The Empire at Noon

High Noon Above the Madonnina

There are years that arrive like guests and years that arrive like landlords, and 1994 came to Milan holding the deeds. The fog that rolls off the Lombard plain in January is a great equaliser — it swallows the spires of the Duomo and the tower blocks of the periphery with the same grey indifference — but that winter it seemed to part, theatrically, for one man. In January Silvio Berlusconi, the president who had taken over a listing football club in 1986 and refitted it with the brisk confidence of a man rearranging one of his television studios, launched a political party named, with a salesman's genius for the obvious, Forza Italia: the terrace chant repurposed as a ballot line. By the tenth of May he had been sworn in as Prime Minister of the Republic. Eight days after that, his football team walked out in Athens and played the most complete final the European Cup's gaudy new incarnation has ever seen. No novelist would dare such plotting; history, which has no editor, simply printed it.

It is worth pausing on the strangeness, because those of us 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 the way it argues about risotto, with total conviction and no expectation of agreement, the convergence had no precedent. The rossoneri of 1994 were not merely a team. They were the sporting wing of an empire at its 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. Ruud Gullit had gone to Sampdoria and Frank Rijkaard home to Ajax; Aldo Serena had hung up his boots; and Marco van Basten, the most beautiful striker of his generation, spent the entire season in the purgatory of the treatment room, a Stradivarius locked in its case. In their place came sterner music: Marcel Desailly, prised from Marseille in mid-season and built like something quarried rather than born; the young Christian Panucci; Florin Raducioiu; Brian Laudrup from Fiorentina. 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, and the nickname was earned the hard way — not with spectacle but with subtraction, Sacchi's symphony rescored by Capello for chamber quartet. Daniele Massaro, of whom much more presently, led the club's league scoring with eleven goals, sixteen in all competitions: modest arithmetic 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 beneath the San Siro's ribbons of smoke and abuse. The record has it that the title was made mathematically safe at matchday 32, a 2-2 draw at home to Udinese on the seventeenth of April, and that 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 even the club's own ledger has at times numbered it differently; accountancy, like everything else, grows dizzy at altitude.

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 on a night when the hosts must have longed for their ferries. 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 cross a group stage; this Milan audited it.

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 form a little map of the season's soul: 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 final was booked, and the trouble began.

Athens: The Masterpiece of the Maimed

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 were left watching in their suits 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.

For across the halfway line at the Olympic Stadium of Athens, on the eighteenth of May before some seventy thousand souls and the English referee Philip Don, stood Johan Cruyff's Barcelona — the Dream Team of Romário and Stoichkov, of Koeman and Guardiola, champions of Spain and princes-presumptive of Europe. What followed belongs less to sport than to demolition. Massaro struck after twenty-two minutes, and again on the stroke of half-time at the end of a Donadoni surge, and the Dream Team went to their dressing room already dreaming of something else. Two minutes into the second half came the goal the century keeps in its wallet: Savićević, il Genio, robbing Nadal 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.

The verdict of Athens was double. It crowned Capello, who had been caricatured all winter as beauty's undertaker and now 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 and asked to tidy the pieces; more often a substitute than a starter, more often thanked than celebrated. Patience of that grade is a moral quality before it is a professional one, and football, which wastes so much virtue, occasionally remembers to pay its debts. 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, which canonises with a smile, gave him his titles: 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. There is a moral here that Brera's Lombardy would have relished over a plate of risotto giallo: 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 — the prophet of Milanello now in the national blazer — 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. For Milanists the sting was doubled and strangely 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 keep strict books; they had paid Milan in May and collected in July.

Autumn Accounts, and the Verdict

The domestic cup had been surrendered early — a Round of 16 exit in the Coppa Italia, an afterthought discarded by a squad with heavier silver in mind — but August brought a first instalment of the new season's dues. 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 accountancy rather than poetry, which suited the house style perfectly.

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 empires 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 the Madonnina.

And yet the verdict of 1994 is not in Tokyo but in Athens, not in the ledger's last line but in its astonishing middle pages. Three scudetti in a row, the third 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 bars of the Navigli, 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. The Berlusconi-Capello dynasty would win again, but never again would everything align as it did in that spring: power, providence and Providence himself, Massaro, all arriving on time. Call it the empire at noon. The clocks of football, like those of Lombardy stations, never stop; but for one year, in 1994, they all struck twelve together.