A Header in Munich, a Wheel Near Asti

Bribesville, and the One Club No Magistrate Could Indict

The word arrived as a joke and hardened into an indictment: Tangentopoli — Bribesville — fixed to the capital of Italian money like a stain on a good suit. All through 1993 the Mani Pulite investigations were taking down the old political order the way men take down scaffolding, patiently and from the top, one bolt at a time; and the city that had taught Italy how to make money was learning, courtroom by courtroom, how the money had actually been made. Then, on 27 July, the summer turned from farce to horror. A car bomb outside the Padiglione d'Arte Contemporanea in Via Palestro killed five people, one night's work in a wave of Mafia bombings that reminded Italians their state itself was under siege. The shutters went up again the next morning, the trams ran, the evening crowds came out as evening crowds do — and underneath all of it the city was holding its breath.

Against that stood a football team of such serene, mechanical beauty that it might have been posted to Milan from some better-governed country. Silvio Berlusconi's Milan, shaped first by Sacchi's revolution and governed now by Fabio Capello, who preferred his beauty frugal, was the one Milanese institution no magistrate could indict and the one export the nation was not ashamed of. The president was months from founding Forza Italia and beginning the march that would carry him to the prime minister's office in 1994, and he understood better than anybody alive that his football club was the most persuasive manifesto he owned. What follows is that machine at its zenith — and three falls, one in March, one in May, one on an August road in the Asti country, which between them proved that even machines are made of men.

Fifty-Eight, and the Afternoon It Ended

Take the numbers first, because Capello did. Milan finished the 1992-93 championship with eighteen wins, fourteen draws and two defeats — fifty points from thirty-four matches in the old currency of two points a win — sixty-five goals scored, a tally only Lazio matched, thirty-two conceded, and four points of daylight between themselves and Internazionale, their neighbours and pursuers. It was the club's thirteenth scudetto and the second in succession under Capello, and Franco Baresi wore the captain's band with the gravity of a man carrying the city's one uncontested honour through a season of dishonours. Up front the goals were shared with an almost diplomatic evenness: Marco van Basten and Jean-Pierre Papin, thirteen apiece in the league and joint leading scorers across all competitions, with Gianluigi Lentini — hold that name, reader; we shall return to it in grief — contributing seven in his first full season, while around them moved Gullit and Rijkaard, Maldini and Massaro, and the conjuror Savićević.

Then the spring wrote the lesson out in full. On 21 March 1993, at San Siro of all places, Parma won 1-0, and with that single goal a monument came down: fifty-eight consecutive Serie A matches without defeat, a national record that had been running since 26 May 1991, through the whole unbeaten 1991-92 campaign that earned the side its standing nickname, Gli Invincibili. Fifty-eight matches — nearly two years in which all of Italy had sharpened its knives at Milan's table and gone home hungry. The gods of football are Greek in their habits: they permit hubris for exactly as long as it amuses them, and not an afternoon longer. The Invincibles were mortal after all, and though the season still ended in a scudetto, a small cold draught had entered the room and would not be shut out again.

Ten Out of Ten, and the Forty-Third Minute

The road to Munich had been laid like a Roman consular way, straight and pitiless. Olimpija Ljubljana were dispatched 7-0 on aggregate, Slovan Bratislava 5-0, and then, in the group stage of the competition newly rebranded as the UEFA Champions League, Milan won all six matches of Group B — IFK Göteborg beaten 4-0 and 1-0, PSV Eindhoven 2-1 and 2-0, Porto 1-0 and 1-0 — six wins from six, a file without a single blemish, the kind of paperwork a prosecutor dreams of. Ten European matches played, ten won: few sides have ever travelled to a European final with cleaner papers.

And then, on 26 May, before 64,444 souls at the Olympiastadion and the Swiss whistle of Kurt Röthlisberger, the file was overruled. Basile Boli rose to meet a ball in the forty-third minute, on the very cusp of the interval, and headed the only goal of the first final ever staged under the Champions League name. Somewhere in the white shirts beside him, ninety minutes without relief, ran a young Croat called Alen Bokšić: the first man of his country ever to win the European Cup won it against Milan, twelve months before Zvonimir Boban became the second and won it for them. Marseille became the first French club to lift the great trophy, a triumph soon shadowed by the match-fixing scandal that engulfed their domestic affairs, though the European title itself was left standing. Milan were left with the oldest lesson in the game — that a perfect season and an imperfect hour cannot be exchanged at any bureau.

