Gold, Silver and Bronze in the Same Shirt

The Third of January

Napoli came to San Siro on the third day of the year and went home four goals to one lighter. The reigning champions of Italy, the Napoli of Diego Maradona, holders of everything the south had ever wanted to hold, were taken apart by Colombo, Virdis, Gullit and Donadoni — a strike from each quarter of Arrigo Sacchi's new geometry — and the message went down the peninsula faster than the express out of Centrale. Beyond the turnstiles the city hummed with the electricity of money being made: this was the Milano da bere of the boom years, drinking itself confident in designer suits, certain the future had chosen it as a residence. On the third of January 1988 its football team gave that confidence a scoreline.

It needs remembering what the waiting had done to this club. No scudetto since 1979 — nine years, measured in Milan not in seasons but in Sunday lunches gone sour, in a generation of children raised on their fathers' memories rather than their own. The eleventh title was not desired; it was owed, the way a debt of honour is owed. The man who had arrived in February 1986 to underwrite it — Silvio Berlusconi, impresario of Fininvest, a president who thought of football as 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 lay face-up, and the dealer was nobody's idea of a dealer: a coach named Sacchi, in his first season, who had never been a great player and saw no reason why that should disqualify him.

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 eleven soloists awaiting an aria. The proof came in numbers, 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, superlatives being 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, run like a faithful mule across San Siro, Roberto Donadoni on the flank, Carlo Ancelotti with his slow smile and his fast brain — and ahead of them, the extravagance. Berlusconi 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 became an act of doctrine. Milan spent its ration on Ruud Gullit and Marco van Basten, the two Dutchmen bought the previous summer at the price and by the manoeuvres the last chapter set down. Two Dutchmen, then, with a third still to come.

May, and the Storming of the South

The title race became 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 matches among sixteen clubs, four points late in the day is not a lead, it is a formality with a date pencilled on it. Then the formality slipped. Napoli lost four of their last five, a collapse Neapolitans will argue over forever, and into the middle of it Milan inserted the blade: the first of May 1988, the Stadio San Paolo, the champions 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 changes not a table but what two 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, then, on the fifteenth, the season's final day, the pilgrimage north to the lake, where thousands of Milanisti descended on little Como as though the city had been tipped whole onto the shore. Virdis scored, the match finished 1-1, and the eleventh scudetto was Milan's — sealed on the same modest lakeside ground where, at the very start of the previous year, a boy named Paolo Maldini had scored his first goal in Serie A. Football's geometry is rarely so courteous. 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. Atop the 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 surgery required patience, the one commodity San Siro has never stocked. His debut season dissolved into absence: something in the region of eleven league appearances, the counts loose because nobody enjoys tallying misfortune precisely, and a whole city wondering 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 partly from the treatment table. What followed was the thing football grants very few men: the worst doubt of his life converted, item by item, into the best year anyone had ever seen. That the same 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 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 out of the sky on the far side of the area, an angle from which geometry advises a cushioned header or a prayer, and instead a right foot swung flush through it from a position respectable strikers do not consider a position. Rinat Dasayev, the man beaten by it, gave afterwards in the Dutch press the only review that counts: "Ik verkeerde in de vorm van mijn leven, maar zelfs in die vorm kon ik die fenomenale inzet van Van Basten niet keren" — I was in the form of my life, and even in that form I could not stop that phenomenal effort from van Basten. 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 would in time call that volley perhaps the most iconic goal in the history of the Euros, a governing body for once underselling something.

The final was also a shop window into which Milan was already reaching. That summer Rijkaard signed for the rossoneri, and he came by the scenic route of a man who had burned a bridge behind him. On the twenty-sixth of September 1987, worn to the bone by Johan Cruijff's unceasing correction — never is it good — he had sworn aloud, walked off the Ajax training pitch and vowed never to play under him again; earlier that summer, still contracted to Ajax, he had put his name to a PSV deal, a mess that ended in a lawsuit and a reputation dented at home. Sporting Lisbon took him, Real Zaragoza borrowed him, Milan collected him. 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 gluttony to it, 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 Night the Sky Came Down

Autumn brought the European Cup, the trophy around which all Milanese longing orbits, and the campaign opened against Vitosha Sofia — the Levski of another name — with businesslike violence: 2-0 away in the Bulgarian capital on the seventh of September, Virdis and Gullit scoring, then on the sixth of October a 5-2 at San Siro in which van Basten, back from his summer coronation, scored four times in one 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, and so everything travelled east for the ninth of November, to the Marakana, where the ground filled so fast that the announcer was calling supporters down from the north stand three quarters of an hour before kick-off. Among the ball boys was a teenager named Aleksandar Jankovic, one day a Red Star coach himself, who remembered Gullit — "with those dreadlocks, like an alien" — and the tartan running track trembling like the Gazela bridge when a truck goes over.

