The Polite Dismantling of an Empire

The Fog Over an Empire

There are years that move through a football club the way the autumn fog moves along the Navigli — slowly, politely, without raising its voice — until the lamps of the old certainties have been put out one by one and you find yourself standing in a city you no longer quite recognise. For Milan, 2009 was such a year. It began with the empire apparently intact: Carlo Ancelotti in the dugout he had occupied for eight seasons, Paolo Maldini in the number three shirt, a quarter of a century after his debut in 1985, Kaká gliding through the middle third with the serenity of a man who had never once considered the existence of mud. By the time the December fog came down again, all three were gone or going — the coach to London, the captain into history, Kaká to Madrid — and the family silver had been entrusted to a manager who, on the day of his appointment, had never coached a football match in his life.

It helps to remember what Italy was that year, because Milan has never existed apart from Italy; the club is a dish cooked in the national broth. The president of the club was also the head of the national government — Silvio Berlusconi presided over Milan and over Italy at the same time, an arrangement history will find stranger than we did — and in April the earth itself broke into the conversation, the L'Aquila earthquake of the sixth of that month pressing its grief upon the whole peninsula and upon the government's year. And above Italian football, meanwhile, stood the neighbours. José Mourinho's Internazionale were champions of the 2008-09 season and were preparing to be considerably more than champions, and there is no lamplight crueller to a fading aristocrat than the glow from the house across the landing.

An Englishman on the Navigli

January brought the strangest of house guests. David Beckham, on loan from Los Angeles Galaxy, arrived in the winter window to a chorus of raised eyebrows — the suspicion, freely expressed, being that this was commerce wearing shorts. The Englishman confounded the cynics in the simplest way available to a footballer, which is to play well, and he played well enough that what had begun as a curiosity became a genuine transatlantic tug-of-war over whether he might be kept for good, a dispute conducted between two clubs, two continents and one very famous right foot before he was returned, in the end, to his Californian employers. Milan had borrowed him as a novelty and given him back as a footballer, which is the kind of joke the game plays when nobody is watching.

In the same window, almost unnoticed beneath the Beckham noise, came the most important signature of the year. Thiago Silva arrived from Fluminense for something in the region of ten million euro — a defender who had come through tuberculosis, and who for that reason would not be woven into the squad until the following season. Milan bought him the way a prudent house lays down wine: not for tonight's table but for a future dinner, and rarely has a cellar decision been more handsomely vindicated.

And then there was the siege. Manchester City, newly enriched from Abu Dhabi, presented themselves in that same January with a proposal for Kaká whose true size no two newspapers could agree upon — a hundred million pounds was the figure most often reported, a world record had it ever been signed, and the exact number belongs to legend rather than to accountancy. Kaká said no. It had not been quite the right time, he explained years afterwards, and what decided him was the uncertainty over what exactly City were building. The rossoneri heard the refusal and celebrated in the piazzas of their hearts. They would have done better, as we shall see, to notice how narrow the margin had been: by the player's own later account, the only thing standing between him and the move had been his final word.

The Cruel Arithmetic of Bremen

Europe that spring offered Milan a competition the club did not quite know how to hold. The UEFA Cup is an honest tournament, but for a side that had twice won the Champions League under Ancelotti it felt like being asked to eat risotto from a paper plate, and Milan handled it with exactly the distracted courtesy such a meal invites. In the round of thirty-two came Werder Bremen: a one-all draw in Germany on the eighteenth of February, Inzaghi scoring on thirty-six minutes and Diego answering with six left, and then, on the twenty-sixth, a San Siro evening that deserves study in every school of football morality.

Pirlo scored on twenty-five minutes, Pato on thirty-two, and at two-nil the tie appeared to be concluded, folded, and put away in a drawer. Then Claudio Pizarro scored on sixty-seven minutes and again on seventy-seven, the evening ended two apiece, the aggregate stood at three-all, and Bremen passed through on away goals — that actuarial invention by which football pretends that a goal scored in one postcode weighs more than a goal scored in another. The Germans, for consolation, went all the way to the final of the competition, which proves at least that Milan had been eliminated by serious opponents; but a club learns more about itself from ten bad minutes at home than from any away-day misfortune, and those ten minutes said that the great machine had begun, very quietly, to trust itself too much.

Seventy-Four Points and a Farewell Handshake

In the league, Ancelotti's last Milan was what late Ancelotti teams tended to be: mature, intermittently magnificent, and a half-step slower than its own memory of itself. The final accounting read twenty-two wins, eight draws and eight defeats — seventy-four points, seventy goals scored and thirty-five conceded — which in most seasons is the arithmetic of contention. In this one it bought third place, a full ten points behind Mourinho's champion Inter, and level on seventy-four with Juventus, who took second by the small print of the tie-breakers, football's way of reminding you that even equality has a hierarchy. Kaká, in his farewell campaign, was the club's leading scorer in Serie A with sixteen goals; young Pato, the forward on whom the future had been provisionally written, led all competitions with eighteen.

