The Year the Machine Was Assembled

The Inheritance of the Fog

Some years arrive with trumpets, and some come up from the Navigli like the fog, unannounced, patient, certain of their welcome; 2002 arrived in the second manner, and it found Milan already halfway through a quiet revolution. The revolution had begun in early November of the old year, when Fatih Terim was dismissed after a poor start and the club handed its kitchen to Carlo Ancelotti, a man who understood what every cook of the Po valley understands: that a great dish is not invented but reduced — clarified, stirred without vanity, coaxed until the starch surrenders and the thing becomes itself. He inherited expensive ingredients and no menu. By June he had made of them a fourth place, which sounds like modesty and was, in truth, a resurrection.

The arithmetic of that fourth place deserves reading aloud, because arithmetic, read properly, is character. Fourteen wins, thirteen draws, seven defeats; forty-seven goals scored against thirty-three conceded; fifty-five points, a single point more than Chievo, two more than Lazio, with Bologna also left in the queue outside. A margin as thin as the skin on cooling polenta — and yet it was everything, because fourth place meant the Champions League, and the Champions League meant that Milan, after a period away from Europe's top table, would again sit down where the silverware is kept and the napkins are pressed.

Over it all presided Silvio Berlusconi, who in 2002 held simultaneously the presidency of the club and the office of Prime Minister of the Republic — an arrangement history may argue about at its leisure, but which that year was simply the weather in which Milan lived. And on the pitch the captain's band stayed where it had long lived, with Paolo Maldini, of whom more shortly, because 2002 asked of him a renunciation that no fixture list records.

The Spring of Near Things

Spring offered Milan two roads to a trophy and closed both with courteous firmness. In the Coppa Italia the semi-final brought Juventus to San Siro on 23 January, and Juventus left with a 2-1 win; the return on 6 February ended 1-1, and Milan were out, 3-2 on the aggregate — beaten not by a storm but by a persistent drizzle, which is the more Italian way to lose, and the harder to forgive oneself.

The UEFA Cup travelled further and behaved more strangely. In the round of sixteen Milan went to Roda JC Kerkrade on 19 February and won by a single goal; nine days later at San Siro they contrived to lose by a single goal after extra time, and the tie had to be settled from the penalty spot, where Milan prevailed — a small parable on the danger of assuming the second helping will taste like the first. The quarter-final against Hapoel Tel Aviv was staged on neutral ground in Cyprus, where Milan lost 1-0 on 14 March; the San Siro return on 21 March was won 2-0, and the 2-1 aggregate carried the rossoneri into a semi-final that would administer the year's most useful lesson.

The lesson arrived on 4 April in Dortmund, wearing yellow, and it was given without anaesthetic: Borussia 4, Milan 0. The return at San Siro was won 3-1, gallant and insufficient in equal measure, and Milan went out on aggregate to consider, over the summer, the difference between a good team and a serious one. Andriy Shevchenko at least had kept his ledger in order: fourteen goals in Serie A, seventeen in all competitions, the leading scorer of a season that began in confusion and closed in credit.

A Golden Goal in the East

The summer belonged to the World Cup, staged at the far end of the morning in Korea and Japan, where Italy travelled as contenders and returned as plaintiffs. On 18 June, in the round of sixteen, the co-hosts South Korea beat the azzurri 2-1 by golden goal — that briefly fashionable instrument of sudden death — and the name of the referee, Byron Moreno, entered the Italian vocabulary as a curse with a long shelf life. Whether the grievance was justice or consolation is a matter each tifoso settles according to his own digestion; what is beyond dispute is that the wound was real and did not close.

For Milan the deeper consequence was quieter and arrived almost at once. Immediately after the defeat Paolo Maldini, eight days short of his thirty-fourth birthday and the most-capped Italian in history with 126 appearances, retired from international football. A nation lost a monument; Milanello, by the cold arithmetic of rest and recovery, gained one back — for the miles no longer flown in an azzurro shirt would now be spent entirely in a rossonero one, and the autumn to come would show precisely what that was worth. There is a Lombard thrift in such accounting, and no shame in it: the city that built its fortune on careful ledgers has always known that what you decline to spend abroad you may invest at home.

The Captain Who Did Not Want to Leave

Every summer market produces one story that is really a novella, and in 2002 it had the face of Alessandro Nesta. He had captained Lazio since 1997; he had lifted with them the Cup Winners' Cup of 1999 and the scudetto of 1999-2000; he had turned away suitors with the serenity of a young man who believes that loyalty is a currency the world will always accept. The summer of 2002 declined the currency. Lazio's finances collapsed, and the sale of the captain became not a choice but an amputation.

The details deserve the moralist's underline. By his own account the players had gone eight months without pay; Nesta himself was owed roughly two million euro in back wages — and half of that debt he converted into Lazio shares, easing the pressure on the coffers of the very club that could no longer afford him. Find, in the whole cynical history of the transfer market, a gesture more quietly aristocratic than that. On 31 August 2002, the last day of the window, he was sold to Milan for a reported thirty-one million euro, the most expensive of Milan's summer signings, and he left the team of his heart the way a man leaves a burning house: because he must, and looking backward.

