Thirty-Four Matches, Not One Defeat

The Morning They Took Mario Chiesa

On the seventeenth of February the magistrates of Milan arrested a Socialist functionary named Mario Chiesa, and the thread they pulled that morning did not stop unravelling until the whole gaudy tapestry of post-war Italian politics lay in pieces on the courtroom floor. Mani Pulite, they called the investigation: clean hands. Tangentopoli, they called the system it exposed: bribe city. And the bribe city, to our embarrassment and our strange civic pride, was ours — the scandal was Milanese before it was Italian, born within tram-distance of the Duomo. A club may mirror its city or console it. The year 1992 required Milan to do both at once, and in the same twelve months.

What followed was a calendar of griefs. On the twenty-third of May the Mafia murdered Giovanni Falcone; on the nineteenth of July it murdered Paolo Borsellino; and in September a currency crisis drove the lira out of Europe's exchange-rate mechanism, so that even the money in a man's pocket seemed to have lost its footing on the cobbles. The old parties dissolved like sugar in grappa. And through all of it there glittered, improbably and almost indecently serene, one Milanese institution that simply kept winning: the football club owned by Silvio Berlusconi and bankrolled by his Fininvest media empire, the dominant force in the Italian game and, as the autumn would confirm, impatient to dominate Europe again. Two years later Berlusconi would walk into the ruins of that political order and make himself prime minister. In 1992 he was still merely the impresario of the most beautiful squadra on earth, a man whose fortune was made of television light, and the city, needing urgently to believe in something, believed in it.

A Masterpiece in a Locked Room

Consider the numbers first, because here the numbers do the work that ordinarily falls to adjectives. Thirty-four matches; twenty-two won; twelve drawn; none — read it twice, none — lost. Fifty-six points, seventy-four goals scored, twenty-one conceded, a difference of fifty-three. No side in the history of Serie A had ever taken the title without a single defeat; Perugia had gone unbeaten in 1978-79 and still finished second, which is its own kind of tragedy. Now one had, and it wore red and black, and half of that immaculate campaign was played out across the first months of the 1992 calendar year, Sunday after winter Sunday, while the Republic outside the stadium gates was being dismantled by subpoena.

The delicious irony is that this perfection belonged not to the prophet but to his successor: it was won under Fabio Capello, in his first season in charge, the prophet gone to the national team. Where Sacchi had preached, Capello governed. The revolution was over and the administration had begun, and the administration, it transpired, was flawless: Franco Baresi carried the armband the way a Roman carries a standard, Berlusconi presided from on high, and the machine Sacchi had built and Capello now tuned ran through an entire league season without once tasting defeat. They were named, with the plainness that great facts permit, Gli Invincibili.

And yet — the yet is unavoidable — all this perfection played to a domestic audience only, because UEFA had barred Milan from European competition that season, the lingering price of a March night in Marseille in 1991 when the floodlights failed and Milan declined to resume, walking off into a darkness that turned out to be administrative as well as electrical. The unbeaten champions had no continental stage on which to prove the point. The masterpiece hung in a locked room, and only Italy held a key.

Twenty-Five Goals, and the One Wound

At the head of the avalanche came Marco van Basten, the Swan of Utrecht, who in that 1991-92 season scored twenty-five goals in the league and twenty-nine in all competitions and took his second crown as capocannoniere, the marksman's laurel of Serie A. Around him the cast reads now like a fresco: Baresi at the back with the young Paolo Maldini beside him, Ruud Gullit and Frank Rijkaard bringing their northern weather down into Lombardy, Daniele Massaro running his honest kilometres, and Carlo Ancelotti, in what would prove his final season as a player, distributing the ball with the patience of a man who already understood the game the way managers do.

