Athens, Monaco, Yokohama

Minus Eight

Minus eight. The number stood against Milan's name in the Serie A table before the first whistle of the 2006-07 championship, printed there the way a penalty is printed against a licence. Calciopoli had emptied its sentences over the peninsula the previous summer, Juventus had gone down, and Milan — spared the worst, not the shame — began the season with a ledger opened in red ink. The old Lombard bookkeepers, who gave the world double-entry accounting to keep merchants honest, would have admired the severity of that arithmetic even while doubting its justice.

Consider the strangeness of that year. Italy were champions of the world, the game's domestic house stood accused and mistrusted, and Internazionale, untouched by the sentences, were setting off on a procession that would end with a record 97 points; meanwhile the finest team of the age, Ancelotti's Milan, ageing like a great Barolo and roughly as slow to open, found itself queuing at the servants' entrance of the Champions League, obliged by its punishment to qualify through a preliminary round as though it were some ambitious provincial and not the holder of six European Cups. Out of that indignity came the most laden calendar year the club's trophy room had known in a decade. What the state subtracted at home, Milan went abroad and collected in silver: Europe in May, the Super Cup in August, the world in December.

Penance in the League of Others

The scudetto was never a real conversation. Inter, unburdened, ran to their 97 points; Roma followed at 75; and Milan's championship is best read as a subtraction: 19 victories, 12 draws and 7 defeats, 57 goals scored against 36 conceded, produced 69 points' worth of football, of which the state confiscated eight at the door, leaving 61 and fourth place — one point behind a Lazio side that carried a lighter penance of its own, a mere minus three.

There was a stretch in the depths of that campaign when the champions-to-be of Europe sat in the bottom half of Serie A, a humiliation the club absorbed with the patience of men who knew where the true examination would eventually be held. The recovery, when it came, was workmanlike rather than rhapsodic: Reggina beaten 3-1 in mid-January, a goalless afternoon in Rome against Lazio, Parma and Sampdoria and Atalanta each dispatched 1-0 — the single-course meals a great kitchen serves while it is saving its stove for the feast. Only occasionally did the old appetite flash out, as at Siena on 17 February, when the two sides conspired in a 4-3 for Milan, seven goals scattered like loose change across a Tuscan afternoon; and only once did the city truly wince, when Inter took the derby 2-1 on 11 March and reminded everyone which cousin owned the year at home. Gilardino, with 12 in the league, was the leading scorer of this domestic penance, and the fourth place he helped secure was, in truth, all the league was ever asked to provide: it kept Milan among Europe's invited for the season to follow, and Europe, as we shall see, was where Milan kept its conscience.

Through the Servants' Entrance

The European campaign had begun, remember, in the third qualifying round of the previous August, and the tie itself is told in the chapter that owns it. What belongs here is the posture rather than the scoreline: a six-time champion of Europe queuing at the servants' entrance without complaint, because the great houses of Lombardy have always understood that a title is defended in the doing, not in the protesting.

The knockout winter was a study in patience. At Celtic Park on 20 February nothing was scored and little was truly risked, and in the return at San Siro on 7 March the evening had wandered into extra time, and three minutes of it were gone, before Kaká — let us call him the Seraph, for he played that spring like a creature not entirely subject to gravity — slipped the decisive goal past the Scots. One goal across the better part of two hundred and ten minutes: not the stuff of legend, you will say, but legends rest on such foundations the way the Duomo rests on piles nobody photographs.

Bayern Munich were a sterner examination and were dispatched with more style: 2-2 at San Siro on 3 April, a scoreline that sent Milan to Bavaria as presumed dead, and then, on 11 April at the Allianz Arena, a performance of cold assurance — Seedorf on 27 minutes, Inzaghi on 31, two goals inside the half-hour, a 2-0 evening that closed the tie at 4-2 and reminded Germany that experience, in football as in diplomacy, travels remarkably well.

