Four Operations and a Ballon d'Or

Holders, and a Capital of Caretakers

Serie A in 1995 was the richest and strongest league on earth, the theatre in which every great actor of the game wished to perform, and Milan held the European Cup. Fix that position in the mind before anything else happens, because a club is never more exposed than when it has run out of things to want. Fabio Capello sat on the bench. Franco Baresi wore the armband the way other men wear their own surname. Silvio Berlusconi occupied the president's chair. Everything that follows here is the story of what such a position costs to keep, and of the bill that greatness is handed — presented not when you fail, but while you are still succeeding.

Berlusconi himself had lately discovered how much faster politics moves than football. His first government had collapsed in December 1994, and 1995 belonged, in Rome, to the technocratic cabinet of Lamberto Dini — a year of caretakers in the capital while the owner of Milan remained, whatever the count of his votes, a dominant figure in the national imagination. It is a very Italian arrangement, that a man may misplace the country and keep the club, and I record without judgement that nobody in the Curva Sud lost a minute of sleep over the distinction. Governments fall in the evening and are buried by breakfast. The fixture list does not resign.

Fourth, and No Two Sundays Alike

The domestic spring made no sense, and I say this as a man who has spent a lifetime insisting that football always makes sense if you stare at it long enough. Milan surrendered their crown as champions of Italy to Marcello Lippi's resurgent Juventus and finished fourth — fourth! — with sixty points from thirty-four games: seventeen won, nine drawn, eight lost, fifty-three scored, thirty-two conceded. Respectable on paper and mortifying in the flesh, the accounts of a great house that has begun, discreetly, to sell the silver. And still the public came, because the Milanese are faithful in the way of people who have known both famine and banquet: an average of 56,659 filed into San Siro all the same, to watch the strangest league season the club had produced in years.

Consider the evidence, because the evidence refuses to be considered quietly. On 15 January at Bari, Milan won by five goals to three, and four of the five belonged to Dejan Savićević — the conjuror, who handles a ball the way a jeweller handles a stone he suspects of being priceless, and who chose that provincial afternoon to empty his entire workshop onto the pitch. On 19 February, Lazio put four past Milan without reply. A fortnight later, on 5 March, Milan put five past Brescia without conceding. And on 15 April the derby went to Inter, three goals to one, which in this city is not a result but a season of penance compressed into ninety minutes. Marco Simone, il piccolo diavolo of the front line, finished as top scorer with seventeen league goals, twenty-one in all competitions, and deserved a more coherent spring to score them in. A team that can win 5-3 and 5-0 and lose 4-0 and 3-1 inside three months is not a bad team; it is a great team whose clocks have begun to keep two different times.

Lisbon, Paris, and the Prose That Won

Europe was another matter, because in Europe the old machine still remembered itself. In the quarter-final of the Champions League, Milan dispatched Benfica with the cold courtesy of the Capello school: 2-0 at San Siro on the first of March, then a goalless evening in Lisbon on the fifteenth, the away leg played like a man walking home with his winnings buttoned into an inside pocket. No flourish, no risk, no mercy. It was football you could have taught from, freeze-frame by freeze-frame, and half the coaches of Europe were doing exactly that, spooling the tapes back and forth in dark rooms and learning nothing they could use. Sacchi had written the poetry; Capello edited it into prose that won; and in the spring of 1995 the prose still parsed perfectly.

The semi-final brought Paris Saint-Germain, and Milan won it in the manner least likely to inspire poets and most likely to inspire engravers of trophies: 1-0 at the Parc des Princes on 5 April, 2-0 at San Siro on the nineteenth, three goals to none across the tie. There is an irony folded into that scoreline which only the summer would unfold, for the Parisian club Milan eliminated in April was the club from which, before the next season began, Milan would take George Weah. Football devours its opponents and then hires their best cook. And so to a third consecutive European final — the last of the sequence, though nobody leaning on the April railings of San Siro could have known that the run of finals was about to end.

