The Year of Refusals

The Fog After the Feast

January in Milan begins with fog, as it has always begun: the fog that climbs off the Navigli at dusk and settles over the city like the lid on a pot of risotto, muffling the trams, erasing the Alps that on clean days stand beyond the Madonnina like a promise nobody quite dares believe. In 2000 the fog felt thicker, or perhaps it was only that the feast was over. The club had spent 1999 celebrating a hundred years of itself, and Alberto Zaccheroni had crowned the centenary with a scudetto that let the city believe, briefly, that the great dynasty of the nineties had merely been napping between courses. The calendar year 2000 — which straddled two of Zaccheroni's seasons, the defence of that title and the campaign that would prove his last full one — set about correcting the illusion in the Lombard manner: gently, greyly, without a single thunderclap.

The Italy into which the year opened was rich and restless. Serie A remained the wealthiest league on earth, a gilded aviary in which Batistuta, Vieri and Totti sang for their suppers while every summer imported new plumage from abroad; by May the scudetto would belong to Sven-Göran Eriksson's Lazio, and by July the national side would come within one golden goal of the European title before France took it away in extra time — a year, in short, that held Italian brilliance and Italian heartbreak in almost perfect equilibrium. At Milanello the constants held their posts: Silvio Berlusconi in the president's chair, Adriano Galliani at his shoulder as vice-president and chief executive, Paolo Maldini wearing the armband as though he had been born already wrapped in it, and Zaccheroni — Zac of the centenary — asked to defend a championship with a squad suspended between one great age and the next.

The Archer of Kyiv

Every fading season keeps one bright thread running through it, and the thread of Milan's 2000 was Andriy Shevchenko. Signed from Dynamo Kyiv, the Ukrainian had arrived without ceremony and proceeded to learn Serie A the way a hungry man learns a menu. By the end of his first Italian season he was capocannoniere with twenty-four league goals — a debutant leading the scorers of the hardest championship in the world — and twenty-nine in all competitions. I will call him the Archer of Kyiv, because his finishing had the archer's virtues: stillness before release, no wasted motion, and an indifference to occasion that bordered on the unmannerly. Whatever else sagged around him in this year, and much did, the Archer kept loosing his arrows, and it is scarcely an exaggeration to say that he alone kept Milan competitive across both halves of 2000.

The arithmetic of the title defence reads like a physician's chart. Third place; sixty-one points; sixteen victories, thirteen draws, five defeats; sixty-five goals scored and forty conceded; eleven points adrift of champions Lazio, with Juventus wedged between as runners-up. Note the thirteen draws, for they are the diagnosis: a team that had forgotten how to be cruel, that cooked the risotto beautifully and then declined to serve it. And note the sentence hidden in the fine print — third place bought not the Champions League proper but its antechamber, the qualifying route, an indignity for defending champions that the previous spring's confetti had not foreseen.

There was a moment when the defence looked serious. On 20 February Milan beat Lazio, the eventual champions, 2-1 at San Siro, both goals struck from the penalty spot by Zvonimir Boban before the interval, with Simone Inzaghi replying for the visitors; the city allowed itself half an inhalation. Then came the derby of 5 March at the Giuseppe Meazza, before a reported 80,736 souls, and Inter won it 2-1, and the breath was let out slowly through the teeth. January had already administered one Inter-flavoured humiliation — elimination from the Coppa Italia at the quarter-final. Milan lost the first leg 3-2 on the twelfth, two Shevchenko goals notwithstanding, and drew the second 1-1 on the twenty-seventh, Shevchenko again with the equaliser after Baggio had struck; four goals to three on aggregate, and the essential point stands, which is that Inter passed and Milan did not. The league season closed on 14 May with a 4-0 home win over Udinese, a courteous bow performed while the crown was being fitted elsewhere, on Roman brows.

The Last King Leaves the Court

In January, while the fog still held, the old court began to empty. George Weah — Ballon d'Or of 1995, the great striding emperor of San Siro's mid-nineties evenings — was loaned to Chelsea on the eleventh of the month, and on 1 August 2000 the parting became official: a free transfer to Manchester City, and the end of an era that had begun in 1995. The detail that history should keep is not the destination but the refusal. Berlusconi offered him a farewell settlement, a reported million pounds by way of golden handshake, and Weah declined it. He walked out of the richest football of its age leaving money on the table, which is a thing so rare in this trade that it deserves to be written twice — he declined it — and the reader is invited to sit a moment with the fact.

I have known strikers who measured themselves in contracts the way vintners measure in barrels, and I do not condemn them; a footballer's prime is short and his knees are mortal. But 2000 at Milan turns out to be, on close reading, the year of refusals — the year in which the club's truest nobility was displayed not in the winning of anything, for nothing was won, but in the manner of men declining what they had not, by their own severe accounting, earned. Weah was the first refusal. The second belongs to a newcomer, and it is the saddest and finest story of the year.

The Prince Who Refused His Wages

The summer campaign of 2000 was conducted with the president's customary appetite. From Real Madrid came Fernando Redondo, the marquee purchase; from Corinthians came the goalkeeper Dida; from Palmeiras the defender Roque Júnior — two Brazilians whose true significance lay some years down the road — and from Vicenza the forward Gianni Comandini. It was Redondo who filled the newspapers. The elegant Argentine, the most cultured holding midfielder of his generation, was prised from Madrid in a move the accountants reported at around eleven million pounds, though the figures quarrel from ledger to ledger; what is not disputed is that Redondo said he had never been consulted and wished to stay, and that the Bernabéu's own supporters protested the sale of their metronome. He arrived in Milan, in other words, as a man taken rather than a man come.