Then came Manchester United, and the great semi-final of the era. At Old Trafford on 24 April, Milan lost 3-2 and somehow left as favourites: Ronaldo — the Portuguese one; Milan by then employed the Brazilian original — had scored after five minutes and Rooney twice, the second deep in stoppage time, but between those wounds the Seraph had twice cut United open, and everyone in the old stadium understood that the tie had merely been postponed. At San Siro on 2 May the postponement expired. Kaká after 11 minutes, Seedorf on the half-hour, Gilardino late: 3-0 on the night, 5-3 across the two legs, and a dismantling so complete that the argument ended early and the stadium spent the last quarter of an hour rehearsing for Athens.

Pippo of the Offside Line

Istanbul lived in the Milanese body the way an old fracture lives in a wrist, aching when the weather turns. In 2005 Milan had led Liverpool 3-0 at the interval and lost on penalties, and Filippo Inzaghi had not even been named in the matchday squad, so that the worst night of the club's modern life had passed him by as a spectator; the wound had never properly closed. Athens, on 23 May 2007, offered the rarest mercy football has in its gift — the identical examination, resat: the same Liverpool, the same trophy, the Olympic Stadium this time, 63,000 present, Herbert Fandel of Germany carrying the whistle.

Inzaghi settled it, and he settled it in the two dialects he had spoken all his life. The first goal, arriving in first-half stoppage time, was pure opportunism, and it came with an asterisk that honesty requires: Pirlo's free kick struck Inzaghi and wrong-footed Reina — off the shoulder, said some; off the upper arm, said the replays; nothing at all, said Fandel, waving play on. Inzaghi himself later admitted that the deflection was intended and the arm was not, which is as close to a confession of genius as the poacher's trade allows. He had spent a career keeping house on the last centimetre of the offside line, a frontier no defender could quite see, and in Athens the ball sought him out the way trouble seeks a gossip.

The second, on 82 minutes, required no asterisk at all. The Seraph slid the pass through, Pippo carried the ball around Reina and finished from an angle geometry would have advised against, and CNN would file it under the headline 'Inzaghi's deadly display of striker's art'. Kuyt pulled one back for Liverpool in the 89th minute, and the closing moments were an agony of the purest Milanese kind — but this time the lead held, and 2-1 it finished.

And so Paolo Maldini, thirty-eight years old and captain of captains, climbed the steps and raised the European Cup for the fifth time in his own life and the seventh in the club's; and Carlo Ancelotti, who had now answered Istanbul with Athens, permitted himself the small, tired smile of a cook whose long slow braise — kept at a whisper for two years while lesser men shouted for more heat — had come to the table exactly as he had always intended it.

A Cup Raised in Mourning

The autumn brought the European Super Cup, and it must be written quietly. Three days before the match in Monaco, Antonio Puerta of Sevilla died, and the evening of 31 August at the Stade Louis II was played beneath a pall that no trophy could lift. Sevilla, grieving, went ahead through Renato after 14 minutes; Milan answered in the second half — Inzaghi on 55, Jankulovski on 62, Kaká on 87 — and won 3-1 before a sparse 17,822, a record fifth Super Cup entered in the club's books with less joy than any of the previous four. There are results that go into the record and are not celebrated, and this is one of them: football that week was reminded of its own smallness, and the wiser heads in both dressing rooms did not need reminding twice.

The Year of the Seraph

It was, above everything else, Kaká's year, and for once the records agree entirely with the eyes. Ten goals in the Champions League made him the competition's top scorer and its best player — the extra-time dagger against Celtic, the two that cut Old Trafford open, the early goal that began the demolition in the return — and when the year's individual honours were distributed, they went to him almost by acclamation. On 2 December he received the Ballon d'Or, polling 444 points, ahead of Cristiano Ronaldo on 277 and a young Lionel Messi on 255, the sixth Milan player to win it after Rivera, Gullit, Van Basten, Weah and Shevchenko; on 17 December, at the Zurich Opera House, he was named FIFA World Player of the Year with 1047 points; and the professionals themselves, voting through FIFPro, said the same. He did not pretend to be astonished. Asked about the golden ball by the Brazilian press, he answered with disarming frankness — 'eu já estava mais ou menos esperando isso', he had more or less been expecting it — because winning the Champions League and top-scoring it had made the difference. Posterity would add its own frame: he proved to be the last Brazilian ever to take that trophy, and the last man of any nation to hold those crowns before Messi and Ronaldo enclosed them for a generation. The Seraph stands, therefore, at the gate of an age — the final king of the old world, elected on merit by everyone who watched him run.

