The Hinge and the Helicopters

The Fog Over the Navigli

There are winters when the fog settles over Milan the way a creditor settles into an armchair: patiently, without malice, and with no intention of leaving until the accounts are put right. The winter of 1986 was one of those winters. The city itself was prospering — fashion money, television money, the bright new noise of private broadcasting spilling out of the studios of Canale 5 — but its red-and-black half woke every morning to a football club that was, in plain Lombard speech, broke. Giuseppe Farina, the president of the grey years, was gone, fled abroad with his debts left standing behind him like unwashed dishes in a shuttered trattoria, and what remained of the Diavolo was a great name with empty pockets: a squad of genuine promise, a captain of granite, and no hand on the tiller.

Every long history has its hinge, the year on which the door of an era swings, and for Milan that year is 1986. Juventus took the scudetto that spring; down south, Diego Maradona's Napoli were gathering themselves for the first title of their lives, which would come the following season; Italy would travel to Mexico in June as world champions and come home after the round of sixteen, undone by France. Against this backdrop a television impresario walked into an accountant's office and bought a bankrupt football club, and nothing in the Italian game — perhaps nothing in the European game — was ever quite the same again. But hinges turn slowly at first. In January, nobody knew.

Fifty-One Days and a Signature

The presidency, in those months, passed from hand to hand like a plate nobody wanted to wash. Farina's resignation was ratified at a club assembly in early January 1986 — the records quarrel over the precise day, as records do when the house is on fire — and into the vacancy stepped Rosario Lo Verde, a caretaker in the fullest sense of the word, who held the chair for some fifty-one days between the middle of January and the latter part of March: the shortest-lasting chairman in the club's history, a man remembered chiefly for the dignity with which he held a door open for somebody else.

The somebody else was Silvio Berlusconi. The preliminary deal was signed on 10 February 1986; the share transfer itself was completed on 20 February, in the office of the accountant Locatelli — an Inter supporter, and there is a whole essay on Milanese irony in that single detail, the papers of the Diavolo's rebirth passing across a nerazzurro desk. Fininvest took Farina's debt-ridden Milan for a reported six billion lire and an immediate increase of capital, and Berlusconi did not come alone: his brother Paolo was at his side, and Fedele Confalonieri, and a man named Adriano Galliani, of whom Milanisti would be hearing a very great deal.

On 24 March 1986 Berlusconi was formally installed as president — the twentieth of the line by one count, the twenty-first by another, for Milan has always kept its ledgers the way a poet keeps his desk. Galliani became chief executive; Ariedo Braida arrived as sporting director. And the new proprietor was not a president of the old provincial type but the master of Fininvest and Canale 5, a man who dealt in spectacle the way other men dealt in steel, and who would one day govern Italy itself. He looked at a mid-table team drowning in debt and saw, with the eye of an impresario, a stage.

Thirty-One Points, and the Cousin One Ahead

The football, meanwhile, went on being mortal. The 1985-86 season, which closed in the spring sunshine while the notaries were still blotting their signatures, ended with Milan seventh: thirty-one points from thirty matches, ten won, eleven drawn, nine lost, twenty-six goals scored and twenty-four allowed — the arithmetic of a side neither drowning nor swimming, treading water with its chin just clear of the surface. The cruellest number was the smallest: one point. One point behind Inter, and with it went the last road into the UEFA Cup, so that the cousins across the Madonnina could spend the summer smirking, which is, after all, what cousins are for.

On the bench sat Nils Liedholm, the Swede, with Luciano Tessari at his elbow, taking results the way one takes Lombard weather — philosophically, with the collar turned up. Franco Baresi wore the armband and Mauro Tassotti the vice-captaincy; behind them, half-formed and wholly precious, stood the future: a teenage Paolo Maldini, already unhurried in the way only the great are unhurried, the young Alessandro Costacurta, Alberico Evani. Giuliano Terraneo kept the goal, and the exotic imports were English — Mark Hateley, all shoulders and aerial violence, and Ray Wilkins, who passed the ball as though apologising to it. Pietro Paolo Virdis led the scoring with sixteen goals in all competitions; Hateley's eight made him the side's best in the league; Paolo Rossi and Agostino Di Bartolomei, two men with heavy pasts and quiet seasons, managed three apiece.

Europe, for its part, had ended before the calendar year even began, and the wound still ached. In the UEFA Cup's round of sixteen Milan had drawn one-all away to the Belgians of Waregem and then, on 11 December 1985, contrived to lose the return 1-2 at San Siro — Bortolazzi's goal on thirty-eight minutes answered by Desmet from a penalty and then by Veyt — and the penalty was disputed, and the crowd's fury at it was of the kind that peels paint from the second tier. The Coppa Italia had gone no better, surrendered to Empoli in the round of sixteen. So the second half of 1986 passed without a single European night: San Siro dark on Wednesdays, the floodlights cold, a great house with the piano shut.

Pablito, in the Fading Light

Now the small story inside the large one, because history is a risotto and the single grain matters. In the summer of 1985 Milan had signed Paolo Rossi from Juventus — Pablito, the Golden Boot and Ballon d'Or of 1982, the slight, quick-eyed hero of Spain, the most famous footballer on earth for one unrepeatable July. The hope was a final blaze. What arrived instead was a long, gentle dusk: twenty-six appearances in that 1985-86 season, and three goals.