Then, in one of his very first training sessions at Milanello, the anterior cruciate ligament of his right knee ruptured, with damage to the meniscus besides, and the surgeons opened him more than once. The absence would stretch, by the commonly reported count, to 838 days — roughly two and a half years in which the costliest signing of the summer barely wore the shirt he had not asked to wear. Football has a hundred stories of this shape, and most of them end in bitterness, in lawyers, in leaked resentments. Redondo chose another ending.

Some months later — the gesture itself belongs to the following year, though the character it reveals belongs to this one — he suspended his own salary, reported at some £2.74 million a year, declining to be paid for football he could not play. He went further: he tried to give back the house and the car the club had provided, and Milan refused to take them, which gives us the rare spectacle of a club and a player locked in a duel of generosity. Galliani, speaking for the club, explained that the man was besieged by the same question wherever he went — when will you be fit? — and wanted only tranquillity in which to mend. When at last he returned to the field, San Siro rose to him in standing ovations, applauding not a signing but a principle. I have called Shevchenko the Archer; let Redondo be the Prince Who Refused His Wages, and let the refrain be repeated wherever this game confuses price with worth.

Autumn Lanterns: A Night at Camp Nou

While the Prince healed and the Archer scored, Milan's autumn belonged to Europe, and for a while it glowed like the last good lantern on a dark canal. Drawn into the first group stage of the Champions League — Group H, with Barcelona, Leeds United and Beşiktaş — Zaccheroni's side opened on 13 September by dismantling Beşiktaş 4-1 at San Siro: Coco on thirty-six minutes, Bierhoff on forty-four, and Shevchenko twice, a penalty in first-half stoppage time and a second on seventy-seven. Six days later, away to Leeds, the bill arrived in the eighty-ninth minute, Bowyer scoring the only goal of the night; the English, that autumn, were not sentimental hosts.

Then came the night that justified the year. On 26 September, at Camp Nou, Milan beat Barcelona 2-0 away — Coco again in first-half stoppage time, Bierhoff on seventy-one — and the old European aristocrat in the club's blood stirred and stretched. It was the standout result of Milan's 2000, the kind of away performance that needs no adjectives because the scoreline and the address supply them. The return at San Siro on 18 October finished 3-3, an evening of six goals and precious little defending that delighted the neutrals and aged the coaches; on 24 October Milan won 2-0 away to Beşiktaş, Shevchenko on thirty-eight and José Mari on forty-three; and on 8 November the group closed with 1-1 against Leeds at San Siro, Serginho equalising on sixty-eight. Milan topped the group with eleven points, ahead of Leeds in second and of a Barcelona left third and demoted to the UEFA Cup — first among that company, and on merit.

The second group stage began before Christmas, and the two fixtures that fall inside this chronicle's year were honourable ones: on 21 November, Milan 2-2 Galatasaray at San Siro, José Mari and Shevchenko answering Jardel and Hasan Şaş; and on 6 December, at the Riazor, a 1-0 win away to Deportivo La Coruña, Helveg scoring the goal. Whoever walked out of that stadium in December had every right to believe. The reckoning — third place in that second group, behind Deportivo and Galatasaray, sealed by a 1-1 draw with the Spaniards at San Siro on 13 March — belongs to 2001 and to another chapter; 2000, for its part, closed with Milan unbeaten in the second group and dreaming plausibly.

December Presents the Bill

The league, meanwhile, was telling a subtler and crueller story. Its emblem was the evening of 21 October at San Siro, when Milan led Juventus 2-0 through Ambrosini on fifty-nine and Shevchenko on sixty-one, and contrived within half an hour to be pegged back to 2-2 — Trezeguet answering on sixty-seven, Conte completing the sentence in the ninetieth minute. A team reveals itself in how it holds a lead much as a man reveals himself in how he holds his drink, and this Milan, two goals to the good against its oldest rival, could hold neither. Still, the autumn promised well enough; the table was respectable; the football, on its better nights, remembered the centenary.

Then mid-December arrived and the floor gave way. The midfield was scythed down by injury — Redondo already lost, and now Albertini and Ambrosini following him to the treatment room — and a side built around its central intelligence found itself thinking with its limbs. On 23 December, at San Siro, Perugia won 2-1 — Saudati on twenty-one, Shevchenko levelling three minutes later, Vryzas settling it after the interval — a Christmas delivery of coal made in front of the assembled family. The collapse that began in those weeks would carry through the winter: the season would end in sixth place with forty-nine points, a UEFA Cup consolation for a club that considered the European Cup its family silver, and in March 2001 Zaccheroni — the man who had given the centenary its scudetto — would be dismissed. But that sacking, like the European reckoning, belongs to the next chapter. What belongs to 2000 is the sound of the floorboards beginning to crack.

How, then, to judge a year without a trophy? By what it refused, and by what it planted. It refused, through Weah and through Redondo, the proposition that a footballer is only a line in a ledger. And it planted, almost absent-mindedly, the seeds of a harvest it could not yet imagine: Dida and Roque Júnior were already in the building, the Archer of Kyiv was already loosing his arrows, and within a couple of years the age of Ancelotti would arrive to gather what 2000 had sown — Pirlo, Nesta, Kaká, and European silver of the largest kind. The fog over the Navigli always lifts eventually, and when it lifts the Alps are exactly where they were, beyond the Madonnina, keeping their promise. Milan in 2000 finished third, then stumbled toward sixth, and won nothing — and was, in the ways that matter longest, richer at the year's end than at its beginning.