Prove It, Genius

A Party Named After a Chant

On the tenth of May 1994 Silvio Berlusconi was sworn in as Prime Minister of the Italian Republic. Eight days later the football club he had taken over half-sunk in 1986 walked out in Athens and played the most complete final the European Cup's gaudy new incarnation has ever seen. In January he had launched a political party and named it, with a salesman's genius for the obvious, Forza Italia: the terrace chant lifted off the curva and printed on a ballot paper. No novelist would dare such plotting; history, which has no editor, simply printed it.

Pause on the strangeness; those who lived through it too easily forgot to be astonished. A man owned a football club; the club conquered Europe; the man conquered Italy — in the same month of the same spring. Whatever one made of the politics, and Milan is a city that argues about politics with total conviction and no expectation of agreement, the convergence had no precedent. He had refitted the club with the brisk confidence of a man rearranging one of his own television studios; now the studio light had followed him into government. The rossoneri of 1994 were not merely a team. They were the sporting wing of an empire at noon, and empires at noon cast the shortest, sharpest shadows.

The Scudetto of Silence

Consider first what Fabio Capello had lost before he won anything. The summer had stripped him of the Dutch trio and restocked the squad with younger and cheaper men — those silences and that shopping list were counted out one by one in the previous chapter, and need no second telling here. What this season added was the last piece and the hardest: Marcel Desailly, prised from Marseille in mid-season and built like something quarried rather than born. Out of this reshuffled hand Capello dealt a third consecutive scudetto — fifty points from thirty-four games, nineteen won, twelve drawn, three lost, three points clear of Juventus — and he dealt it face down, without flourish, daring the aesthetes to complain.

Complain they did, for this was a title of almost liturgical austerity: thirty-six goals scored in an entire league season, fewer than many mid-table sides, and a mere fifteen conceded, a figure that reads less like a defensive record than a vow of silence. Sebastiano Rossi, the great gaunt doorman of the rossonero cathedral, went 929 consecutive minutes without picking the ball out of his net, then a Serie A record; in front of him Franco Baresi and Paolo Maldini conducted the back line like men who considered a goal conceded a lapse of manners. They called this side gli Invincibili still — a name earned by the unbeaten march of 1991-92 and defended now the hard way, not with spectacle but with subtraction, Sacchi's symphony rescored by Capello for chamber quartet. Daniele Massaro led the club's league scoring with eleven goals, sixteen in all competitions: a modest tally for an immodest season.

The spring told the story in miniature. On the sixth of March Milan went to Turin and beat Juventus 1-0, which is the connoisseur's scoreline; a fortnight later, on the twentieth, they took the derby from Inter 2-1. The title was made mathematically safe at matchday 32, a 2-2 draw at home to Udinese on the seventeenth of April, and the campaign closed on the first of May with a 0-1 home defeat to little Reggiana — the Invincibles losing precisely when nothing was left to defend, which is either irony or economy, depending on your seat. By the common count it was the fourteenth league title, though the club's own count has at times numbered it differently. The records disagree. The trophy did not.

The Long Road Through Small Doors

Europe began, as Europe often does, through doors so small a champion must stoop to enter them. Aarau of Switzerland were dispatched 1-0 on aggregate, a tie remembered by nobody, least of all the Swiss; then Copenhagen were taken apart 7-0 across two legs, six of the goals administered in Copenhagen itself. The group that followed — Porto, Werder Bremen, Anderlecht — was negotiated in the Capello manner: two wins and four draws, a 3-0 against Porto and a 2-1 against Werder Bremen the ornaments, and two goals conceded in six matches the true signature. Other teams survive a group stage; this Milan policed one.

The semi-final, on the twenty-seventh of April at San Siro, brought Monaco and their thoughtful young manager, one Arsène Wenger, a professor visiting a foundry. Milan won 3-0 and the scorers map the season: Desailly after fourteen minutes, the new muscle; Demetrio Albertini three minutes into the second half, the metronome of the Milanello school; Daniele Massaro midway through the second half, the old man with the young man's timing.