The club, meanwhile, went shopping in both directions of time. In January it had signed Ronaldo — the Brazilian, from Real Madrid, some 7.5 million euros for a monument acquired late in its history — and on 1 February the Phenomenon was presented in Milan, having reached Milanello at about six in the morning off a private aircraft of Berlusconi's that somebody in the party had christened 'I-Rony', to a crowd of journalists already waiting in the dark. He took the number 99, the 9 being Inzaghi's and not available; the physios drew him up a preparation programme of his own; and he trained at first with the halt and the unwanted — Borriello, Kaladze, Serginho, Ricardo Oliveira. He was also cup-tied, having already played that season's Champions League for Madrid, so that he watched Milan win the thing in Athens rather than playing in it. Massimo Oddo came from Lazio in the same window and, unlike him, was eligible for everything.

In the summer it reached instead for the future, paying Internacional a fee the reports never settled — twenty-two million euros by some accounts, twenty-four by others — for Alexandre Pato, announced on 2 August yet forbidden, as a non-EU minor under FIFA's rules, from official football until 3 January 2008 — so that Milan had bought a debut the calendar itself declined to deliver — while Emerson arrived from Madrid for a far more modest fee to thicken the middle of the pitch. Around these arrivals stood the permanent government: Berlusconi in the president's office, Galliani at his shoulder, Ancelotti in the dugout he had occupied since 2001, and a dressing room — Dida in goal; Cafu, Nesta, Maldini and Jankulovski across the back; Gattuso, Pirlo, Ambrosini and Seedorf in the engine room; the Seraph floating behind Inzaghi and Gilardino — that was ageing precisely at its zenith, like fruit at the exact hour before the fall.

Yokohama in December

December took them to Japan, where the world championship of clubs waited — a prize that, in this tournament's form, no European side had ever carried home. In the semi-final at Yokohama on 13 December, Urawa Red Diamonds resisted with honour until Seedorf, that philosopher of the interior spaces, resolved the matter on 68 minutes; 1-0, and Boca Juniors waited in the final.

On 16 December, before 68,263 at the International Stadium in Yokohama, Milan delivered the season's valedictory lecture: 4-2. Inzaghi — of course Inzaghi — scored twice, Nesta added another from the back, and the Seraph produced the emblem of the entire year, a solo run finished on 61 minutes, after which he was named man of the match and, at the tournament's close, its best player too — an honour that by December had acquired the feel of a standing appointment. Palacio and Ledesma replied for Boca, because the Argentines are never merely beaten, only outscored. Milan thus became the first European club — the first non-Brazilian club of any kind — to win the FIFA Club World Cup, and the season had found its closing adjective: universal.

No sober sum makes 2007 look probable. A year opened eight points in arrears, in a punishment mixed from other men's corruption; a year closed with the seventh European Cup, a record fifth Super Cup, the first world title of the new kind, and the golden ball and the FIFA crown together on one Brazilian's head. Running through every page of it, like a signature repeated by a man afraid of being forgotten, is the name of Filippo Inzaghi — the poacher written off a hundred times — who scored in every final Milan won that year: twice in Athens, once in Monaco, twice in Yokohama. Serie A had put Milan in the dock and Inter on the throne; Milan answered not with rhetoric but with silver. What the peninsula was left looking at, by the last week of that December, was an old, slow, incomparable team standing exactly where it had always believed it belonged: above everyone.