuropa's great prize, the competition of the coffee-house dynasties of Vienna, Prague and Budapest, had by 1982 declined into a tournament for the second-tier and the provincial, a silver cup passed around football's waiting rooms.

Milan won it four days before being relegated, and it would stand as the lone trophy of the whole grey era. There is no way to type that sentence which removes its sting, and the club's historians have mostly handled the cup the way a family handles the ugly vase from a beloved aunt: acknowledged, dusted occasionally, kept out of the good room. And yet — a small dissent, entered here for the record — a trophy won is a trophy won, Baresi struck his penalty like a man twice his age, and in the middle of the blackest season of the Long Decade eleven men in red and black gave San Siro one evening that ended with something being lifted rather than lowered. In famine years, one does not sneer at bread.

The Sixteenth of May

The last day of the season fell on the sixteenth of May 1982, at Cesena, and it belongs in the small anthology of afternoons that Milanisti recite the way other cultures recite battles. The condition was simple and merciless: Milan had to win and had to hope, because salvation depended not only on themselves but on what happened simultaneously in Naples, where Genoa — rivals in the struggle — faced Napoli. Milan then proceeded to fall two-nil behind, which given the season's character felt less like a setback than a confirmation. What followed was the day's first cruelty, disguised as joy: the storm came at last, six months late. Accounts that name every scorer give the equalising goals to Jordan and to the young Francesco Romano, who between them dragged the match level; on the goal that mattered every account agrees — Roberto Antonelli arriving to cut a diagonal strike across the goalkeeper for three-two, the top scorer's final and finest contribution, a winning goal in a match that won nothing.

Because in Naples, at more or less the same minute, the season was being decided by somebody else's mistake. An error by the Napoli goalkeeper Castellini — a glaring, ugly blunder, the ball spilling from his hands as he shaped to clear — conceded the corner from which Genoa's Faccenda equalised for two-two, and two-two in Naples saved Genoa and condemned Milan, whose own three-two in Cesena turned instantly from lifeline to epitaph. On the pitch the players heard it the way such news travelled in 1982, in fragments, by radio and rumour, and in the away dressing room afterwards Franco Baresi — twenty-two years old for barely a week, months removed from a sickbed, author that season of a trophy-winning penalty and precisely no blame — sat and wept, and could not stop, and nobody asked him to. The sixteenth of May remains one of the darkest dates in the club's long history, and its particular cruelty is worth naming: Milan were not relegated for losing. They won, and fell, and had to hold both truths in their hands on the same afternoon.

Madrid, Through the Glass

The summer then played its trick on the whole peninsula, and the trick was joy. On the eleventh of July 1982, in Madrid, Enzo Bearzot's Italy beat West Germany three-one and won the World Cup, every aerial from the Alps to Sicily leaning toward the same picture, and the country emptied itself into its piazzas — Rome, Naples, and yes, Milan, where the fountains received the faithful and the car horns performed their national anthem until dawn. The hero of the tale was Paolo Rossi, himself a man returned from the Totonero scandal's exile, redeemed in the most public way sport allows, and there was a bitter geometry in that for the Milanista: the same scandal that had first thrown Milan down had loaned the nation its redeemer, and the nation got the redemption while Milan got Serie B. To love a relegated club in the July of a World Cup is a particular schooling in irony — the flags on your own street are your flag, and yet the celebration belongs to a game that has just finished breaking your heart.

Captain at Twenty-Two

For the vultures circled, as vultures conscientiously do. With Milan condemned to Serie B, the offers for Baresi arrived from every direction, and the most seductive of them wore the colours of Sampdoria, whose president Paolo Mantovani was reported to have dangled a sum with nine zeroes in lire — the kind of money that ends arguments in most families. Baresi ended the argument differently. Il Milan è la mia vita, he answered — Milan is my life — and the sentence, six words long, is the true trophy of 1982, worth more in the club's vault than the Mitropa and most of what surrounds it. He stayed, and the club, showing for once the wit its season had lacked, made him captain for 1982-83 at twenty-two years of age. He would keep the armband for the next fifteen years, which is another way of saying that everything the modern reader knows about Milan was underwritten, in its worst summer, by a convalescent boy's refusal.

Around him, Farina rebuilt for the second division with the sporting director Silvano Ramaccioni at his elbow and a new man, Ilario Castagner, on the bench. The turnover was heavy and tells its own story of a club selling its present to protect its future: out went Collovati, across the city to Inter of all destinations; out went Maldera to Roma, Antonelli to Genoa, Novellino to Ascoli. In came the young forward Aldo Serena and the midfielder Giancarlo Pasinato, both on loan from that same Inter, Oscar Damiani from Napoli, Vinicio Verza from Cesena, and the goalkeeper Giulio Nuciari — a squad assembled not for glory but for a single, unglamorous, indispensable errand: come straight back up.

The autumn suggested they would, though Serie B, that great teacher of humility, insisted on conducting the lesson personally. Milan opened in September with a two-two draw against Sambenedettese and a one-one at Catania, the sound of a thoroughbred learning to pull a cart, before the engine caught: two-one over Arezzo, two-nil at Campobasso, three-one over Bari, a four-one demolition at Monza, and on the twenty-fourth of October a five-nil dismantling of Bologna — fellow exiles from the spring — that felt, for ninety minutes, like the old aristocracy remembering its manners. Serie B answered a fortnight later with a one-two home defeat to little Cavese, lest anyone grow comfortable, and by the winter break, after a three-three at Cremonese, wins over Foggia, Perugia and Palermo, a stumble at Como and a two-two at Lazio, Milan sat second, a single point behind those same Romans, with eight wins, five draws and two defeats. The spring of 1983 would finish the job — the group won with fifty-four points, Serie A restored for 1983-84 — but that is the next chapter's harvest; 1982 closes with the cart still on the hill.

What the year taught the club was that the table keeps no court of appeal: that twenty-one goals in thirty matches are paid for one by one; that a side can win its last match and go down, win a cup and hear no singing, change president, coach and captain in a single winter and change nothing that mattered. And in the same twelve months, by the same hand, it acquired the one asset that would outvalue every signing of the golden era to come — the loyalty of Franco Baresi, sealed in tears at Cesena and sworn in six words. Berlusconi was four years away, and nobody in Milan had yet heard his name in this connection. What there was, that autumn, was a second-division fixture list, long coach journeys to provincial grounds with concrete terraces and wire behind the goal, and a twenty-two-year-old wearing the armband at every one of them.