Eighteen Years and 327 Days

Vienna, 24 May 1995, the Ernst-Happel-Stadion, 49,730 inside — the round-number men wrote fifty thousand, and for once I forgive them. History, which has a taste for symmetry bordering on cruelty, had arranged a rematch: Milan and Ajax, the same two names that had contested the final of 1969, meeting again with a quarter of a century between the handshakes. Capello sent out a team that read like a page of the club's own gospel: Rossi in goal; Panucci, Costacurta, Baresi and Maldini across the back; Albertini and Desailly in the engine room; Donadoni and Boban to supply; Simone and Massaro to finish. The holders of the cup, captained by Baresi, the last Roman of the penalty area, against Louis van Gaal's young orchestra from Amsterdam.

One of those eleven had spent that year opening a door of his own. In Gajeva Street in central Zagreb, a short walk from Ban Jelačić Square, Zvonimir Boban and his father Marinko put the family name over a restaurant — Mediterranean cooking with an Italian accent, run by the family from that year to this. A Milan midfielder's wages planted an Italian kitchen in a country still at the ragged end of its war. Footballers are not only footballers. They are also, quietly, the economies of the places that made them.

For eighty-four minutes the final was a chess match played with the pieces glued to the board, the kind of evening in which every pass is an argument and no argument is won. Then, in the eighty-fifth — the minute every camera in Europe was pointed at, as cameras always are when it matters — the orchestra found its note. Patrick Kluivert, eighteen years and 327 days old, a boy in the strict actuarial sense and a finisher in every sense that counts, scored the only goal of the night. One to nil. The holders were holders no longer, and the run of three straight finals closed not with a collapse but with a single late sentence, delivered by a teenager to a team of monuments. The football gods do not send letters; they send eighteen-year-olds. Milan, who had taught Europe more about time and space than any side of the era, read the message in silence on the flight home over the Alps.

The Swan Folds His Wings

Whatever Vienna took, August took more. On the seventeenth of that month, at a press conference in Milan, Marco van Basten announced the end of his career, and with it ended the long, whispered argument about whether we would ever see him whole again. His last competitive match had been the European Cup final of 1993, lost to Marseille; everything after that was medicine. More than two years of treatment that failed. Four operations on an ankle that would not forgive him for the way he had been kicked and the way he had insisted, regardless, on dancing. Shortly before the announcement he had flown to Belgium for one final consultation, and the specialist delivered the plainest sentence of the whole affair: the ankle would not recover, and the advice was to stop.

He explained himself to the Dutch reporters without a gram of self-pity, which is how the Dutch prefer their tragedies served. There was no improvement, he said — 'when I get up my ankle hurts, I cannot even play tennis'. He set out what had been attempted: operations, water and heat treatments, acupuncture, even traditional healers, and nothing had helped. Then, because he could never resist the dry note, he observed that a man who stops early apparently remains in people's memories as a better player. The door that had stood ajar for two years, wide enough for hope to squeeze through sideways, was shut.

The next evening at San Siro, before the Trofeo Berlusconi friendly against Juventus, he walked a lap of honour while a crowd reported at over sixty-three thousand rose and stayed risen, an ovation of the kind a stadium grants perhaps twice in a generation. In the dugout Fabio Capello — Capello, the great pragmatist, the man who had turned beauty into a budget — pressed his fingers to his nose to hold the tears where they were, and did not manage it. Van Basten was thirty; the birth certificate says the last day of October 1964. Reflect on the crueller number: he never played a competitive match after the age of twenty-eight. Three times the Ballon d'Or had gone to him, the most complete striker of his generation, a swan among the geese of the area di rigore, and the swan folded his wings at an age when most centre-forwards are still learning which way the goal is.

The hoping did not stop when the career did. Long afterwards he admitted what he had gone on carrying: 'For a long time I had the idea, even when I was so to speak forty-one years old: if I get a good ankle, I will simply still show that it can be done.' Read that twice. A man who had won everything the game had to award was still, decades later, negotiating with a joint. There are defeats a club avenges and defeats a club can only mourn. Vienna was the first kind. This was the second.