Two of the three came in a single night, and what a night he chose. The derby, 1 December 1985, matchday twelve at San Siro: Rossi struck in the fifth minute, Virdis the provider, and after Altobelli had levelled for Inter and Liam Brady had put them ahead from a penalty in the sixty-fifth, Pablito answered again in the sixty-ninth for 2-2. Afterwards, so the retellings go, he joked that had Inter only worn Brazil's yellow he would have scored three — and confessed that he could no longer remember his previous brace. The pedant will note the date: December 1985, strictly the old year. But light travels slowly in fog, and the glow of that night was the glow by which Milanisti read the whole of 1986; it belongs to this chapter or to none.

The rest is elegy. Enzo Bearzot, loyal to the legend of 1982, took Rossi to Mexico for the World Cup, but the altitude and the fading of the legs decided otherwise, and he did not play a single minute; Giuseppe Galderisi carried his duties up front. And when the summer came, the new Milan shipped Pablito to Hellas Verona — partly, with the tidy cruelty of the market, to bring that same Galderisi the other way — where he played one last quiet season — twenty league games, four goals — before hanging up his boots in 1987. So 1986 was the year the light of Spain went out, and hardly anyone noticed, because overhead the sky was suddenly full of helicopters.

Valkyries Over the Arena

On 18 July 1986, at the Arena Civica, at half past five in the evening, before some ten thousand of the faithful, the loudspeakers began to play Wagner — the Ride of the Valkyries, no less — and out of that sound descended the helicopters, settling on the grass like patient dragonflies. The squad had been gathered at Linate, Baresi would recall, without quite being told what was happening to them. The doors opened, and out stepped Berlusconi and his players, the captain among them, each man presented to the crowd in his turn by the television presenter Cesare Cadeo, and Italian football understood in the space of about ninety seconds that an old liturgy had ended and a new one — scored for brass, rotor blades and prime time — had begun.

One may smile at it; many did; some of us managed to smile and shiver at the same time. It was vulgar and it was magnificent, and those two qualities have never been strangers in this city, which gave the world both grand opera and the glass-roofed shopping arcade. The helicopter show became the founding image of the commercial era — the moment Berlusconi's Milan announced that it would not merely play football but stage it. Nothing, mark you, had yet been won. A team that had just finished seventh descended from the heavens to a Wagnerian fanfare, and the presumption of it was breathtaking; and the presumption, in the fullness of time, would be honoured to the last comma.

The Impresario's First Market

The first summer market of the new regime was less operatic and more instructive. In came Roberto Donadoni from Atalanta, a winger of intelligence; Giovanni Galli from Fiorentina to keep the goal; Daniele Massaro, also from Florence; Giuseppe Galderisi from Hellas Verona; Dario Bonetti from Roma to thicken the defence. Out, besides Rossi, went the club's youth to be seasoned elsewhere, as one sends the good salami to the cellar: Alessandro Costacurta on loan to Monza, Stefano Borgonovo to Como.

Note, with the historian's discipline, what was not yet there. No Dutchman had arrived: Gullit and Van Basten were a year away, Rijkaard two. Arrigo Sacchi and his pressing were still a rumour the future was keeping to itself. On the bench the new owner kept, of all people, the old Swede: Liedholm stayed, and in September the 1986-87 season opened with the same measured hand on the tiller. Berlusconi in 1986 built the frame rather than the picture — Donadoni, Galli, Massaro, the scaffolding onto which the great canvas would later be stretched.

And since a chronicle may be permitted one glance at the next page: Liedholm would remain until 6 April 1987, when his assistant Fabio Capello — remember the name, for it returns in this story the way a theme returns in Wagner — took interim charge of the final matches; Milan finished that season fifth and entered the UEFA Cup through a play-off, a single goal against Sampdoria in Turin on 23 May 1987. Around them the peninsula was rearranging itself: Juventus champions in the spring of 1986, Napoli and their Argentine sorcerer preparing to seize the title of 1986-87, the old order loosening like March snow on the Alps beyond the Madonnina.

The Hinge of Everything

For the Milanese of Adelaide, who follow this club from the far side of the world's clocks, let it be recorded honestly that no rossonero boot touched Australian grass in 1986; that meeting lay far in the future, for Milan's first visit would come only in 1993, with two friendlies against the Australia national team in Sydney and Melbourne. In 1986 the Diavolo did not travel even as far as a European Wednesday. And yet everything the distant faithful would one day rise in the dark to watch was, in this one year, set upon the table.

So let the verdict be entered. 1986 gave Milan no trophy, no glorious run, not even a place in Europe; it gave a seventh-place finish, a derby draw, and a fallen hero sold to Verona. And yet it is the hinge on which the club's whole modern history turns, because in an accountant's office on a February morning — the accountant an Interista, fate grinning quietly into its espresso — a nearly bankrupt institution passed to a man who understood that football was about to become theatre, and who possessed the money, the machinery and the appetite to build the theatre himself. The old Milan died owing money; the new one was born owing only a promise, made in helicopters and Wagner, that the spectacle would be worth the presumption. Rossi's light went out; Berlusconi's lights came on; and between those two flickers, in the fog between the Navigli and the Madonnina, the modern game — for better, for worse, for richer — was quietly invented.