But the true weight of Munich was never the scoreline. In the 86th minute Marco van Basten limped to the touchline and was replaced, and though nobody in the stadium could have sworn to it that night, the most patrician of strikers had made his final bow. The ankle — operated, betrayed, operated again — would never permit him another competitive match after 1993, and the formal retirement of 1995 was merely the death certificate for a career that died in Bavaria. There is no irony crueller and none more classical: the club's joint leading scorer that season walked off four minutes from the end of a final and simply never came back. Munich took the cup from Milan for a year. It took van Basten from football altogether.

The Diavolo at the Bottom of the World

Here this chronicle, written from Adelaide, permits itself a swelling of the chest. In the winter of 1993 — our winter, the true southern winter of mid-year — the champions of Italy came to Australia, Franco Baresi at the head of the party like a consul visiting the far provinces. It was not, the pedant will note, the club's first crossing: a haunted Milan had toured these shores in 1980, beaten by the Socceroos in Sydney in the very weeks when the Totonero scandal was dragging the club toward Serie B. But that had been a funeral procession; this was a state visit, the first time Australia received the rossoneri as reigning champions of Italy. For the Italians of Australia, who had carried San Siro across the world folded up in their suitcases with the photographs and the recipes, this was not a friendly tour; it was a visitation. The club that had existed for us as newsprint and rumour put on its boots and walked out onto Australian grass.

The tourists played the national team twice in two days and beat them twice, in the unhurried manner of a landlord inspecting his properties. In Sydney, at the Football Stadium on 16 June, it finished 1-0, and the single goal was not even scored by an Italian: the unfortunate Tony Vidmar turned it into his own net. The reports agreed that Mark Bosnich, in the Australian goal, was the reason the score stayed decent — an evening of denial that could not, in the end, prevent defeat. In Melbourne the following night, at Princes Park, it finished 2-0, Marco Simone and Gianluigi Lentini with the goals. Two matches, two wins, no goals conceded: Capello's parsimony travelled well.

Melbourne, it must be admitted, still nurses its grievance. The referee, John Fraser, trimmed roughly nine minutes from the first half at Princes Park, and the muttering — never proven, endlessly repeated — was that the half had been shortened so the millionaires could catch a late flight home. Australian football has filed the evening under 'cultural cringe', an infamous little parable of how the world game treated the world's far end. On the shape of the thing there is no dispute: two internationals on successive nights in June 1993, Sydney first and Melbourne the next, whatever dates the Australian retelling has worn into the story in the decades since.

And yet — truncated, disputed, half-remembered — the tour mattered, and matters still. Every club writes its history in trophies, but a supporters' club writes its history in proximities, and for one southern winter the distance between Australia and San Siro shrank to the width of a touchline. Decades on, when the Milan Club of Adelaide gathers in the small hours to watch the modern side, somebody will eventually mention 1993, the year the rossoneri actually came — and the room will nod, because a love affair conducted across ten time zones lives on exactly this kind of memory.

The Boy with the Yellow Porsche

Gianluigi Lentini still stood at the top of the world's transfer list — the record fee of the summer before, the one that split Turin in two and told you everything about football's new economy and the man who was building it. He had repaid the first instalment honestly — those seven league goals, a wing of genuine speed and invention — and on the winter tour he had scored in Melbourne, a world-record footballer performing at the bottom of the world. He was young, adored and rich, and he drove a canary-yellow Porsche 911, which is the detail the fable requires.

He was driving home from Genoa toward Turin in the small hours of 3 August, at something close to 190 or 200 kilometres an hour, when a mismatched replacement wheel failed him. The Porsche left the A21 motorway, flipped and caught fire. He was dragged clear seconds before it burned; his skull was fractured, an eye socket damaged; and for two days he lay in an induced coma while a nation that had spent its summer arguing over corruption and mourning its bomb dead found, for once, something simple to pray about.

He lived. He even returned, sporadically, before the season was out, and there would be another scudetto in 1994. But the effects on his memory and his vision did not leave, and the player who came back was a copy struck from a worn tape: the outline exact, the colours dimmed. Icarus at least fell into the sea; Lentini fell onto the Asti asphalt and had to go on living as the exhibit of what he had been. The moralists of football — I confess myself their dean — have never found a cleaner parable of the era: the most expensive man in the game, undone not by any defender but by velocity itself, some seven weeks after the champagne of Melbourne. Speed had made him priceless. Speed nearly made him posthumous.

