The Volley, the Fog and the Eleventh Crown

A City Learns to Breathe Again

January in Milan is a conspiracy between fog and stone. The Madonnina keeps her little flame of gold above the murk, the Navigli push their cold grey water past shuttered bars where the espresso machines hiss like disapproving aunts, and in that winter of 1988 the city hummed with the particular electricity of money being made — this was the Milano da bere of the boom years, a city drinking itself confident, tailored, hurried, certain that the future had chosen it as a residence. On the third day of the year, its football team gave that confidence a scoreline. Napoli — the reigning champions of Italy, the Napoli of Diego Maradona, holders of everything the south had ever wanted to hold — came to San Siro and were taken apart, four goals to one: Colombo, Virdis, Gullit, Donadoni, a strike from each quarter of Arrigo Sacchi's new geometry, and the message went down the peninsula faster than any express from Centrale.

It needs remembering what the waiting had done to this club. No scudetto since 1979 — nine years, which in Milan is measured not in seasons but in Sunday lunches soured, in risotto gone cold while the radio delivered its small cruelties, in a generation of children raised on their fathers' memories rather than their own. The eleventh title was not merely desired; it was owed, the way a debt of honour is owed, and the man who had arrived in February 1986 to underwrite that debt — Silvio Berlusconi, impresario of Fininvest, a president who thought of football the way an opera producer thinks of a season at La Scala — had wagered his fortune and his considerable vanity on the proposition that Milan could be made modern again. By January 1988 the wager was on the table for all to see, and the dealer was a former shoe salesman's idea of nobody: a coach named Sacchi, in his first season, who had never been a great player and saw no reason why that should disqualify him from being a great anything else.

The Heretic and the Impresario

What Sacchi preached was, by the standards of the Italian church of football, heresy — pressing high when prudence said retreat, defending zones when tradition said shadow your man to the ends of the earth, asking eleven men to move as one animal rather than as eleven soloists awaiting their aria. The proof of the heresy was arithmetical, and arithmetic is the one language every sceptic in every bar from Porta Ticinese to the Ortica eventually respects: fourteen goals conceded in thirty league matches, the meanest defence in Italy, marshalled by Giovanni Galli behind a line where Mauro Tassotti's cheerful violence and the young Paolo Maldini's improbable elegance flanked the captain, Franco Baresi — and about Baresi one must be careful, because superlatives are a currency easily inflated, so let us say only that he read the game the way old Lombard farmers read the sky, early and correctly and without fuss.

Ahead of them laboured the honest lungs of the enterprise — Angelo Colombo, brought from Udinese and run like a faithful mule across every blade of San Siro grass, Roberto Donadoni on the flank, Carlo Ancelotti arrived from Roma with his slow smile and his fast brain — and ahead of them, the extravagance. Berlusconi had spent as impresarios spend, and because the rules of the day rationed foreigners — two to a squad that season, with a third permitted from 1988 — the choosing of them became an act of doctrine: Ruud Gullit, prised from PSV, and Marco van Basten, gathered from Ajax, had come in the summer of 1987 while Ray Wilkins and Mark Hateley — honourable Englishmen of the leaner years — went out the other door. Two Dutchmen, then, with a third still to come, and a coach who intended to make the whole cost more than the sum of its considerable parts.

May, and the Storming of the South

The title race resolved itself into the oldest of Italian stories, north against south, and for most of the spring the south was winning it. With five rounds to play Napoli sat four points clear — and in a season of thirty matchdays among sixteen clubs, four points late in the day is not a lead, it is a verdict awaiting only the stamp. Then the stamp slipped. Napoli lost four of their last five, a collapse that will be argued over as long as Neapolitans argue, which is to say forever, and into the middle of that collapse Milan inserted the blade: the first of May 1988, the Stadio San Paolo, the champions at home needing only to hold, and Milan won 3-2 — Pietro Paolo Virdis twice, van Basten once, three away goals in the champions' own theatre, the kind of result that does not merely change a table but changes what both cities believe about themselves.

