The Tendon and the Smile

Two Brazilians, One Year

Two Brazilians stand at either end of 2008. In February one of them came down on his left knee under the San Siro floodlights and never played for Milan again. In the summer the other arrived from Barcelona wearing the most famous smile in football. Milan entered the year as champions of Europe and of the world, the silverware of 2007 still warm in the cabinet; they left it fifth in Italy, exiled from the Champions League for the first time since 2001-02, playing their continental football on Thursday nights against Heerenveen and Braga. Between those two poles lies one of the strangest, saddest, most human years in the club's modern history.

The 2007-08 championship reads like a doctor's chart: fifth place, 64 points, eighteen wins, ten draws, ten defeats, sixty-six goals scored and thirty-eight allowed. A team that scores sixty-six times is not sick in the attack; a team that loses ten matches is sick somewhere subtler — in the legs, in the calendar, in the soul. Carlo Ancelotti presided over both halves of the year, the mourning and the rebuilding, at the same unhurried temperature: no panic, no flame turned suddenly high. It is a measure of the house of Berlusconi and Galliani that nobody reached for the axe. The scudetto, meanwhile, crossed the city: Internazionale were champions of Italy in the spring under Roberto Mancini, and by winter, under new management, they were marching toward another.

The Night the English Came Into the House

The wound that defined the winter was European, and it was administered with terrible courtesy. Milan, the defending champions, drew Arsenal in the round of sixteen and played a first leg of high chess at the Emirates on 20 February — goalless, 60,082 looking on, the tie balanced like a coin on its edge. Milanese logic said the San Siro would settle matters, because history said so: no English club had ever come to Milan's own ground in Europe and won. On 4 March, before 81,879, history was corrected. For eighty-three minutes the old fortress held; then Cesc Fàbregas struck in the 84th, Emmanuel Adebayor added a second in the dying breath of added time, and Arsenal walked out of the San Siro as the first Englishmen ever to beat Milan there in European competition. The champions of Europe were out of Europe, at home, under their own lights, in silence.

Nor was there a domestic cup to hide in, and that door had swung shut even earlier. Catania — provincial, unfashionable, admirably indifferent to reputations — had won 2-1 at the San Siro on 20 December and finished the job in Sicily on 16 January, a 1-1 draw at the Cibali in which Juan Manuel Vargas struck from distance, young Alberto Paloschi equalised as he had equalised in the first leg, and both teams ended the night with ten men, Andrea Sottil and Gennaro Gattuso sent off, as if the fixture itself had grown exasperated with everyone concerned. Three-two on aggregate, out at the round of sixteen, and out before the winter was properly cold. By March the season had been reduced to the league, and the league would be reduced, by May, to an autopsy.

The Falling of the Phenomenon

But the true heartbreak of 2008 was not a result at all. On the night of 13 February, in an ordinary league match against Livorno that would end 1-1 on a Pirlo penalty just after the hour, Ronaldo — Ronaldo Luís Nazário de Lima, Il Fenomeno, twice a world champion with Brazil, twice a Ballon d'Or winner and three times FIFA's World Player of the Year — rose for a ball as he had risen ten thousand times, landed as he had landed ten thousand times, and felt the patellar tendon in his left knee let go. Those who were present will tell you the sound a crowd makes at such a moment: not a roar, not a groan, but a great intake of breath, a whole stadium refusing at once to believe its eyes. He was carried off on a stretcher, in tears, and taken to hospital, and everyone watching understood, the way one understands that a curtain has come down, that they had very probably seen the last of him.

It was the third time a knee had betrayed him — the right one twice, in 1999 and 2000, now the left — and the doctors spoke of nine months, perhaps a year. Football's doctors are optimists by profession; the game's actuaries knew better. Milan let his contract run out that summer while he convalesced in Brazil, and the man who had scored twice in the 5-2 demolition of Napoli only a month earlier never played elite European football again. He would resurface at Corinthians — signed that December, back on a pitch the following March — and lay the boots down for good in February 2011, but the European chapter of perhaps the most gifted striker the game has produced closed that February night, in a Milan shirt, in front of the San Siro. It can be said without cruelty that the gods give such men everything except durable knees; it can be said with affection that at least the last stage he graced was the right one.

A Debut, a Golden Ball, and a Derby Won for Nothing

That 5-2 against Napoli, on 13 January, deserves its own paragraph, because it contained the whole year in miniature. Ronaldo scored in the 15th minute and again straight after the interval — his last great evening, though nobody in the ground could have known it. Napoli had twice pulled level through Sosa and a Domizzi penalty; Clarence Seedorf had struck in between, Kaká made it four in the 68th, and then, in the 74th minute, a young Brazilian named Alexandre Pato — signed the previous August from Internacional for that fee the reports never settled, somewhere between twenty-two and twenty-four million euro — scored on his Serie A debut.

He had waited a long time for those ninety minutes. The margin, he told ESPN Brasil years later, was four days: he arrived at seventeen and the window had already closed behind him. "Registration closed and at seventeen they could not enrol me," is how Pato puts it. So he spent six months with the reserves, training beside a teenaged Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang, while the first team flew off to be crowned champions of the world. And when the release finally came, it was Ronaldo who unlocked the door: three assists, by Pato's own count, laid on for the boy before one of them was at last converted. His teammates mobbed him. He wept. "Vi meus pais chorando na torcida" — I saw my parents crying among the fans. One Brazilian's twilight and another's dawn on the same green rectangle, in the same ninety minutes: football rarely writes its symbolism so legibly, and rarely with such tenderness.

