The Secret Medical and the Golden Ball

A Medical in January

On the fourteenth of January 1987, using a day off granted him by PSV Eindhoven, a Dutchman walked into a consulting room in Milan and submitted himself to the examinations of the club doctor, Monti. He passed. Then he flew home and said nothing, and the transfer would not be announced for months yet. That is where this year begins — not with a match, not with a signature in front of the cameras, but with a stethoscope and a silence.

Milan went about its winter in ignorance, and out at San Siro a club two seasons into new ownership was still trying to discover what it wished to become. Nineteen eighty-seven would open with one Milan and close with another: a year with two faces, one turned back toward an honourable mediocrity, the other toward a revolution that had not yet been permitted to speak its name.

The Impresario — for that is what Silvio Berlusconi was and would remain, a man of television and spectacle who had lifted a debt-laden Milan out of the water in 1986 the way one lifts a drowning swimmer, by the hair and without ceremony — was in his second season as owner, and he had already absorbed the first lesson every impresario learns: an audience forgives failure more readily than it forgives boredom. The Milan of early 1987 was not boring, exactly, but neither was it a spectacle, and the distinction mattered enormously to a man who intended his football club to be watched the way his channels were watched — by everyone, always, on every screen in the country.

Spring: The 102nd Minute in Turin

The season that straddled the new year, 1986-87, closed in the numbers of mere respectability: thirty matches, thirteen won, nine drawn, eight lost, thirty-five points, thirty-one goals scored against twenty-one conceded — the profile of a side that defended with diligence and attacked with hesitation. Fifth place in Serie A, which in most cities is a result and in Milan is a diagnosis.

There had been mornings of promise. On the fourth of January, at Como, where the lake wind comes down off the mountains and makes honest men of forwards, a boy named Paolo Maldini scored his first goal in Serie A — the only goal of the afternoon — and those with long memories filed the name away with quiet satisfaction. But spring undid the winter's work. A slump through March and April cost Nils Liedholm his position on the sixth of April, a defeat away at Avellino the final indignity, and the old maestro handed the dugout to his own assistant, Fabio Capello, who took interim charge of the matches that remained: a caretaker then, a serious young man minding the shop until summer. History, which stores its ironies the way a broadcaster stores tape and plays them back a decade later, would one day return him to that same bench to preside over invincibility. Nobody in April 1987 suspected it, least of all Capello, which is how history prefers to work.

Redemption, when it came, wore the face of a poacher. Pietro Paolo Virdis finished as Milan's leading scorer with seventeen league goals — eighteen in all competitions — and saved his most emphatic afternoon for the third of May, when Roma came to San Siro and left beaten 4-1, three of the goals belonging to Virdis alone: a hat-trick delivered with the economy of a man settling accounts before a journey. And the season was decided, at last, on the twenty-third of May, in Turin, at the Stadio Comunale, where Milan and Sampdoria — level on points, indistinguishable by every measure the table recognised — met in a single match for the final UEFA Cup place. Ninety minutes settled nothing, as ninety minutes so often decline to do. Then, in the 102nd minute, Daniele Massaro scored, and Milan had Europe: one goal to nil after extra time, a qualification won not with glory but with stubbornness — which is glory's plainer, harder-working cousin, and the more reliable of the two.

Summer: The Prophet, and the Leak That Doubled the Price

What followed, in the summer of 1987, was the most consequential season of shopping in the club's history, and it began not with a player but with an idea. Arrigo Sacchi arrived from Parma — Parma, a provincial club, and Sacchi a coach so unheralded that much of Italy greeted the appointment with a raised eyebrow and a suppressed smile. Berlusconi did neither. He had built an empire on the conviction that the public does not know what it wants until it is shown, and in Sacchi — the Prophet, let us call him, since prophets are traditionally without honour right up until the moment they are drowning in it — he had found a man who believed a football team could be rehearsed like an orchestra: the press applied high up the pitch, the defending done by zone rather than by shadowing, eleven men moving as one animal, the same movement run and re-run until the body gave it back unasked, the way tape gives back whatever is recorded on it. It was a wager on an idea, made by a man who wagered on ideas for a living.

Ruud Gullit, as we have seen, had been decided upon long before. Berlusconi watched him at a tournament in Barcelona in August 1986 and told his people, in the version the Dutch tell it, ‘Die moeten we echt hebben’ — we really must have him. A Milan delegation then met the player in something close to secrecy at the Amstel Hotel in Amsterdam, after a Netherlands international; but the Dutch journalist Jurriaan van Wessem broke the story in La Gazzetta dello Sport, and secrecy, once punctured, becomes expensive. Milan had gone in aiming at five billion lire and settled at ten — seventeen million guilders, fixed on the twenty-first of November 1986 — the one entry in the club's balance sheet that year which the Impresario could blame on a newspaper, and loudly did. Then came the January consulting room, and the months of saying nothing, and finally the announcement: the largest fee the world had ever paid for a footballer. Dreadlocks, a smile like a harbour opening, and a physique that seemed designed by committee to solve every problem the game had yet invented.

Marco van Basten came from Ajax; at home they called him de zwaan van Utrecht, the swan of Utrecht, and the name was earned — watching him gather a ball was like watching a swan settle on still water. Born in Utrecht on the thirty-first of October 1964, he had passed from the age of six through three amateur clubs of his own city — EDO, UVV, Elinkwijk — before Ajax took him into their youth teams at sixteen in 1981; and his professional debut, in 1982, had the shape of scripture, since he came on as substitute for Johan Cruijff himself and scored his first goal in a five-nil win over NEC. Carlo Ancelotti arrived from Roma to give the midfield its metronome, Angelo Colombo from Udinese to give it lungs. Ray Wilkins departed for Paris Saint-Germain and Mark Hateley for Monaco, with the club's thanks; and the armband stayed precisely where it belonged, on the arm of Franco Baresi, the quiet aristocrat of the defence, who had endured the lean years and would now captain the fat ones.