What remained was the bureaucracy of triumph, conducted with Sacchian sobriety: a goalless draw at home to Juventus on the eighth of May, and then, on the fifteenth, the short pilgrimage north to the lake, where thousands upon thousands of Milanisti descended on little Como as if the whole Navigli had been tipped out of the city and poured up the shore. Virdis scored, the match finished 1-1, the mathematics closed their books, and the eleventh scudetto was Milan's. The final ledger reads like a manifesto: forty-five points from thirty matches, seventeen won, eleven drawn, two lost; forty-three scored and those fourteen conceded; three points clear of Napoli, seven clear of Roma. And atop the club's scoring charts, with eleven league goals of his fifteen in all competitions, stood Virdis — the veteran who had carried the attack all winter while the club's greatest investment sat in the stands with his foot in ruins, which brings us, as everything in 1988 eventually does, to the ankle.

The Ankle That Nearly Wasn't

Marco van Basten had come to Milan in 1987 as the coming man of European football and had promptly become its most expensive spectator. The right ankle — that treacherous hinge on which his whole vertical art depended — required surgery, and the surgery required patience, and patience is the one commodity San Siro has never stocked. His debut season dissolved into absence: something in the region of eleven league appearances, the sources counting loosely because nobody enjoys counting a man's misfortunes precisely, and a whole city wondering aloud, over the cotoletta and the third glass, whether the impresario had bought a masterpiece with a crack running through the canvas.

The answer arrived in April, quietly, as real answers do. On the tenth, against Empoli at San Siro, van Basten scored the only goal of the match — a 1-0 win worth two points and worth immeasurably more as testimony. Three weeks later he scored again in the 3-2 at Napoli that broke the champions, and by mid-May he owned a scudetto medal earned the hard way, which is to say partly from the treatment table, a place that teaches a footballer more about himself than any training pitch. Hold the shape of this story in your mind — the surgeon's knife in one year, and what came after it in this one — because 1988 was about to do something for van Basten that football does for very few men: it was to take the worst doubt of his life and convert it, item by item, into the best year anyone had ever seen. That the same right ankle would one day return to end his career belongs to sadder chapters; this one belongs to the resurrection.

Munich, Midsummer

On the twenty-fifth of June, in Munich, the Netherlands met the Soviet Union in the final of the European Championship, and Milan — the club, the city, the idea — was somehow present in orange. Gullit rose for the header that opened the match. And then van Basten did the thing for which the word volley has ever since seemed insufficient: a ball dropping from the sky on the far side of the area, an angle from which geometry advises a cushioned header back across goal or a prayer, and instead a right foot swung flush through the falling ball to beat the goalkeeper from a position that respectable strikers do not even consider a position. Two-nil, the Netherlands champions of Europe, van Basten the tournament's top scorer with five goals, Frank Rijkaard part of the victorious squad — and UEFA itself would in time call that volley perhaps the most iconic goal in the history of the Euros, a rare case of a governing body underselling something.

For Milan the final was also a shop window into which the club was already reaching. That summer Rijkaard — out of Ajax, by way of Sporting Lisbon — signed for the rossoneri, and the Dutch trio was complete: three foreigners permitted, three Dutchmen chosen, a nation's golden generation folded whole into a single Lombard project. There was a pleasing gluttony to it, like a menu that offers one perfect dish three ways, and the rest of Italy regarded the feast with the expression of diners at the next table who had ordered sensibly and were beginning to regret it.

The Fog of Belgrade

Autumn brought the European Cup, the trophy around which all Milanese longing ultimately orbits, and the campaign opened against Vitosha Sofia — the Levski of another name — with businesslike violence: 2-0 on the seventh of September, Virdis and Gullit scoring, and then on the sixth of October a 5-2 in which van Basten, back from his summer coronation, scored four times in a single evening, as if to notarise personally that the ankle question was closed. Seven-two on aggregate, and into the second round, where football had prepared one of its strangest theatre pieces.