Milan received him as the fog receives a bell-tower — entirely, and without ceremony. He would anchor the defence for a decade; and within a year of the wound came the redemption, the Champions League itself, won in his very first season in rossonero. But that is the next chapter's business. In 2002 he was simply a great defender learning to be sad in a new city, and the city, to its lasting credit, set about giving him reasons to stop.

The Kitchen of the New Milan

Around Nesta the club shopped like a chef before a feast day. Clarence Seedorf arrived from Inter, of all houses — the deal built as an exchange, Francesco Coco crossing the city in the other direction, the valuation recorded at around twenty-two and a half million euro though contemporaries quoted higher figures, as they always do when a fee is barter rather than banknotes. Rivaldo came free from Barcelona, which in any ordinary summer would have been the headline of headlines; Jon Dahl Tomasson came free from Feyenoord; Dario Simic followed Seedorf across from Inter, Samuele Dalla Bona arrived from Chelsea, and Umit Davala joined Coco on the nerazzurro side of the ledger. It was not a spending spree so much as a composition: a free transfer here, a swap there, one great cheque written for the one irreplaceable man.

Pre-season gathered at Milanello in July with the squad thinned by the World Cup, several of the first team still on national duty or resting, and it wandered, as pre-seasons do, as far as Glasgow: on 28 July Milan drew 2-2 with Rangers at Ibrox, one of those friendlies that the record book keeps and the memory discards. Yet anyone watching with the right sort of eyes could already make out the shape of the dish Ancelotti was reducing — a midfield of thinkers, a defence of monuments, forwards who between them could pick any lock in Europe. It wanted only the autumn, and the autumn was coming.

Autumn of the Returning Kings

The Champions League placed Milan in a first group stage with Deportivo La Coruña, Lens and Bayern Munich, and the story was told in six evenings. Lens were beaten 2-1 at San Siro on 18 September; six days later Milan went to Deportivo and won 4-0, a scoreline that made the continent look up from its newspaper. Then, on the first evening of October, came the result that named the season: Bayern 1, Milan 2, both goals struck by Filippo Inzaghi, the second a header six minutes from the end — the pickpocket of the penalty area, who has never willingly scored an early goal when a late one would hurt the victim more.

Bayern were beaten again at San Siro on 23 October, 2-1; there were stumbles at Lens on 29 October, 2-1, and at home to Deportivo on 13 November, 1-2, with passage already arranged; and Milan advanced at the top of their group with twelve points from four wins. The second group stage, drawn with Real Madrid, Borussia Dortmund and Lokomotiv Moscow, allowed the year to answer its own spring. On 26 November at San Siro: Milan 1, Real Madrid 0, Shevchenko striking on 40 minutes. On 11 December, in Dortmund of all cathedrals: 0-1, Inzaghi on 49 minutes, victory on the very ground where eight months earlier Milan had conceded four without reply. Revenge, the Lombards know, is best served like ossobuco — slowly, at proper temperature, with the marrow intact.

Inzaghi was the engine of that autumn, and the pickpocket's ledger would close, at the end of the 2002-03 campaign, on seventeen goals in Serie A and thirty in all competitions, Milan's top scorer by a distance. But his numbers describe the harvest, never the method: the method was patience, larceny, and a personal quarrel with every offside line in Europe.

The Derby and the Verdict

The league, meanwhile, was being eaten in generous mouthfuls. Modena were beaten 3-0 away on 14 September; Torino were dismantled 6-0 at San Siro on 6 October; Atalanta fell 4-1 on their own ground on 20 October. There was one true bruise — 10 November, Juventus 2, Milan 1, the old enemy reminding the new pretender who still kept the deeds to the title — and there was one clean, necessary win over Roma, 1-0, on 7 December, the kind of result that wins nothing by itself and without which nothing is ever won.

Between the bruise and the Roma win came the derby, and the derby was the year in miniature. On 23 November, before 78,843 souls — the largest home crowd Milan would draw in the league all season — Milan beat Inter 1-0 at San Siro. Three days later, at the same address, Real Madrid were beaten by the same score. Two 1-0s in a single week, against the neighbour and against the grandest name in the European directory; and if you wish to know when the rest of the continent began to take Ancelotti's Milan seriously, you may set your watch by that week in November.

Milan entered the new year at the top of the table, and the chronicler must confess at once that spring would be unkind to that particular ambition: the scudetto went elsewhere, Juventus first and Inter second, Milan third with sixty-one points. But to weigh 2002 on the scale of the league alone is to measure a foundation by the height of its scaffolding. In twelve months Ancelotti had taken a convalescent squad to fourth place and back among the aristocracy; the club had gathered, in one summer, Nesta and Seedorf and Rivaldo and Tomasson; and the autumn had assembled — Maldini and Nesta behind, Pirlo and Gattuso and Seedorf and Rui Costa in the middle, Shevchenko and Inzaghi and Rivaldo ahead — the machine that within a year would take the Champions League and the Coppa Italia both. The fog of the Navigli, any Milanese will tell you, does not hide the city; it ripens it. In 2002 Milan ripened. The trumpets could wait for spring.