The Janus Year: A Prophet, Two Dutchmen, and a Golden Ball for a Prisoner

A Janus Year

There are years that belong to a single season and years that belong to history, and 1987 — viewed from the distance that turns fog into landscape — was emphatically the second kind, though nobody living through its damp Milanese January could have sworn to it. The city went about its winter as it always had, the Navigli black and slow under a sky the colour of pewter, the Madonnina invisible above the mist, the risotto steaming in the trattorie of Porta Ticinese as consolation for everything the league table withheld; and out at San Siro a football club two seasons into new ownership was still trying to discover what it wished to become. The year would begin with one Milan and end with another. It was, in the truest sense, a Janus year: one face turned back toward an honourable mediocrity, the other toward a revolution that had not yet announced itself.

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.

Spring: The 102nd Minute

The season that straddled the new year, 1986-87, closed in the arithmetic of respectability: thirty matches, thirteen won, nine drawn, eight lost, thirty-five points, thirty-one goals scored against twenty-one conceded — the ledger 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 a certain quiet satisfaction. But spring undid the winter's work. A slump through March and April cost Nils Liedholm his position in the first week of April — a defeat away at Avellino the final indignity — and the old maestro handed the dugout to Fabio Capello: a caretaker then, a serious young man minding the shop until summer, though history, which likes its ironies slow-cooked like a good ragù, would one day bring him back 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 yet the season's true verdict was postponed to 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 to decide the final UEFA Cup place. Ninety minutes decided 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 in the long run the more reliable of the two.

Summer: The Impresario and the Prophet

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. It was a wager on an idea, made by a man who wagered on ideas for a living.

Then came the Dutchmen. Ruud Gullit arrived from PSV Eindhoven for a fee that was, in that moment, the largest 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, a forward of such refinement that watching him gather a ball was like watching a swan settle on still water. 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, above all, 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 in the stock exchange 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 result that appears in the ledgers as a scoreline but was in truth a sentence handed down, and a just one, upon an act of imbecility that no banner and no loyalty can dress in colours. The moralist is obliged to record it; the tifoso is obliged to remember it; and the reader should distrust any summary that lists it as a mere defeat, for it was something worse and something other.

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, whatever the more casual chronicles have implied since; the derby was won by pressure and misfortune mixed in the correct proportions, which is to say it was won 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. The scudetto was run down and sealed on the final day of that season with a one-all draw at Como: the same modest lakeside ground where the boy Maldini had scored his first goal, back at the very start of the year our story tells. Football's geometry is rarely so courteous.

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.

What Gullit did with the award matters more, in the long ledger of human deeds, than the award itself. 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 prison 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 purchased: not merely the marvel of the newsreels, but a conscience wearing dreadlocks.

The Verdict of the Fog

For the faithful on the far side of the planet — and there were Milanese hearts in Australia even then, keeping the faith at impossible hours, by radio and by newsprint arriving days late, in Adelaide and beyond — 1987 offered nothing to witness in the flesh: the Diavolo would not set foot on Australian soil until 1993, when Baresi captained the side in friendlies against the national team in Sydney and Melbourne, and the modern pilgrimages came later still. But 1987 gave those distant devotees something better than a visit. It gave them a reason to set the alarm for the decade to come.

Weigh the year, then, as the moralist must, with both pans of the scale honestly loaded. On one side: a fifth place, a sacked old maestro, a European exit administered by Espanyol before the machine was tuned, and one December afternoon of genuine shame that no derby can launder. On the other: a boy's first goal by the lake at Como, a poacher's seventeen, the 102nd minute in Turin, a Prophet hired from the provinces to howls of scepticism, two Dutchmen who would bend the game's history, a derby won under the winter lights, and a golden ball dedicated to a prisoner. The scale does not balance. It tips — decisively, irreversibly — toward the future. 1987 was the year Milan stopped being a club that remembered and became, once again, a club that intended. The fog on the Navigli lifted, as it always does, sometime past noon; and behind it, for those with eyes to see, the Alps stood enormous and white beyond the Madonnina — like the years that were coming, and would not be refused.