Red Star Belgrade came to San Siro on the twenty-sixth of October and left with a 1-1 draw, Virdis scoring for Milan, and so everything travelled east for the ninth of November — and what descended on Belgrade that day was not weather but dramaturgy. Fog, real Balkan fog, the kind Lombardy exports and does not expect returned with interest, thickening over the pitch until the game inside it became rumour. Red Star led 1-0, Savicevic having scored on fifty minutes; Virdis had been sent off; Milan were reduced, trailing, and dissolving into the white — and then the referee, Dieter Pauly, abandoned the match at the fifty-seventh minute, the fog having swallowed the spectacle whole. Every Milanista of a certain age crosses himself at the memory, for the tie was to be replayed in its entirety, and a match that was slipping away had been erased by the sky.

The replay came the very next day, the tenth of November: van Basten on thirty-five minutes, Stojkovic on thirty-nine, 1-1 through ninety and through extra time, and then penalties, that cruel little opera buffa, which Milan won 4-2. They advanced — and though the accounting of it belongs to the next chapter, honesty compels the spoiler: the road that emerged from the Belgrade fog ran all the way to the European Cup itself in 1989. Great histories often pass through a needle's eye; Milan's passed through a cloud.

A Stumbling Autumn, a Golden Christmas

It would flatter the season to pretend the league obeyed the same script. Serie A had swollen to eighteen clubs and thirty-four matchdays, and the champions navigated it like a liner in chop: imperious one week — Fiorentina dismissed 4-0 on the ninth of October, Donadoni striking first and Virdis helping himself to the other three — then grinding out a 2-1 at Verona in early November, then losing 1-2 at home to Atalanta on the twentieth with Rijkaard's goal a mere receipt for the defeat. On the twenty-seventh of November came the reckoning of the south: Napoli 4-1 Milan at the San Paolo, Maradona's people repaying the spring with interest, Virdis's penalty the thinnest of consolations. In December the city's other church took its tithe, Inter winning the derby 1-0 at San Siro on the eleventh, and the civil year closed on the thirty-first with a goalless draw against Sampdoria — champions of Italy, conquerors of the fog, and altogether mortal on a Sunday.

Italy itself was rehearsing for bigger stages. In April Ciriaco De Mita had formed a new government — governments in Rome being seasonal, like artichokes — and the whole country was building, literally and spiritually, toward the World Cup it would host in 1990. Milan the city gleamed on, sure of its money and its taste; and into this gilded December fell the year's last and most symmetrical honour. On the twenty-seventh, France Football announced the Ballon d'Or: Marco van Basten first, with 129 points; Ruud Gullit second, with 88; Frank Rijkaard third, with 45. First, second and third — three team-mates, one club, one country, a podium filled entirely from a single dressing room for the first time in the award's history. The man who twelve months earlier had been a convalescent with a suspect ankle was now, by ballot, the best footballer on earth, flanked by his countrymen like a tenor between two baritones.

The Verdict

Weigh the year, then, as a magistrate weighs evidence. In May, the eleventh scudetto, sealed by the lake at Como after the storming of Naples — Sacchi's first, the club's first in nine years, won with the best defence in Italy and a style that made the peninsula's old catechism look suddenly provincial. In June, Munich, and a volley that will outlive everyone who saw it. In autumn, a European campaign preserved by fog and resolved by nerve. In December, gold, silver and bronze all wearing the same shirt. Around it, Berlusconi's Milan and Berlusconi's Milano, the impresario and the heretic, the drinking city and its suddenly undrinkable football — undrinkable, that is, for everyone else.

For those of us who follow the Diavolo from the far side of the world, where the fog of Belgrade would have rolled across a television screen in the small hours and the Como coronation reached us with the dawn, 1988 is the year the devotion stopped requiring memory and started requiring only attention: one no longer had to explain to one's children what Milan had been, because there it was, every week, being it. The verdict, therefore, and it is unanimous: 1988 was the year Milan stopped chasing its own legend and lapped it — the year the doubt went in for surgery and came out wearing the Ballon d'Or.