And then the coach stood up from the table. Ancelotti resigned after the final match and by June belonged to Chelsea, closing eight seasons in which he had won the Champions League twice, in 2003 and 2007, and the scudetto of 2004 — eight seasons conducted with the unhurried patience of a man stirring something that must not be rushed. He had governed the most political dressing room in Italy without ever appearing to govern at all, which is the highest form of the art, and he left as he had ruled: no slammed door, no manifesto, a handshake and the sound of a chapter closing. Clubs replace coaches every summer; they replace eras rather less often, and only later do they notice which of the two has happened.

The Captain and the Curva

Now to the wound at the centre of the year, and it is a wound, however we dress it. On the twenty-fourth of May 2009, Paolo Maldini played his last match at San Siro — against Roma, a two-three defeat, as if the fixture list itself had declined to sentimentalise the occasion. Twenty-five seasons; somewhere in the region of nine hundred appearances, six hundred and forty-seven of them in Serie A; a debut in 1985 and not one day of it spent in another shirt. By every law of the theatre this afternoon should have been a coronation, the kind of farewell in which grown men discover things in their eyes and blame the wind.

Instead, a section of the Curva Sud's organised support chose the day for an execution of their own grievance. Banners rose where garlands should have been. Thank you captain, ran the cruellest of them, on the field an infinite champion, but you disrespected those who enriched you; another dredged up his old jibe that he considered them mercenaries and paupers; and while they chanted that there is only one captain, they raised the name of Franco Baresi against him — wielding one sacred number as a club with which to beat another. The quarrel was old, tracing back to the poisoned aftermath of Istanbul in 2005, to the night at Malpensa when supporters demanded that the players apologise for the final and Maldini flatly refused, and like most old quarrels it had long ago stopped being about its origin and become simply a habit of the blood.

Maldini's reply was not diplomatic, and I confess I honour him for it. He raised his middle finger toward the curva, and afterwards he said he was proud not to be one of them. The moralist in me is obliged to note that both parties told the truth as they understood it — the ultras had indeed followed him across two decades and a continent, and he had indeed refused to flatter them for it — but the moralist is also obliged to deliver a verdict, and it is this: a terrace that loves the shirt more than the man inside it has misunderstood the entire purpose of the shirt.

Football, which wounds carelessly, occasionally repairs with the same hand. One week later, on the thirty-first of May at the Stadio Franchi, the farewell arrived that Milan's own house had refused him — and it came, of all places, in Florence, from strangers. The Fiorentina players formed a guard of honour; the Florentine crowd rose to him in a standing ovation; and Milan won two-nil, Kaká on fifty-five minutes and Pato on seventy-five, to seal third place — the old captain escorted out of the game by the two men who would themselves be gone or diminished soon enough. It was appearance number nine hundred and two, and Serie A appearance number six hundred and forty-seven. The club retired his number three, reserving it for one of his sons should a son ever reach the first team — a condition Daniel Maldini would meet eleven years later, though the shirt itself has stayed folded. So closed the longest sentence in the club's grammar: begun in 1985, ended in Florence, applauded by the wrong crowd — or perhaps, in the end, by the only crowd that saw clearly.

Sixty-Five Million and a Removal Van

The January reprieve expired on the eighth of June, when Milan announced they had agreed to sell Kaká to Real Madrid for a reported sixty-five million euro — the figure was converted, rounded and disputed in every currency the newspapers could reach for, but the substance was the same in all of them: the finest attacking player of the late Ancelotti years, signed in 2003, Ballon d'Or of 2007 in rossonero, was made the first purchase of Florentino Pérez's second galáctico age. Madrid was assembling a constellation and wanted Milan's brightest star for the founding light. There is no shame in selling beauty — every great Italian house has done it, from the altarpiece to the archive — but there is always an invoice, and the invoice for beauty is never denominated only in money.

The rest of the summer ledger read like the estate sale it partly was. Out went Yoann Gourcuff to Bordeaux for some fifteen million; out, in the deeper sense, went Maldini, whose replacement was not a transfer but an impossibility. In came Klaas-Jan Huntelaar from, of all sellers, Real Madrid, for roughly the same fifteen million — a small return current in the great tide flowing toward the Bernabéu — along with Oguchi Onyewu on a free from Standard Liège and Ignazio Abate from Torino, while Thiago Silva, recovered at last, stepped out of the cellar and into the light. A Ballon d'Or had left; honest artisans had arrived. One does not sneer at artisans — cathedrals are built by them — but no one has ever crossed a city to watch scaffolding.