Kaká carried what could be carried. The reigning Ballon d'Or and FIFA World Player finished the campaign as Milan's leading scorer with fifteen league goals, nineteen in all competitions — a whole season signed in a single hand. And there was one spring evening when the old order bared its teeth: on 4 May, in the Derby della Madonnina, Inzaghi struck in the 51st minute, Kaká in the 56th, and Milan beat Internazionale 2-1. A derby won, a title lost — for the neighbours took the scudetto anyway, and the Rossoneri finished fifth. A derby victory in a fifth-place season is a beautiful, useless thing: a floodlight left burning over a ground everybody has already left.

The Smile from Barcelona and the Last of Cafu

The response of the house was characteristically operatic. In the summer of 2008 Milan went to Barcelona and came back with Ronaldinho, for a fee reported at around twenty-one million euro: the most famous smile in football, the man whose feet had always seemed to hold opinions of their own, now recast as the headline of the reconstruction. Gianluca Zambrotta followed from the same shop for about nine million; Mathieu Flamini arrived on a free transfer from Arsenal, of all houses, as if by way of apology for March; Marco Borriello came in on co-ownership from Genoa; and, most sentimentally of all, Andriy Shevchenko came home on loan from Chelsea, a returning son whose place at the San Siro no transfer fee could describe. Going the other way were Alberto Gilardino, sold to Fiorentina for some fourteen million, and Ricardo Oliveira to Real Zaragoza.

And Cafu — that endless right flank made flesh — put the boots away, having added a third club world title the winter before and scored, in his farewell match, in a 4-1 win over Udinese. Milan had known only the finished article: the shuttle who ran the touchline until the touchline gave in. Where the running began was another matter. Marcos Evangelista de Morais grew up in Jardim Irene, on the poor far-southern edge of São Paulo, and was turned away at some ten trials — ten peneiras — before São Paulo FC finally took him in 1988, at eighteen, late by the standards of a country that likes its prodigies early. In a letter to the neighbourhood published long afterwards he remembered the balls of that childhood: socks bound tight, newspaper, pages torn out of school notebooks; flip-flops set down for goalposts on unpaved streets. He wrote that he had never imagined what it would come to mean when he pulled open his Brazil shirt at the 2002 World Cup and showed the words beneath — 100% Jardim Irene. He left with the gratitude of anyone who ever watched him run.

Off the field the club's owner had, in his spare time, retaken a country. Silvio Berlusconi won Italy's general election in April 2008 and took office as Prime Minister in May, resuming the double life of palazzo and pitch that has always made Milan something more theatrical than a mere football club; Adriano Galliani, his vice-president and managing director, ran the daily business as he had for decades. The summer's other Italian story was crueller: the Azzurri, world champions two years before, went out of Euro 2008 in the quarter-finals to Spain, on penalties — which is how the football gods dispose of empires when they are feeling tidy.

Thursday Nights and the Ninety-Third Minute

The new season began like a bad joke told twice. Bologna won 2-1 at the San Siro on the last day of August; Genoa won 2-0 a fortnight later; and the sceptics dipped their pens. Then the team remembered itself. On 28 September Ronaldinho — who else — decided the autumn derby, 1-0 over Inter with a goal in the 37th minute, and Milan climbed back into the argument. Then came a wild 4-2 defeat at Juventus on 14 December — Del Piero from the spot, Chiellini, Amauri twice, against a Pato strike and an Ambrosini reply — and then, a week later, a 5-1 answer against Udinese with Pato and Kaká scoring twice apiece and Seedorf making five. So the year closed: chasing an Inter now conducted by José Mourinho, near enough to hope, far enough to worry.

Europe, meanwhile, meant the UEFA Cup, and the UEFA Cup meant Thursday — late kick-offs, late departure gates, and lateness of every other kind besides. In Heerenveen on 23 October they won 3-1 at the Abe Lenstra Stadion, Calvin Jong-a-Pin turning a Kaká cross into his own net under pressure from Inzaghi, Gattuso adding a second and Inzaghi himself a third — his sixty-fourth goal in European competition, one more than Raúl, which made him the continent's leading marksman outright — with Danijel Pranjić replying from the penalty spot. Braga were beaten 1-0 on 6 November by a Ronaldinho goal in the third minute of added time. At Fratton Park on 27 November, Portsmouth led 2-0 through Kaboul and Kanu, whereupon Ronaldinho pulled one back in the 84th and Inzaghi — a man who has spent his whole professional life materialising at exactly such moments — equalised at the death. And on 17 December Wolfsburg drew 2-2 at the San Siro, Ambrosini heading in a Seedorf corner, Cristian Zaccardo levelling for the Germans and Pato restoring the lead barely fifty seconds later, before Mahir Sağlık struck nine minutes from time. The group was navigated, and Milan advanced to the last 32 as runners-up behind that same Wolfsburg: progress, of a kind, at the wrong altitude.

The Captain at Forty

Through it all walked Paolo Maldini, forty years old and captain still, the armband as natural on him as skin. This was his last season; the farewell of May 2009 already stood on the horizon, distant, certain, immovable. There is a kind of nobility in a great house that declines slowly while keeping its manners, and in 2008 Milan declined with more style than most clubs manage in their pomp: it lost a Phenomenon in February, a European crown in March and a Champions League place in May, and it answered with a smile bought from Barcelona and a son brought home from London.

What the year taught, it taught quietly. Decline in a great house does not arrive as catastrophe. It arrives as a procession of small late goals conceded and small late goals scored; as Thursdays where there used to be Wednesdays; as a stretcher in February and a salvation in the ninety-third minute in November. A club is its Maldinis and its wounded Ronaldos as much as its trophies, and somewhere in those twelve months, unannounced, an era had begun the long business of saying goodbye. The captain was forty. The boy who had wept at his first goal in January scored two more in December. Between the two of them, the house went on.