Because a chronicle without a scar is a fable, record also the one wound of that otherwise seamless spring. In the semi-final of the Coppa Italia, Juventus held Milan to nought-nought at San Siro and then beat them one-nil at the Stadio delle Alpi, Salvatore Schillaci the scorer, and so the only defeat of the entire campaign belonged to the cup and not to the league, which kept its virginity intact. One is almost grateful to Juventus for it. A season should carry one scar, if only to prove the flesh is human — and this flesh, as December would demonstrate in an operating theatre in Switzerland, was human right down to the bone.

The Summer the Record Broke Twice

Then came the summer, and with it a transfer market conducted less like commerce than like opera, in the tailored manner of the new decade. In the space of a single close season Milan broke the world transfer record twice. First arrived Jean-Pierre Papin from Olympique de Marseille — of all the clubs on earth, Marseille, the very house of the darkened floodlights, which now sold Milan its centre-forward for a fee reported at around ten million pounds. Papin came bearing the 1991 Ballon d'Or, which meant that Milan now fielded, in Gullit, Van Basten and Papin, the winners of four of the previous five golden balls: a form of collecting previously reserved for museums.

And then, before the market had drawn breath — Juventus having seized the record in between with Gianluca Vialli — it fell again to the same buyer: Gianluigi Lentini from Torino, for eighteen and a half billion lire, call it thirteen million pounds, the currency conversions of that era being a minor genre of fiction in themselves; the most expensive footballer the game had ever known. From Red Star Belgrade came Dejan Savićević, to add Balkan mischief to the ensemble. Italy would soon be calling him Il Genio, and the credit for that name is disputed in the pleasantest way: his official biography names Germano Bovolenta of the Gazzetta dello Sport as the inventor, a reporter who watched him at play in training and reached for the only word left; Serbian retellings prefer to hand the line to the president, who is said to have instructed Capello without leaving room for discussion — “Savićević mora da igra. On je naš Genije.” Savićević must play. He is our Genius. He was a natural left-hander whose parents and teachers had made him write with his right hand — “Under the communist state, you know how it was,” he explained — which is one account, as good as any, of what that left foot found to do instead.

In the other direction went two servants of the old order: Ancelotti retired, his knees having spent themselves in the service of his intelligence, and Diego Fuser departed for Lazio. Berlusconi had turned the mercato into La Scala, and the rest of football could only stand in the foyer and listen.

The Boy Who Split Turin

Every record fee buys a footballer and sells a story, and the story of Lentini is the most instructive of the year. He was twenty-three, a winger, a Torino product and a favourite son of that proud and wounded club, one of the brightest talents Italy possessed. His sale was not born of football logic but of financial desperation — Torino under its president Gian Mauro Borsano, the club drained by a UEFA Cup final lost to Ajax on away goals and its president himself caught in the undertow of Tangentopoli, needed money the way a drowning man needs air — and the affair split a city. Juventus came first and came close, and against that the granata support rose in revolt, because there are things a Torino man will not do and handing his favourite son across town to the hated neighbour is chief among them; the protests at the club's offices had to be dispersed with tear gas. Then Milan outbid Juventus, the signature went down on the thirtieth of June, and the supporters who had rioted to keep him from one buyer mourned him all the same when he left for another — not a transfer but a defection ordained by bankers.

At Milan, under Capello, he set about justifying the impossible number attached to his boots, and the first dividend came quickly: a Supercoppa already in his first August — the human centre of a summer of madness in which his club had twice reset the price of a man. There is a coda to this, and it is terrible, and the reader will meet it in the following year's chapter, where by every right of the calendar it belongs. But in 1992 none of that had happened. In 1992 he was the golden, contested boy at the exact centre of the football world, the costliest player alive, and the A21 was only a motorway.

The Thirtieth of August

The season's first silverware arrived before the summer had properly ended. On the thirtieth of August, at San Siro, before 30,102 spectators — a modest congregation by the cathedral's standards, but August is August and a supercup is not a scudetto — the champions of Italy met Parma, holders of the Coppa Italia, for the Supercoppa Italiana. Van Basten scored on fourteen minutes, with that economy of movement that made his goals look like corrections of an error in the universe; Alessandro Melli answered for Parma on the stroke of the interval; and on seventy minutes Daniele Massaro, the artisan among the aristocrats, settled the matter. Two to one, and the first trophy of the new order was carried off almost casually, the way a great house adds a small painting to a full wall.

