The Scudetto and the Shipwreck

A Year Broken in Two

There are years that arrive whole and years that arrive already broken, and 1996 came to Milan like a plate split cleanly down the middle: on one side the fifteenth scudetto, served warm in April sunshine, on the other a winter so bitter that the fog off the Navigli seemed to seep under the doors of San Siro and settle in the boots of champions. The honest chronicler must carry both halves home in the same basket, resisting the temptation — strong in every supporter, forgivable in none of us who presume to write — to pretend that the spring was the truth of this team and the autumn merely a slander invented by its enemies.

The club that entered the year was still, on paper and mostly in the flesh, the imperial Milan of the Berlusconi decade: the president in his pomp, Fabio Capello on the bench wearing the face of a man auditing accounts he already knows to be in order, Franco Baresi carrying the armband as he had carried it since men now balding were schoolboys, Mauro Tassotti at his shoulder like the second signature on an old and honoured contract. By the year's end the president sat in political opposition, Capello sat in Madrid, and the champions of Italy had been turned out of Europe in their own house by a team from Norway. Between those two sentences lies everything this chapter has to tell, and the telling asks patience, because the distance between April and December in 1996 is not eight months but an entire education in mortality.

Capello's Arithmetic

The 1995-96 championship was only the second in Italy to pay three points for a victory, and the small revolution in accountancy, barely a year old, suited Capello the way double-entry bookkeeping suits a Lombard banker; and Milan, who under him had long understood that a match not lost is a civilisation preserved, adapted to the new currency without loosening a single collar. The ledger at the close of the thirty-four rounds read twenty-one wins, ten draws, three defeats; sixty goals scored against a miserly twenty-four conceded; seventy-three points in the vault, eight clear of Juventus, who would have their consolations elsewhere — we shall come to that bitterness in its proper place — but who could not lay a finger on the peninsula itself.

The arithmetic became a title on 28 April 1996, with two rounds still to spare; the Italian records give the clinching afternoon as a 3-1 win over Fiorentina at San Siro, the goals shared among Savićević, Baggio and Simone — a scoresheet containing three biographies and at least two unwritten novels. And when the season closed on 12 May, the champions declined to tiptoe out of the room: they put seven past Cremonese in a 7-1 valediction, as if to remind the league, with the last flourish of the pen, that all that parsimony had been a choice and never once a limitation.

Capello has been accused, by romantics and other agreeably unemployed persons, of making beauty file an expense report. The charge misunderstands him. His Milan of that spring defended the way a Lombard family guards a recipe, and precisely because the many agreed to be prose, the few were free to be poetry: Savićević the conjuror, Roberto Baggio the exiled prince purchased from Juventus the summer before, George Weah the great striding thoroughbred brought from Paris Saint-Germain, handed the Ballon d'Or that first December as if Milan had merely completed the paperwork on a coronation. It was the crown of a tenure that had already produced the 4-0 dismantling of Barcelona in the 1994 Champions League final, and it would prove — though nobody at the banquet dared say it above a whisper — his parting gift.

The Prince, the Panther and the Cups

Weah deserves a paragraph to himself here, and will later demand a whole section. Eleven league goals made him the team's leading scorer, and the manner of them mattered more than the count: he was the reigning Ballon d'Or, the first African ever to win it, and there was in his running a kind of continental embassy, as if every stride were signing a treaty on behalf of a hemisphere that European football had too long treated as a rumour. I will call him the Panther, because the nickname earns itself every time he moves, and I intend to repeat it until the reader can see the animal.

The cups, meanwhile, supplied the year's first hairline cracks, visible only to those who looked with a jeweller's eye. In the UEFA Cup Milan strolled through the early rounds — an 8-1 aggregate over Zagłębie Lubin, 3-1 past Strasbourg, 2-0 against Sparta Prague — and then met Bordeaux in the quarter-final, won the home leg 2-0 at San Siro, and travelled to France with the tie apparently folded and put away in a drawer. They lost the return 0-3, out on a 3-2 aggregate, undone by a Girondins side carrying two names the world would soon learn to pronounce, Zinédine Zidane and Christophe Dugarry; and Bordeaux kept running all the way to the final, as if to certify that the earthquake had not been an accident of the weather.

The Coppa Italia added its own small humiliation, a quarter-final exit on penalties to Bologna, then of Serie B — the kind of defeat that means nothing in May, when the scudetto is on the table and the wine is open, and means everything in December, when a man sits alone with the season's accounts and notices that the cracks had all been in the same wall.

The Emptying of the House

Championships are photographs; squads are rivers. No sooner had the fifteenth title been framed and hung than the water began to move. Capello, the author of the spring, left for Real Madrid at the season's end, and his departure was less a transfer than the removal of a keystone: the arch stood for a while afterwards, as arches do, out of habit.

The ledger of farewells reads now like the closing of an era's parenthesis, and it had been filling for a while: Marco van Basten's retirement had been entered into the books the previous August, the saddest single line Italian football had to print, a swan obliged to fold his wings while the lake was still watching, and Daniele Massaro had already carried his honest goals off to Shimizu S-Pulse in Japan. Now Roberto Donadoni crossed the ocean to the MetroStars of New York and New Jersey — loyal servants dispersing to the corners of the map, as if the house itself had quietly told them the party was ending. In the incoming column the club wrote new names for the new season — Michael Reiziger, Edgar Davids, Christophe Dugarry, the veteran Pietro Vierchowod, with Jesper Blomqvist to follow before Christmas — while letting slip, with the serenity of a man donating his winter coat in October, the young Patrick Vieira, brought from Cannes only the year before and now sold to Arsenal; Paolo Di Canio went to Celtic, Gianluigi Lentini departed, and in midwinter Christian Panucci followed Capello to Real Madrid. History does not judge every sale a club makes, but it has never stopped judging that one.