The Photograph Taken Too Early

Before a ball was kicked in Athens, Johan Cruyff posed for the photographers holding the trophy. He had already said in public what much of Europe believed in private — that Milan could not be compared to his Barcelona — and the cameras obliged him with the flattering light they keep for the certain. The Belgrade papers still reprint it: the Dream Team of Romário and Stoichkov, of Koeman and Guardiola, champions of Spain, cradling a cup that was, for ninety minutes more, nobody's.

Rarely has a team arrived at a European final so thoroughly bandaged. Baresi, the captain, was suspended; so was Alessandro Costacurta, his heir in the art of arriving first; Van Basten remained locked in his season-long convalescence and Gianluigi Lentini was likewise unavailable. And then the era's peculiar bureaucracy took its cut: UEFA's three-foreigners rule obliged Capello to choose his imports as a poor man chooses at the market, and Jean-Pierre Papin and Florin Raducioiu spent the evening in their tailoring while Savićević, Boban and Desailly got the shirts. The eleven read: Rossi; Tassotti, Filippo Galli, Maldini, Panucci; Boban, Albertini, Desailly; Donadoni, Savićević, Massaro — a defence improvised from deputies, Galli and Panucci filling the boots of legends against, on paper, the most feared attack in Europe.

One more thing was said before kick-off, off camera. Berlusconi went to Dejan Savićević — the Montenegrin he had bought in 1992 and then defended almost single-handedly, when the coaching staff had wearied of him and the player had come close to leaving — and put it as a proprietor puts things: "Dejane, već dve godine ti pomažem i branim te, ako si genije — dokaži to." Dejan, for two years I have been helping you and defending you; if you are a genius, prove it.

The eighteenth of May, the Olympic Stadium of Athens, some seventy thousand souls, the English referee Philip Don. What followed belongs less to sport than to demolition. Savićević went raiding down the right and Massaro finished the work after twenty-two minutes; Massaro struck again on the stroke of half-time at the end of a Donadoni surge, and the Dream Team walked to their dressing room already dreaming of something else. In the forty-seventh minute came the goal the century keeps on tape: Savićević robbing a hesitant Nadal by the touchline, high up the pitch, and, from the angle where prudent men square the ball, lifting it instead over Zubizarreta in a parabola of pure insolence. Desailly drove in the fourth on fifty-eight minutes. Milan 4-0 Barcelona: a margin no Champions League final would surpass for three decades, sealed with a clean sheet kept by a patched, borrowed, improvised back line.

"Kada je došao taj treći gol," Savićević said long afterwards, "kroz glavu mi je prošlo da je utakmica odlučena jer sam bio siguran da nas Barselona više ne može stići" — when the third went in, it flashed through my head that the match was decided, because I was sure Barcelona could no longer catch us. He was gentler than the scoreline: "They were rightfully favorites, but they made great chaos." His own press was not gentle at all. It gave the evening a name it has never lost, najlepši ples genija — the most beautiful dance of the Genius — and dated his immortality to that forty-seventh minute.

Zvonimir Boban played the full ninety, no late cameo, and became by doing so the second Croatian to lift the European Cup — twelve months after Alen Bokšić had lifted it against Milan. In Croatia the two are never told apart, an echo running from one final to the next.

Athens said two things at once. It crowned Capello, caricatured all winter as beauty's undertaker, who produced when it mattered most a performance of savage beauty; and it humbled the theory, dear to Cruyff and his admirers, that virtue in football has only one accent. That night it spoke Lombard — through gritted teeth, and then, four times, with a roar.