Shopping for Shoulders

A club that loses its greatest scorer cannot weep indefinitely; it must go to market, and that summer Milan shopped like a widow determined not to be pitied, and dressed for it, in the best tailoring the city could cut. From Paris Saint-Germain came George Weah, for a fee reported at around seven million — I give the figure with the shrug it deserves, since the tellers of transfer fees are the least reliable witnesses in football, and other honest audits swear to something nearer nine. From Juventus, of all houses, came Roberto Baggio, at a price similarly disputed: nine million and some, or ten, depending on the newspaper and its mood at breakfast. From Cannes came a long-limbed young midfielder named Patrick Vieira, a purchase whose wisdom the future would judge; from Reggiana came Paulo Futre. The intent needed no interpreter. The goals that had walked out with the swan would be carried back in on new shoulders, and the broadest of those shoulders belonged to a Liberian.

The departures had their own quiet poetry. Daniele Massaro, who had led the line in Vienna, went east to Japan, to Shimizu S-Pulse, along the era's new silk road for the distinguished veteran. And Van Basten's retirement was entered formally into the club's books at last — an administrative full stop beneath a sentence that injury had finished writing two years before. Thus does a great club conduct its grief: a press conference, a signature, a line in a register, and then, because the calendar is merciless and merciful in the same gesture, a fixture list.

The Autumn of the Fifteenth

Whoever expected the remade Milan to require a season of introductions was disappointed inside a month. The autumn of 1995 was an exercise in steady accumulation, no single stir decisive and every stir necessary: 2-1 against Padova, 2-1 against Udinese, 2-1 against Roma, 3-0 against Atalanta, points gathered the way the Lombard plain gathers its harvest, without commotion. Then, on 15 October, matchday six, the champions of Italy came to San Siro and left beaten: Milan 2, Juventus 1, the goals from Weah and Simone — the new king and the faithful retainer sharing the scoresheet, and the table tilting towards Milan as the days shortened. By the turn of the year Milan led the league, and the foundation was poured for what April 1996 would confirm. What that fifteenth scudetto finally weighed — the points, the margin, the coach it would cost — is counted out on the next chapter's page. 1995 did the ploughing and the sowing, which is the part of farming nobody photographs.

There was midweek work too, in the UEFA Cup, to which the fourth place of the previous spring had consigned them — a demotion the squad treated as a professional obligation rather than an insult. Zagłębie Lubin were dispatched 4-0 at San Siro on 12 September and 4-1 away a fortnight later; Strasbourg fell 1-0 in France on 17 October and 2-1 in Milan on 2 November; Sparta Prague were beaten 2-0 on 23 November, and a goalless evening in Prague on 7 December carried Milan through the round of sixteen and into the new year. That the road would end at Bordeaux in the spring belongs to 1996's page, not this one. In December 1995 the column showed only wins, and a club that had spent May learning about endings spent the autumn remembering how to begin.

A Crown on Christmas Eve

And then, on 24 December 1995, the year performed its final reversal. George Weah was awarded the Ballon d'Or — the first African ever to win it, in the first edition that deigned to consider players born outside Europe — and in the first days of the new year the FIFA World Player of the Year would join it, presented at a gala staged, fittingly, in Milan itself, under the television light that had become the age's natural weather; a European, African and world treble assembled in a single season of awards, which no man had done before him. He would finish that season as Milan's leading league scorer with eleven goals, but the goals were the smaller half of the story. A forward who had crossed from Monrovia to Monaco to Paris to Milan carried the rossonero shirt to a summit the game's oldest prize had never before permitted, and he did it in the December of the very year the club had buried its greatest striker's career.

So the year stands like this. In May, Milan lost the crown of Europe to a boy of eighteen, by one goal in the eighty-fifth minute. In August they lost the most complete striker of his generation to an ankle, and the hardest man in the dugout could not keep his face straight in front of sixty-odd thousand witnesses. And on Christmas Eve the best footballer on the planet, by official decree, wore red and black. It is tempting to call that an exchange — a swan out, a king in — and the temptation should be refused, because there is no exchange for Van Basten. But the game does not stop for grief, and neither does the city. In the bars of the peninsula, and on the far side of the world where the faithful of the southern hemisphere take their Milan before dawn and their coffee immediately after, the glasses went up on the twenty-fourth all the same. Out in the dark fields of Lombardy the fifteenth scudetto was already germinating, four months short of anyone being permitted to say so.