A Hundred Years, Won by a Point

Two Currencies, One Hundred Candles

On the first day of January 1999 the lira began its long goodbye. The euro arrived that morning not as coin or banknote — those would wait until 2002 — but as an accounting currency, a column of new figures entered in the books beside the old. Milan spent the rest of the year doing much the same thing: living in two centuries at once. For in 1999 the red-and-black half of the city turned one hundred. The founders had been Englishmen: in December 1899 a band of expatriates led by Herbert Kilpin gave the town a Milan Foot-Ball and Cricket Club, with Alfred Edwards installed as its first president, and while the cricket withered politely, the football spread like vine through every courtyard in the city. The club lights its candles on 16 December, though the original charter was lost somewhere in the intervening century and most historians place the true signing a few days later, most likely the 18th. No matter. A hundred years is a hundred years whichever evening you choose to raise the glass, and the calendar of 1999 belonged to the Diavolo from its first Sunday to its last.

The Italy around the birthday cake was changing more than its money. Massimo D'Alema's centre-left governed in Rome while Milan's own president, Silvio Berlusconi, led the opposition from the benches of Forza Italia, his Fininvest and Mediaset empire making him at once the most powerful and the most divisive of Italians; and from March to June the country found itself drawn into NATO's air war over Kosovo, aircraft lifting from Italian bases toward the Balkans. Against such weather — political, monetary, martial — a football centenary might seem a small thing. Milan has never believed that, and 1999 would give the anniversary a crown no committee could have commissioned.

Zac, Whom Nobody Had Invited

The champion of the centenary was built by a man the prophets had overlooked: the heretic from Udine whose autumn the last chapter told, and whose three at the back the country was still declining to take seriously. Above him sat the familiar hierarchy — Berlusconi as president and owner, Adriano Galliani running the shop as vice-president, and Paolo Maldini wearing the armband as though he had been born with the crease already pressed into his sleeve. Zaccheroni — whom we may call Zac, because the season made the abbreviation affectionate — noticed that not one newspaper had listed Milan among the favourites, and he made sure his players noticed it too. There is no yeast like being left off the guest list.

By mid-November the prophets had the cup for evidence, Lazio pruning Milan out of the Coppa Italia and closing one road so that only the long one remained: the league, the road that crosses the whole winter. In hindsight the pruning helped, and a tree with one branch feeds all its sap to that branch.

Seven Sundays of Sap Rising

For most of the campaign the title looked bound for Lazio. The Romans led the table for long stretches and scored sixty-five league goals while doing it, playing the sort of spring-water football that seduces neutrals; but the league is decided on its last page, and on the penultimate Saturday, 15 May, away at the Franchi, Lazio left a fatal point behind in a 1-1 draw with Fiorentina — Batistuta ahead inside a quarter of an hour, the equaliser arriving and nothing more — the kind of small wound that does not bleed until later. The same weekend Milan beat Empoli and went top, with one Sunday left to hold it. Milan, meanwhile, had stopped drawing and stopped losing altogether: seven victories in a row to close the season, seven Sundays of sap rising through the old trunk, until the table that had looked decorative in March turned into a guillotine in May.

Zac's champions won it with a record more sober than lyrical: twenty wins, ten draws, four defeats, seventy points; fifty-nine goals scored and only thirty-four allowed. Bierhoff finished with twenty in the league — or nineteen, by the stricter of two counts that have never been reconciled — third in the capocannoniere standings behind Udinese's Márcio Amoroso on twenty-two and Fiorentina's Batistuta on twenty-one — the striker Zac had brought down from Udine proving, week after week, that a header is not a percussion instrument but a form of punctuation. Behind Milan's seventy and Lazio's sixty-nine came Fiorentina with fifty-six, Parma with fifty-five, Roma with fifty-four: a championship of one point, which is to say a championship of character.

Rain at the Renato Curi

The last day, 23 May 1999, was played in rain at Perugia, on a surface the Stadio Renato Curi had left to soak — and for once Milan did not keep the afternoon waiting. Andrés Guglielminpietro struck after eleven minutes; Oliver Bierhoff headed the second on the half-hour, from an Albertini corner, the German settling the argument in the air as he had settled it all winter. Two goals in thirty-one minutes of mud, and the century looked ready to bow.

It was not so simple. On thirty-four minutes Hidetoshi Nakata, the Japanese playmaker who had turned that Perugia side into the neutral's favourite, pulled one back from the penalty spot, and the rest of the day became an examination of nerve. Down at the Olimpico Lazio were doing everything that could be asked of them, beating Parma 2-1 with two goals from Marcelo Salas, so that a single Perugia equaliser would have put the title on a train heading south. It never came: Christian Abbiati, the young goalkeeper thrust into the run-in, produced the save of his life on a Bucchi header, the 2-1 held to the whistle, and the scudetto — the sixteenth in the club's history — came home to Milan by a single point, seventy against sixty-nine, in the exact season of the club's hundredth year. There are titles won by procession and titles won by comeback in the rain on the final afternoon; the centenary deserved the second kind, and the gods of the calendar, who are rarely so tidy, delivered it. Maldini lifted a scudetto the Englishmen of the lost charter could never have imagined; Berlusconi had his crown in the year of the candles; and Zac, whom nobody had invited, sat at the head of the table.