Autumn: A Debut at Pisa, a Door Closed in Europe

The new season opened on the thirteenth of September, away at Pisa, and Van Basten required precisely one league match to introduce himself: a goal in the 80th minute, Pisa 1, Milan 3 at the finish, and up and down the peninsula the aficionados understood — not fully, not yet, but in the way one understands a distant thunderclap — the nature of what had been imported.

Europe, however, administered its lesson in humility before the autumn was out. Sporting Gijón were seen off in the first round of the UEFA Cup — a 1-0 stumble in Spain redeemed by a 3-0 return at the end of September — and then came Espanyol, and with them the bill for a team still learning its own choreography: beaten 0-2 on the twenty-first of October in the borrowed home of Lecce, where a stadium ban had exiled Milan's European nights far from San Siro, then held goalless in Barcelona on the fourth of November, out of Europe by an aggregate of two goals to none. The Prophet's machine was still being assembled, gear by gear, and Espanyol had walked into the workshop before the varnish was dry.

And all the while, Italy's applause belonged elsewhere — for 1987 was Naples' year, the year Diego Maradona carried Napoli to the first scudetto of their existence, and the south wept and danced and hung its washing in the club's colours. Sacchi's Milan, sitting mid-table as the winter break approached, was a rumour, not yet a fact. But rumours, in football as on the exchanges the Impresario knew so well, are merely facts that have not yet been priced.

December: The Firecracker and the Derby

The year's darkest afternoon arrived on the thirteenth of December, and it shames the teller as it shamed the club. Milan were hosting Roma when, just before the second half began, two firecrackers thrown from the stands came down upon the Roma goalkeeper Franco Tancredi — one at the knee, the other exploding beside his face. His heart stopped, and it was massaged back into rhythm on the San Siro turf. Let that sentence stand alone, as it deserves to. The match, absurdly, was then played to its end — a seventeen-year-old named Angelo Peruzzi sent between the posts in Tancredi's place, and Milan winning 1-0 on the field through a Virdis penalty — before the sporting judge annulled the afternoon and awarded it 0-2 to Roma: a sentence handed down, and a just one, upon an act of imbecility that no banner and no loyalty can dress in colours. The record must carry it; the tifoso must remember it; and any account that files it as a mere defeat has filed it wrongly.

A week later football, which forgives faster than it should, offered the city its ritual consolation: the derby, the twentieth of December, 67,545 souls gathered beneath the winter floodlights of San Siro. Milan won it 1-0, and honesty compels the detail that romance would prefer to omit — the goal, scored in the fourth minute, was an own goal, turned past his own keeper by Inter's Riccardo Ferri. No Milanese boot touched the decisive ball. It was won by pressure and misfortune in the correct proportions, which is to say the way most derbies are won. The victory closed Milan's year on sixteen points, five behind the leaders Napoli at the winter break: a gap that looked, from December, like a wall — and would prove, by the following May, to have been a curtain. How that wall was walked through, and on which modest ground the drawing back was finally done, is not this chapter's to tell; the calendar hands it to the next one, and the next one has earned it.

The Golden Ball and the Prisoner

And then, on the twenty-ninth of December, as the year packed its bags, the votes of twenty-seven European journalists were counted and announced: Ruud Gullit of Milan was the Ballon d'Or of 1987, with 106 points to the 91 of Atlético Madrid's Paulo Futre. He had been a Rossonero for barely half a year. The doctor Monti had known him, almost to the week, for twelve months.

What Gullit did with the award matters more than the award. The Dutchman was deeply involved in his country's anti-apartheid movement — the movement of the ‘Free Nelson Mandela’ concerts — and he dedicated his Ballon d'Or to Mandela, then still a prisoner on Robben Island, a man whose name entire governments preferred not to pronounce. And word of the dedication travelled where dedications rarely travel: into the prison itself, down to the cells. Years later, when Mandela was free and the world had turned on its hinge, the two men met, and the old man told him he had heard of it — and confessed, with the gravity of one whom oppression had taught to expect punishment for such gestures, that he had feared they would take the Ballon d'Or away from Gullit for it.

Consider the arc of that. A footballer six months into a new job in a foreign city takes the game's shiniest individual bauble and turns it outward, toward a cell on an island at the far end of the world. The gesture cost him nothing and meant everything — the precise inverse of most gestures made in football — and it told Milan, the club and the city both, what manner of man the Impresario's record fee had actually bought: not merely the marvel of the screens, but a conscience wearing dreadlocks.

One Year, Two Milans

1987 faced two directions at once, and neither face would acknowledge the other. Looking backward: a fifth place, an old maestro sacked in April, a European exit administered by Espanyol before the machine was tuned, and one December afternoon of shame that no derby can launder. Looking forward: a boy's first goal by the lake at Como, a poacher's seventeen, the 102nd minute in Turin, a coach fetched from the provinces amid open scepticism, two Dutchmen who would bend the game's history, a derby taken under the winter lights, and a golden ball sent to an island prison.

Milan finished 1987 mid-table, five points behind Napoli, and nobody outside the building would have called them champions of anything. Somewhere in the city, in a folder in a doctor's cabinet, lay a clean bill of health signed on a January morning on a man who had spent that day telling nobody where he had been. Everything that came afterwards was already inside it, waiting to be developed.