And into the empty dugout the club placed Leonardo, named at the very end of May, within days of Ancelotti's departure: the club's technical director elevated to his first coaching post of any kind, anywhere. Berlusconi remained president and owner, Adriano Galliani remained vice-president and chief executive, and the armband passed to Massimo Ambrosini, an honest sergeant promoted in an hour when the generals had all gone home. And beneath these headlines sat the quietest statistic of the summer, the one that ached most: for the first time since 1983-84, Milan would take the field for a season without a Maldini in the squad.

The Apprentice and the Long Autumn

The new age introduced itself with a beating. On the twenty-ninth of August, in only Leonardo's second league match, Mourinho's Inter came to the derby and won it four-nil — the reigning champions administering to the apprentice a lesson in the current ownership of the city, delivered at San Siro with the thoroughness of men who intended the scoreline as a document. Inter were on their way to the treble of 2009-10, and that evening no one in a red-and-black scarf could pretend the balance of Milan was other than it was. A derby lost four-nil is not a result; it is a census.

Yet the same autumn produced, in Europe, the year's one unarguable glory. Milan's Champions League group opened on the fifteenth of September in Marseille, where the eternal Filippo Inzaghi — a man who has spent his whole life arriving half a second before the defence's understanding of events — scored on twenty-eight and seventy-four minutes around a Heinze goal for a two-one win. A home stumble followed, nil-one to Zürich, Tihinen striking after ten minutes, and the doubters cleared their throats. And then came the twenty-first of October and the Bernabéu, where Kaká's new employers waited in their white finery, unbeaten in the group and its eventual winners. Milan won three-two in that enormous house — Pirlo on sixty-two minutes, Pato on sixty-six and again on eighty-eight, the boy twice silencing the cathedral that had just bought his elder brother in art. If the year 2009 kept one photograph for the family album, it was taken in Madrid.

The group was completed in the key of parity: one-all with Real at San Siro in November, Ronaldinho from the penalty spot; one-all with Marseille, Borriello after ten minutes; one-all in Zürich in December, Ronaldinho again from twelve yards. The table closed with Real Madrid on thirteen points and Milan on nine — two wins, three draws, one defeat — ahead of Marseille on seven and Zürich on four, and Milan passed into the spring as runners-up, where Manchester United were waiting; but that ambush belongs to another year's chapter.

At home, meanwhile, Leonardo's first half-season was a study in weather. There were afternoons of genuine sunlight — Roma beaten two-one in October, Lazio two-one in November, a preposterous four-three carnival against Cagliari on the twenty-second of November, Catania beaten two-nil in Sicily a week later with Huntelaar among the scorers, Sampdoria dispatched three-nil at San Siro on the sixth of December by Borriello, Seedorf and Pato inside twenty-three minutes — with Borriello, the leading Milan scorer in Serie A through the autumn, carrying the attack like a man who had found the family shop suddenly left in his keeping. And there were the fog-banks: the derby, above all, and a nil-two home surrender to Palermo on the thirteenth of December, Miccoli and Bresciano quieting San Siro in what turned out to be the last match Milan played in the calendar year, their seventeenth-round trip to Florence having been put back to February. So the year closed with the rossoneri second, behind Inter alone and a place better than the old regime had left them; the season itself would end a rung lower, third behind Inter and Roma, with Leonardo departing after a single campaign without a trophy. The apprenticeship, in other words, cost exactly what apprenticeships cost.

The Verdict of the Madonnina

How, then, to weigh 2009? Not by the trophy cabinet, which gained nothing, nor by the league table, which said third in May and second at Christmas and meant, on both occasions, not first. The year must be weighed instead as one weighs an inheritance: by what left the house. In twelve months Milan lost the coach of two European crowns, the captain of a quarter-century, and the last Ballon d'Or to be won in the shirt — and it lost them not to catastrophe but to time and to invoices, which is how empires actually end. Nobody storms the palace; the palace holds a series of dignified farewells, and one morning the fog lifts and the rooms are simply emptier.

And yet the moralist declines to file this year under grief alone. The same twelve months put Thiago Silva in the squad and three goals past Real Madrid in their own cathedral; they gave the armband to an honest man and the dugout to a brave one; and they proved, in Florence of all cities, that what Maldini had been was legible even to strangers — more legible, on the day itself, than it was to a corner of his own curva. The Madonnina has watched this city long enough to know that Milan is never finished, only refounded, and that the fog which closes a year is the same fog that will, some later morning, lift on a new one. In 2009 the rossoneri buried an era with full honours and imperfect manners. The refounding would take longer, and cost more, and belong to other chapters; this chapter's verdict is briefer. A great house changed hands with itself, and the finest defender of his age walked out of the game to a standing ovation — given, football being the ironist it is, by somebody else's crowd.