The Boy Who Outran the Cloud

That summer the club went shopping for its second century and came back with a boy from a country younger than some of its defenders. Andriy Shevchenko was born on 29 September 1976 in Dvirkivshchyna, a village in what was then Soviet Ukraine, and raised in Kyiv; in the spring of 1986, nine years old, he was evacuated with his youth sports group when the Chernobyl reactor burned not far to the north — a childhood interrupted by an invisible cloud, which may explain the particular quietness he carried ever afterward. He might have been a boxer; he chose the ball instead, and at Dynamo Kyiv the old master Valeriy Lobanovskyi machined him into a European phenomenon, the hat-trick he scored at Camp Nou against Barcelona in 1997 serving as the continent's formal notification.

Milan paid a reported twenty-five million dollars in the summer of 1999 — a then-record fee — for the twenty-two-year-old, and brought in beside him a snarling young midfielder from Salernitana named Gennaro Gattuso and, from São Paulo, the Brazilian Serginho, whom the scouts had gone to watch in the flesh and whose agent had sold on cassette, posting VHS tapes of the boy's best minutes across the Atlantic in the last years before the disc. The Brazilian came within an hour of going elsewhere. He had sat down with Juventus, he told ESPN Brasil long afterwards, exactly one hour before his first meeting with Milan, and chose the rossoneri because he had liked them since he was a child — a boy's preference repaid in the end with 279 appearances, twenty-five goals, two Champions Leagues, a Club World Cup and a scudetto. The other door swung outward: Roberto Donadoni, for whom the centenary title had been a sixth and final scudetto, left for Al-Ittihad in Saudi Arabia, and Christian Ziege for Middlesbrough. The supporters, still warm from Perugia, asked the eternal August question — what exactly have we bought? — and were answered on 28 August, the opening weekend, when the Ukrainian scored on his Serie A debut in a 2-2 draw with Lecce, as though introductions bored him.

He would end his first season in Italy as almost no debutant ever had; the figures are the next chapter's to read out. But the evening on which Sheva stopped being a purchase and became a son of the house arrived earlier, in October, in the derby; we will come to it.

Last in the Group, First in the Derby

First, the small print of the champion's autumn, of which there was a great deal. On 21 August, at a San Siro only a quarter awake — 25,001 through the gates — Parma, holders of the Coppa Italia, beat the champions of Italy 2-1 in the Supercoppa Italiana, and the season's curtain-raiser fell on Milan's own stage. An omen? The autumn would argue so.

Europe, the theatre where this club has done its most celebrated acting, supplied the year's true heartache. Drawn into a first group stage with Chelsea, Hertha Berlin and Galatasaray, Milan opened with a goalless draw at Stamford Bridge on 15 September, beat Galatasaray 2-1 at San Siro on the 21st, and then began leaking points the way a tired roof leaks Lombard rain: 1-1 at home to Hertha on the 28th, beaten 1-0 in Berlin's Olympiastadion on 20 October, 1-1 with Chelsea at San Siro on the 26th, and finally, on 3 November amid the din of the Ali Sami Yen in Istanbul, a 3-2 defeat to Galatasaray. Six floodlit evenings: one win, three draws, two losses; six scored, seven conceded; six points — and last place in the group, beneath Chelsea's eleven, Hertha's eight, Galatasaray's seven. The champions of Italy were out of Europe before the trees were bare.

And yet the same autumn produced the year's warmest evening. On 23 October, in the derby, Inter went ahead through a Ronaldo penalty after twenty minutes; then the Brazilian was sent off for a foul on Ayala, and the reply came after the interval from the new boy: Shevchenko's first derby goal, bundled in from close range off a defender's attempted clearance, the opening entry in what would grow into the fixture's all-time record of fourteen. George Weah headed the winner from a corner in the closing minute — 2-1 to Milan — and the curva understood, as the curva always understands before the press does, that the twenty-five million dollars had been not a price but a dowry.

The league season those months had opened would not be redeemed in the spring. This was a Milan still handsome going forward and no longer to be trusted behind, the champions descending into the merely good; and the winter that followed would take from them, by a side door, the last king of the mid-nineties court, the man who had just headed the derby winner. The slope of the descent and the date of that departure are entered in the following year's chapter. Between the slippage and the arrival of Carlo Ancelotti on the bench in 2001 lay an interregnum nobody in the year of the candles wished to contemplate.

The Hundredth December

And so to 16 December 1999, the day the club long ago chose for its birthday, one hundred years after the Englishmen of the Foot-Ball and Cricket Club put their names to a paper the century then misplaced. A centenary is a mirror, and Milan looked into it and saw, within a single twelvemonth, everything it has ever been — champion by one point in the rain of May, mortal in a group stage by November; the old guard captained by Maldini, the new century announced by a quiet Ukrainian with a boxer's discipline and a sniper's calm. The club marked its hundredth year in the only way that would not have been an anticlimax, with the scudetto, its sixteenth, and then spent the autumn being reminded that immortality is granted to clubs and never to seasons. The candles went out. The Ukrainian went on scoring, and the second hundred years, though nobody could yet prove it, had already begun.