Beyond the touchline, the ground itself was shifting. In April, Italy's general election delivered the country to Romano Prodi's centre-left Ulivo coalition, and Silvio Berlusconi — president of the champions of Italy, master of towers of television — found himself in opposition, an experience for which no trophy cabinet offers preparation. And in May came the sting that every Milanist of that spring still tastes: Juventus, second in the league by those eight clean points, won the Champions League in Rome, beating Ajax on penalties, so that the rivals could answer our scudetto with Europe's crown, and every argument in every bar from the Navigli to the suburbs ended in an honourable, furious draw.

Ninety Metres of September

Now the section the Panther demanded. It is the 8th of September 1996, the opening day of the new championship, San Siro against newly promoted Hellas Verona, the 85th minute arriving like the hour when the waiters begin stacking chairs. Verona swing in a corner. And Weah collects the ball a couple of yards inside his own penalty area — his own, note, the wrong end of the pitch entirely, the place where strikers stand as tourists — and decides, with the calm of a man who has consulted no one, to go home the long way.

What follows is ninety metres of geography abolished. He rides the first challenges as a big ship rides small waves; two Verona defenders converge on him and collide with each other, cancelling themselves out like errors in a sum; and near the box he commits the oldest and most beautiful larceny in the game, pushing the ball one side of the last man and running round the other, before finishing past the goalkeeper Gregori with the gentleness of a man closing a door behind him. Italy's press christened it Coast to Coast, reached for the comparison with Maradona's Goal of the Century, and for once the hyperbole filed an honest report. Milan won 4-1, and for an afternoon the new season looked like the old one wearing fresh paint.

I dwell on it because the year insists. That run was the high summer of everything 1996 had promised: the champion striker of the champion team, at the absolute peak of his powers, doing a thing so complete that it required no context, no tactics, no explanation beyond the human body's occasional decision to exceed its brief. And it was, we now know, a lighthouse and not a sunrise — the last great flare of light before the fog came down. A season that opens with a miracle and closes with a shipwreck teaches the oldest lesson in Lombardy: eat the risotto while it is hot.

The Shipwreck

The omens, in truth, had preceded the miracle. On 25 August, in the Supercoppa Italiana at San Siro, the champions of Italy lost 1-2 to Fiorentina, winners of the Coppa Italia — a curtain-raiser that raised the wrong curtain. And there was something irregular in the very structure of the bench: the club had entrusted the team to the Uruguayan Óscar Washington Tabárez, a schoolmaster of the game, yet for the early matchdays the paperwork listed Giorgio Morini as head coach and styled Tabárez merely the technical director — one man's ideas on the pitch, another man's name on the documents, a bureaucratic comedy that would have been funnier had the football been better.

The football was not better. The autumn form sagged like wet plaster, and on 1 December, away at Piacenza, Milan lost 3-2 and stood ninth in the table — ninth, the champions of Italy, with the fog thickening by the week — and the club did what wounded institutions always do: it reached for its own past. Tabárez was dismissed, and on 2 December Arrigo Sacchi came home to Milanello, fresh from leaving a national team whose summer had ended in a group-stage exit at Euro 96 in England. The prophet returned to find the temple in mid-collapse, and the beams did not pause for his sermons.

Because the next night of consequence, 4 December, brought the naufragio — the shipwreck, as Italy has called it ever since. In Champions League Group D, alongside FC Porto and IFK Göteborg, Milan had beaten Rosenborg 4-1 away in Norway and needed only a draw at San Siro to pass; the Norwegians won 1-2 in our own house, and the champions of Italy finished third in the group, out of Europe before Christmas. There is no tactical exegesis worth the ink. A team that had spent a decade teaching Europe its manners was shown the door by an honest side from Norway, and the door was its own.

The Captain in the Fog

Through all of it — the April wine and the December water — Franco Baresi wore the armband, as he had through the whole long argument of his career, with Tassotti beside him; and 1996 was the last full year of that captaincy, for both men would lay down their tools at the end of the season, after roughly twenty years of service in the one case and seventeen in the other, leaving the armband to the waiting arm of Paolo Maldini. There is a particular sadness in a great defender's final winter: he can still read the game like a first language, but the sentences arrive faster than the legs that must punctuate them.

The season that 1996 set in motion would finish, just beyond this chapter's border, in eleventh place — forty-three points, eleven wins, ten draws, thirteen defeats, forty-three scored and forty-five conceded — the worst finish of the entire Berlusconi era and the club's worst since 1981-82, with no European qualification of any kind, and with a 6-1 flogging at the hands of Juventus in April 1997 still waiting down the road like a patient creditor. Sacchi's second coming could not resurrect what time had honestly buried; even prophets are subject to the calendar. The Panther, for his part, would again finish the club's leading league scorer, with thirteen — the lighthouse still turning, faithfully, above a fleet that had stopped sailing.

So how shall the year be judged? Sternly, and with love, which is the only honest combination. 1996 gave Milan a fifteenth scudetto assembled with a master's economy, gave the world ninety metres of George Weah that will outlive every league table ever printed, and then confiscated the future with both hands: the coach to Madrid, the swan to retirement, the young Vieira to London, the champions toward eleventh. The Greeks had a word for the pride that precedes a fall; the Milanese, being practical people, have always preferred to check the pantry. In April the pantry was full and by December it was bare, and the lesson of 1996 — written in fog on the glass of San Siro — is that a great house does not fall to its enemies; it lends them the keys, one departure at a time.