Three Silences, a Donkey, and a Cup Won in Washington

The summer, meanwhile, dismantled the most celebrated foreign colony in the club's history. Frank Rijkaard went home to Ajax; Ruud Gullit was loaned to Sampdoria; van Basten's ankle had already withdrawn him from every argument; and so 1993-94 would become the first Milan season with no contribution at all from the famous Dutch trio — an epoch closing not with a farewell match but with three separate silences. Aldo Serena hung up his boots in the same summer, a fourth silence with no Dutch accent to it. In their place came younger and hungrier men: Christian Panucci from Genoa, Florin Raducioiu from Brescia, the goalkeeper Mario Ielpo from Cagliari, Brian Laudrup on loan from Fiorentina; and Zvonimir Boban, at last, established himself at the centre of things.

Those departures were somebody else's arrival. While the trio held their places the limit on foreigners had kept Dejan Savićević off Capello's team-sheets — van Basten, Papin and Rijkaard in front of him — and the Montenegrin had not borne it in silence. Serbian accounts have him walking off the training pitch on the spot the day he learned he was only a substitute for a Champions League journey to Brussels, to Anderlecht; and the official biography preserves the rawest artifact of the war, a message he pressed on Boban out on the grass, in Serbo-Croatian, to be carried to the manager: 'Tell him he's a donkey, that he doesn't understand anything... that he can't tell me what to do.' Berlusconi, as was his habit, intervened on the player's behalf. Capello, who had inherited an orchestra, went on quietly rebuilding it as an engine — and kept, for later use, the genius who had called him a donkey.

The new age was baptised, of all places, in the capital of the United States. On 21 August 1993, at RFK Memorial Stadium in Washington — the first time the Supercoppa Italiana had ever been staged outside Italy — Milan beat Torino, holders of the Coppa Italia, 1-0 before 25,268 spectators, Marco Simone scoring in the fourth minute under the whistle of Helder Diaz. It was the club's third Supercoppa, and there was something perfectly Berlusconian in the staging: Italian silverware contested an ocean from Italy, the product exported before the domestic market had opened for the autumn. One nil, an early goal, the shutters down — the trophy was new ground, but the method was pure Capello.

One Goal at a Time, Into the Dark

The championship resumed and the remade Milan announced its character at once, which was its manager's character: parsimony raised to a fine art. Boban won the opener at Lecce on 29 August, 1-0; Massaro beat Genoa by the same score on 5 September; Atalanta and Roma were each put away 2-0; Cremonese were beaten 2-0 in their own house; Lazio were held to a bloodless 0-0. On 7 November came the derby, Inter's home fixture in the great shared theatre, and Milan won it 2-1; Napoli were beaten 2-1, Parma held 0-0, Torino edged 1-0, and Cagliari beaten 2-1 on 19 December to close the calendar year. In all that autumn the league machine slipped exactly once — 3-2 at Sampdoria on 31 October, an afternoon of quite uncharacteristic generosity, five goals spent in ninety minutes when the whole design of the season was to spend almost none.

In Europe, with Aarau and Copenhagen already dispatched in the preliminary rounds, the Champions League group was begun with the caution of a man testing lake ice: a goalless draw away to Anderlecht on 24 November, then Porto swept aside 3-0 at San Siro on 1 December. What that winter machine was building toward is the next chapter's business to declare, and it will declare it in full; in December 1993 it existed only as a hum in the gearbox, audible to anyone who put an ear close.

March had taken the record, May the cup and the finest centre-forward of the age, August very nearly the world's costliest footballer off the Asti asphalt. Set against that: a thirteenth scudetto, a Supercoppa raised in Washington, a second crossing to Australia — this time as champions, and remembered — and the quiet forging of the side that would conquer Athens. Outside the ground the city was still on trial, five people had died in Via Palestro a short walk from where the fashionable strolled, and the president was preparing to exchange the boardroom for the ballot box. Inside it, eleven men went on doing the one thing nobody in Italy could accuse them of doing dishonestly. By the last week of December the yellow Porsche had burned, van Basten's boots were in a cupboard, the Dutchmen were gone — and the machine that had lost a record in March and a final in May went into 1994 still humming.