It would be wrong to inflate an August supercup into an epic, and Brera's trade teaches suspicion of trophies won before the leaves turn. But as an hors d'oeuvre it announced the menu: the champions had returned hungrier, and richer, than they had left.

Five-Four, Seven-Three, Five-One

Then autumn came, and with it scoring of a kind one associates less with the catenaccio tradition than with harvest festivals. On the thirteenth of September Milan won five-four away at Pescara, nine goals shared out on the Adriatic like loaves. On the fourth of October they won seven-three away at Fiorentina — seven, in Florence, against Florentines, ten goals in an afternoon. On the eighteenth they beat Lazio five-three at San Siro; on the eighth of November they went to Naples and won five-one; and on the twenty-second they drew the derby with Internazionale one-one, the cousins for once keeping the family argument civil. Milan sat at the top of the table, where they would remain long enough to turn the position into an address — though the scudetto that crowned that season belongs, strictly and chronologically, to 1993, and this chronicle will not steal from its neighbour's plate.

Europe, too, reopened its doors. Restored to the European Cup after the ban, Milan won every autumn tie without conceding so much as a goal: four-nil against Olimpija Ljubljana at San Siro on the sixteenth of September and three-nil in Ljubljana a fortnight later; one-nil away to Slovan Bratislava on the twenty-first of October and four-nil at home on the fourth of November. The road thus opened would lead in time to a final against Marseille — but that is 1993's story to tell, and 1993 will tell it with a bitter mouth.

And beneath it all ran the streak. The unbeaten league run, begun in the closing days of the 1990-91 season and carried whole through the year of the Invincibili, rolled on through every Sunday of 1992 without exception — a run whose end, at Faustino Asprilla's feet, belongs to a later spring, and to the chapter that owns it. Whole seasons of honourable clubs contain less football than that one parenthesis.

The Third Crown, and the Surgeon in Switzerland

The year's last important act was performed in December. On the twenty-second, Marco van Basten was awarded the Ballon d'Or — his third, after 1988 and 1989, which made him only the third man in the history of the award to win it three times, after Cruyff and after Platini, a Dutchman joining a Dutchman and a Frenchman on the smallest of podiums. The same year named him FIFA World Player of the Year, so that by Christmas he held every crown his trade could mint.

And here the telling must lower its voice, because the December that crowned him also opened him. In Switzerland the surgeon René Marti went into the ankle and took out ten pieces of bone, describing growths that were constantly rubbing together — the phrase is the surgeon's, and it is not a phrase one wishes to see attached to the finest centre-forward on earth. The trouble was older than the fame: the Dutch record has it that at fourteen he was already being advised by doctors to give the game up altogether. Two further operations would follow in the Milan years, one to clear away fragments of cartilage, one to set metal supports inside the joint. The 1992-93 season then in progress would prove the last he ever played. The goals survive on tape. The ankle did not survive the goals.

In the twelve months when the Republic's certainties fell one after another — the parties to the magistrates, the bravest of the magistrates to the Mafia, the lira to the markets — the most reliable institution in Italy was a football team. That is either an indictment of the state or a compliment to the game, and it is probably both. Capello's Milan passed through 1992 without losing a league match, bought the two most expensive footballers on earth, took a Supercoppa, swept its European autumn, and ended the year with its centre-forward holding the game's highest honour and its flag planted at the top of the table. On the clear mornings of that winter a man could stand in the cathedral square and see the Alps to the north, holding their snow above the whole indicted plain — above the courtrooms and the shredded files, above San Siro and its unbeaten tenants — keeping neither bribes nor trophies, indifferent to both. Milan the city went into 1993 under investigation. Milan the club went in unbeaten.