Twenty-Five Seasons Began at Udine

A Great House in Reduced Circumstances

Look at Milan from its rooftops in 1985 and the city seemed to be doing extremely well for itself: cranes standing in ranks along the skyline, new money in every parapet, the whole place drinking in a television that had grown louder with each year of the decade. This was Craxi's Italy, an Italy of new suits and new noise, sure of itself in the way a man is sure of himself just before the bill arrives. It was also Farina's Milan — a great house in reduced circumstances, still paying in instalments of dignity for the sins of the Totonero years, and living, though nobody up there on the rooftops could have told you so, through the last full calendar year of its old regime.

The team was administered, like a trust held for absent heirs, by Nils Liedholm, the old Swede returned for his third spell in the Milanese dugout, a man who took the long view of a football match in a decade that had no patience for long views: keep the ball, keep the shape, and let the fashion of the moment tire itself out against you. The armband belonged to Franco Baresi, the young lord of the last line, who captained this mid-table Milan with the bearing of a man guarding an empire that existed, for the moment, chiefly in the memory. Between them they kept upright a club that its own finances were quietly working to pull down.

Battistini Feels Something Give

On the twentieth of January, in the iron cold of a mid-table away day at Udinese, Sergio Battistini felt something give and looked to the bench, and Liedholm — who had forgotten more football than most men ever learn — turned to a boy of sixteen and sent him into a Serie A match as casually as a father sends a son down to the cellar for another bottle. The boy's name was Paolo Maldini. The match finished 1-1, which is the scoreline Udine in January deserves; it was his only league appearance of the entire 1984-85 campaign; and out on the concrete terraces nobody thought to mark the hour, because nothing about it asked to be marked.

He was, of course, the son of the house — the boy of Cesare Maldini, Milan captain turned Milan coach, footballing aristocracy of the sort that cannot be bought, only bred. And when the new season opened in the autumn, Liedholm did not file the January cameo away as a curiosity: he installed the boy at right-back in the starting eleven and handed him the number 3 shirt his father had once worn, which at a club like Milan is not a squad number but a deed of inheritance. Twenty-five seasons would flow from that afternoon at Udine. The least remarkable substitution of the grey years turned out to be the one thing the grey years were for.

Fifth, and Ahead of Juventus

Totted up in the spring, 1984-85 read like the work of a cautious notary: twelve wins, twelve draws, six defeats; thirty-one goals scored and twenty-five allowed; thirty-six points and fifth place in a sixteen-team league of thirty rounds. It was not poetry, but it was solvency of a footballing kind, and in that particular season solvency wore a strange glamour, because the scudetto went to none of the great courts but to Hellas Verona — the provinces risen, the map of calcio redrawn for a year by the unfashionable. Milan watched the coronation from mid-table like an old duke at a merchant's wedding, applauding correctly and feeling the floor shift beneath the parquet.

There was one satisfaction, and Milanese satisfaction, being Lombard, is dry: Milan finished level on thirty-six points with Juventus and were placed ahead of them on the head-to-head — a 3-2 victory and a 1-1 draw across the two meetings — the sort of small revenge a diminished aristocracy learns to savour like the last of the good wine. The goals had come from Pietro Paolo Virdis, the Sardinian huntsman, leading scorer with nine in the league and thirteen in all competitions; from Mark Hateley, the Englishman, seven and eight; from Agostino Di Bartolomei, the grave Roman brought from Roma the summer before, six from midfield and nine in all; and from Sergio Battistini, five and eight — a harvest shared among many hands, which is how the Baron always preferred his harvests. And fifth place carried a passport: Milan would return to Europe in the autumn, in the UEFA Cup, for better and for worse.

Brussels

No honest chronicle of 1985 may pass from spring to summer without stopping, hat in hand, at the twenty-ninth of May. In Brussels that evening, at the Heysel stadium, before the European Cup final had even begun, thirty-nine people — most of them followers of Juventus — died, and Italian football, which had spent the decade bickering over points and percentages, was made to learn what an actual tragedy weighs. The pall of that night lay over everything the game did for the rest of the year; it lay over San Siro as it lay over Turin; and every account of trophies won and lost in 1985, this one included, is written — whether the writer says so or not — in the margin of that page.

Two Legs in the Heat

The Coppa Italia had offered Milan a way to gild the season, and Milan carried it all the way to the final, which the compressed calendar of that year pushed to the very end of June and the first days of July, into the sort of heat Lombardy reserves for punishing those who have not yet left for the sea. On the thirtieth of June, before some forty thousand at San Siro with Redini the referee, Sampdoria took the first leg 1-0, Souness striking in the twenty-fourth minute — a Scotsman deciding a Milanese evening, a detail that needs no further comment.