Before half-time the evening turned from spectacle to emergency. Goran Vasilijevic came at Roberto Donadoni with elbow and head arriving together, as Sacchi himself later told it; Donadoni went down unconscious with his jaw shattered and his tongue lodged in his throat. Milan's masseur, Angelo Pagani, forced the broken jaw open to clear the airway and the club doctor, Monti, gave mouth-to-mouth on the grass, his hands going red while the ball boys watched from the touchline. "Roberto fell to the ground, unconscious," Sacchi remembered; van Basten refused to play on and had to be talked back onto the pitch. Donadoni woke, much later, in a Belgrade hospital. Milan's nickname in that city — Besmrtni, the Immortals — took on a second and colder meaning.

And then the weather, which was not weather but dramaturgy. Fog came down during the interval and settled on the grass, thickening until visibility fell under a hundred metres and the game inside it became rumour. Red Star led 1-0, Dejan Savicevic having scored on fifty minutes — only the lower sections jumped, Jankovic said, because nobody higher up could see it. Virdis had been sent off; Milan were reduced, trailing, dissolving into the white; and at the fifty-seventh minute the German referee, Dieter Pauly, abandoned the match, the whole tie to be replayed from the start.

What happened between those two decisions stayed buried for thirty-two years. Pauly's first instruction to Paolo Taveggia, Milan's organisational director, was to wait three quarters of an hour and reassess. Taveggia went to the dressing room and found four or five of his players already in the showers, certain the night was finished. He hurried back, pleaded that his poor English had misled him, said his career was ruined — and Pauly looked again at the murk and agreed to replay the following day. Taveggia passed the same man later in a Belgrade nightclub and said nothing. When he finally confessed, Belgrade filed the story under one word: prevara. Deception.

The replay came the very next day, the tenth of November, before some ninety thousand: van Basten on thirty-five minutes, Dragan Stojkovic level from the penalty spot on thirty-nine, 1-1 through ninety and through extra time. In the eighty-ninth Mitar Mrkela broke clear of the Milan defence and Giovanni Galli's reflex denied him. Then penalties, that cruel little opera buffa. Stojkovic scored, Prosinecki scored; Galli saved from Mrkela and from Savicevic, whose kick was struck too softly for a night of that size; Baresi, van Basten, Evani and Rijkaard all converted, Rijkaard's decisive one going in off the post. Milan won the shootout 4-2. Thirty years later Savicevic had not moved an inch: "da nije bilo magle sigurno da bi Crvena zvezda prošla dalje" — had there been no fog, Red Star would certainly have gone through. Belgrade remembers the night the sky swallowed Zvezda's dream; Adriano Galliani has called it the moment Milan was born as a European power. Both are describing the same cloud. What came out of it belongs to the next chapter, though honesty compels the spoiler: that road ran all the way to the European Cup in 1989.

A Stumbling Autumn, a Golden Christmas

It would flatter the season to pretend the league obeyed that 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 first and Virdis helping himself to the other three — then a 2-1 ground out at Verona in early November, then losing 1-2 at home to Atalanta on the twentieth, 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, survivors of Belgrade, 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 country was building, literally and spiritually, toward the World Cup it would host in 1990. Milan gleamed on, sure of its money and its taste; and into that 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.

Small Hours, Far Side of the World

1988 can be read straight off the calendar. 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 provincial. In June, Munich, and a volley that tape has replayed for four decades without wearing it thin. In autumn, a European tie preserved by the weather, a director's useful lie and a goalkeeper's hands. In December, gold, silver and bronze in the same shirt: the impresario, the heretic, and a drinking city whose football had become undrinkable for everyone else.

For those of us who follow the Diavolo from the far side of the world, where Belgrade came across a television screen in the small hours and the Como coronation reached us with the dawn, 1988 is the year devotion stopped requiring memory and required only attention: one no longer had to explain to one's children what Milan had been, because there it was, every week, being it. Twelve months earlier van Basten had been a convalescent whom half the city suspected of being an expensive mistake. He ended the year first in the world, Gullit and Rijkaard behind him. The ankle went into surgery in one year and came out, in this one, wearing gold.