San Massaro, la Provvidenza

Every great kitchen has its stockpot — the vessel that is never the centrepiece and without which nothing tastes of anything — and for a decade Daniele Massaro was the stockpot of Milanello. He had waited through the years of Van Basten, of Papin, of Gullit and Savićević, a forward crowded out by geniuses, sent on when matches were broken; more often a substitute than a starter. In 1993-94, at thirty-two going on thirty-three, Massaro became indispensable: the club's leading league scorer with eleven, the scorer against Wenger's Monaco in the semi-final, and then, in Athens, twice inside the first half against Barcelona — the second at the end of that Donadoni run — the man who broke the Dream Team with a journeyman's boots.

Italy canonises with a smile: la Provvidenza, they called him, Providence itself, and San Massaro — Saint Massaro, patron of the patient. Five days after the final he turned thirty-three; that summer Arrigo Sacchi, his old master, packed him in the national squad's luggage for the World Cup in America, where Italy went all the way to the final. The moral is old: the geniuses put the crowd on its feet, but it was the honest artisan, aged and unglamorous, who twice put the ball in the net on the night the whole continent watched. Providence, like all good things from these parts, arrived without hurry and exactly on time.

The Summer the Azzurri Borrowed the Devil's Spine

The season's afterglow crossed the Atlantic. At the World Cup in the United States, Sacchi built his Italy on rossonero vertebrae: Maldini, Costacurta, Albertini, Donadoni, Massaro, and above all Baresi, whose return from knee surgery in the middle of the tournament passed instantly into legend, months of convalescence compressed into twenty-five days of American heat. Italy reached the final and lost it to Brazil on penalties, Roberto Baggio's shot climbing over the bar and into the permanent museum of Italian sorrow. The sting was intimate: the azzurri who fell in Pasadena were, to a remarkable degree, the same men who had stood unbeaten in Athens eight weeks before. The gods of football have long memories; they had paid Milan in May and came collecting in July.

Penalties in August, Ashes in December

The domestic cup had been surrendered early — a Round of 16 exit in the Coppa Italia — but August offered a consolation with a trophy attached. On the twenty-eighth, at San Siro, the champions of Italy met Sampdoria, holders of the cup, drew 1-1 after extra time, and took the Supercoppa Italiana 4-3 on penalties: an evening of procedure rather than poetry, which suited the house style.

Autumn brought its own small injustice. The Ballon d'Or of 1994 went to Hristo Stoichkov, one of the men flattened in Athens, and not to the man who had done the flattening. The wound Savićević names, though, is older: "I carry the regret that I did not win it in 1991, when I was a Red Star player." Athens, he insists, is not what cost him 1994; an injury in the autumn, while the votes were being cast, was. He had arrived in 1992 and nearly gone; he had fallen out with the management in the very season he delivered Europe. Genius, at Milanello as everywhere, was never a quiet tenant.

December delivered the year's last lesson in humility. In Tokyo, on the first of the month, at the National Stadium before 47,886, the champions of Europe met Vélez Sarsfield, champions of South America, and lost 0-2 — Trotta from the penalty spot on fifty minutes, Asad on fifty-seven. The world title, the one bauble the season still owed, sailed back to Buenos Aires. Even an empire at noon must dine occasionally on ashes, and perhaps it was necessary: a team that had forgotten how defeat tasted was reminded, politely and in a foreign language, twelve time zones from home.

Yet the year is not measured in Tokyo. Three scudetti in a row, the third of them won on fifteen goals conceded; a European crown taken 4-0 from the most celebrated attacking side of the age by a team missing its captain, its stopper and its greatest striker; an owner running the country while his full-backs ran the flanks. Wherever the rossonero faithful kept their vigils — in the emigrant kitchens of distant continents, where the Diavolo's nights arrive at impossible hours — they understood that they were watching a summit, and summits are visible chiefly from below.

Somewhere in an archive is that photograph from before kick-off: Cruyff, smiling, the cup in his hands. Ninety minutes later it belonged to a Montenegrin who had been told to prove he was a genius, to a Croatian who had played every minute of it, and to a thirty-two-year-old who had spent a decade being sent on when matches were already broken. Nobody asked any of them for proof again.