Three nights later at the Luigi Ferraris in Genoa, before 42,043 under Agnolin's whistle, the tie was settled: Mancini from the penalty spot on forty-one minutes, Vialli on sixty-one, and Virdis replying on sixty-six like an apology delivered after the guests have already risen from the table. Sampdoria won the night 2-1 and the cup 3-1 on aggregate, and it was — the detail that stings and instructs — the first Coppa Italia in their entire history. There is a particular melancholy in being the table on which another club's first great feast is served. Milan tasted it in the Genoese heat and went home to a summer of reckoning.

Buying a Memory

The reckoning produced a name that made the whole city look up from its espresso: Paolo Rossi. In the summer of 1985 Milan signed, from Juventus of all houses, the hero of Italy's 1982 World Cup, the Golden Boot and Ballon d'Or of that miraculous month — Pablito himself, hope incarnate, arriving to lead a line alongside Virdis and Hateley. A club that cannot afford to buy a future will sometimes buy a memory and pray that it still works; Farina, whose books were bleeding, bought the most glorious memory on the market.

And for a while the prayer seemed answered. Milan opened 1985-86 briskly and spent the autumn hovering second and third behind Juventus, playing with an assurance the grey years had rarely permitted; and in December Pablito lit the derby twice against the cousins in blue and black — a night the next chapter owns, and may keep. But the chronicle must be honest where the heart would rather look away: the fine autumn would dissolve, the season would end in disappointment for Rossi and for the men around him, and the measure of that disappointment falls in a spring outside this year's covers. The next chapter counts the wreckage.

Auxerre, Leipzig, Waregem

Europe, meanwhile, was conducted by candlelight — flickering, briefly romantic, and finally blown out. The UEFA Cup campaign opened in France on the eighteenth of September, at the Stade Abbé-Deschamps, where Auxerre won 3-1 and the tie seemed half-buried; then on the second of October San Siro produced one of those nights it keeps in reserve for emergencies, Milan winning 3-0 to pass 4-3 on aggregate — proof that the old ground could still, when the mood took it, raise a cause given up for drowned.

The second act was East German and gothic: Lokomotive Leipzig, beaten 2-0 at San Siro on the twenty-third of October, then winners 3-1 in the vast Zentralstadion on the sixth of November, so that the tie stood level at 3-3 and Milan went through on the away goal — the single goal scored in Leipzig worth more than all the others, a rule that makes purists grumble and survivors shrug. Call these rounds the second and the third, as the almanacs do, or the sedicesimi and the ottavi, as they are called in Italy; the two ties are the same two ties, and the dates agree either way.

Then came Waregem, of Belgium, and the bitter end. A 1-1 draw away on the twenty-seventh of November left everything to San Siro on the eleventh of December, and San Siro, which had saved the Auxerre tie, could not save this one: Bortolazzi put Milan in front on thirty-eight minutes, Desmet answered from the penalty spot and Veyt struck the winner, so that Waregem took the night 2-1 and the tie 3-2 on aggregate. The penalty was disputed and it lit the fuse, the crowd's fury spilled beyond the terraces, and the consequences arrived in official envelopes — a two-match European home-ground ban for the club — while outside, in the December dark, the protests against President Farina no longer troubled to distinguish one grievance from another. The year's last European act was whistled off to the sound of a city losing patience.

The Last Full Year

For the truth, which the terraces had smelled long before the auditors confirmed it, was that Farina's Milan was falling not on the pitch but in the figures. Through all of 1985 the president owned and ran the club while its finances quietly collapsed beneath him, and the crisis the Waregem night dragged into the open would, within weeks of the new year, end his tenure altogether: he would resign amid the debts in January, and in February 1986 a media magnate named Silvio Berlusconi would buy the club and change everything, everything, down to the meaning of the word Milan. 1985 itself closed with the old regime still nominally on its throne, and with the men on the terraces already past anger and into that flat Lombard patience which is the most dangerous mood of the lot.

So the year gave Milan no silver: fifth place dressed as prudence, a cup final surrendered to another club's first feast, a European run put out by a Belgian side and a disputed whistle, a president running out of money and a public running out of patience. And, on the twentieth of January, for want of a fit Battistini, a boy of sixteen. Twenty-five seasons, out of a substitution nobody applauded, in a match that finished 1-1.