Two Nights in Rome

Five Years of Somebody Else's Banquet

Five. That is the number to hold before all the others in this chapter: five consecutive seasons in which the scudetto had crossed the city to the cousins of Internazionale, five years in which Milanisti learned the particular indigestion of watching the neighbours feast. Milan had not been champions of Italy since 2004. The club of Silvio Berlusconi was still grand and visibly ageing, and its grandeur had begun to be discussed in the vocabulary of the new decade — renewals, wage bills, columns that had to be made to balance. Then, in 2011, the table turned in both senses of the word: an eighteenth tricolour won in May, a Supercoppa lifted in Beijing in August, and around these triumphs a year so crowded with omens — a metronome given away, a heart that faltered, a Prime Minister who resigned — that the historian scarcely knows whether to file it under glory or under warning.

File it, for now, under both. This chronicle sits within the era we have called Decline and Rebirth, and 2011 is its strange, brilliant hinge: the last full blaze of the late-Berlusconi years, a bonfire whose light was real and whose fuel, as we shall see, was already running short.

Allegri Changes Key

The architect was a newcomer, and the previous chapter has already made his introductions. What it did not stop to record was the mechanism. Massimiliano Allegri had arrived without fanfare and without the ideological baggage that ruins so many clever men; his early Milan played a 4-3-3 that flattered nobody, and a lesser coach would have defended the blueprint to the death. Allegri instead did the rarest thing in football, which is to listen to his own material. In November 2010, after a 3-2 win over Bari that instructed rather more than it convinced, he folded the 4-3-3 away and set out a 4-3-1-2 — two strikers fed from behind, a midfield of labourers and professors — and the season changed key at once.

Days later Milan went top of Serie A on the November evening the last chapter has already set down, and never came down from it. There is a school of criticism that calls such football pragmatic, as though pragmatism were a vice. It is not a vice. It is a trade, and its practitioners are judged, like all tradesmen, in May.

The Swede at the Head of the Table

At the head of the table sat the Swede. The previous chapter signed him in the last days of August; this one had the use of him. In his first Milan season Zlatan Ibrahimović was less a player than an annexation: fourteen league goals and the title of Serie A's most valuable player at the season's end. The fourteen carried one of the campaign's small ironies, for Alexandre Pato and Robinho finished on fourteen apiece as well, a three-way equality that tells you the burden was shared even while the authority was not. Ibrahimović did not merely score for that Milan; he presided over it.

January brought the counting-house and the carnival to the same door, one entering, one leaving. An injury crisis demanded reinforcements and they came in a rush. On 25 January, Mark van Bommel — thirty-three years old, captain of Bayern Munich and of the Netherlands — had his Bayern contract dissolved at his own explicit request, on sporting grounds, so that he might join Milan at once. “Ik verlaat Bayern met pijn in mijn hart, maar met opgeheven hoofd,” he said — I leave Bayern with pain in my heart, but with my head held high. He became the thirteenth Dutchman in the club's history, and on the same day Milan took Urby Emanuelson out of Ajax; Nicola Legrottaglie came with them, lungs and muscle and an honest centre-half. Van Bommel was cup-tied for that spring's Champions League and could only watch it. By May he was a champion of Italy.

On 3 January Antonio Cassano arrived from Sampdoria, where a rift with the president had ended four seasons in acrimony, and he pulled on the shirt within the week: an imp of pure talent whom half of Italy had given up on and the other half had never stopped loving. And on or about the 11th, Ronaldinho left for Flamengo, taking with him the last of a certain samba Milan that had promised much, delivered intermittently, and smiled throughout.

An English Lesson, a Derby in Three Strokes

Europe administered its lesson in February, and the schoolmaster was improbably tall. Tottenham Hotspur came to San Siro on the 15th for the first knockout round of the Champions League, and before a crowd of some eighty thousand Peter Crouch scored in the 80th minute: 0-1, an away goal like a stone in the shoe. At White Hart Lane on 9 March Milan pressed and probed and found the door bolted — 0-0 — and went out of Europe by a single goal across one hundred and eighty minutes. For a club that keeps the European Cup the way other houses keep the family silver, the elimination stung less for its margin than for its message: the continent no longer feared us, and the continent was not wrong.

The reply came in the one language Milan still spoke fluently. On 2 April, in the derby, Inter were taken apart 3-0 at San Siro: Pato twice, with that sprinter's cruelty of his, and Cassano from the penalty spot, converting with the nonchalance of a man paying for his coffee. Milan beat Inter both home and away across the title season, and the double was worth more than the six points it brought — after five years of the neighbours' banquets, the geometry of the city had been redrawn.

The First Night in Rome

The coronation, when it came, was a goalless draw, and there is a Milanese rightness in that. On 7 May, at the Stadio Olimpico, Milan drew 0-0 with Roma and the eighteenth scudetto stopped being a hope and became a fact, secured with two matchdays to spare, nine points clear of an Inter who still had three matches to play and had already lost both derbies. Read the clinching eleven slowly, as one reads the names on a memorial: Abbiati; Abate, Nesta, Thiago Silva, Zambrotta; van Bommel, Gattuso, Seedorf; Boateng; Ibrahimović, Robinho. There stood the old guard — Nesta, Gattuso, Seedorf, with the captain Massimo Ambrosini carrying the armband he had inherited from Paolo Maldini in the summer of 2009 — alongside the new aristocracy of Thiago Silva, the finest defender in Italy and perhaps anywhere.

The final table read 82 points from 38 matches: twenty-four won, ten drawn, four lost; sixty-five scored and — the connoisseur's number — a mere twenty-four conceded. Inter finished on 76, Napoli on 70. Champions are usually praised for their attack, and the Swede earned every hymn sung to him; but this title was cooked on the low flame of its defence, Abbiati unhurried behind Nesta's anticipation and Thiago Silva's elegance, and in front of them a van Bommel who committed his fouls with the timing of a man who had read the referee's diary.

The Metronome Walks to Turin, the Circus Goes East

Then, days after the crown, the club made the mistake the decade would not forgive. On 18 May 2011 — the eve of his 32nd birthday — Andrea Pirlo announced his farewell, ten years of Milan ending not in rupture but in a shrug: no agreement on a renewal, a judgement from within that he fitted awkwardly into Allegri's system, and a free transfer to Juventus. A free transfer. The metronome of the great Milan midfields, handed to Turin for nothing, like a Stradivarius left on a tram. Behind the boardroom glass a column had been persuaded to balance; the price of it would be paid on grass, and by other people.

The summer's rebuilding was busy and, on paper, sensible. Philippe Mexes and Taye Taiwo came for nothing, out of Roma and Marseille, their arrivals announced by Galliani as early as the previous May; Alberto Aquilani came on a season's loan from Liverpool on 25 August; Antonio Nocerino was plucked from Palermo on deadline day, an hour before the window shut, with the paperwork moving faster than the reasoning, to cover for Mathieu Flamini's cruciate ligament, ruptured the day before; and a slight, sharp-eyed boy named Stephan El Shaarawy came in besides, half of him bought from Genoa in June, a purchase made against the future. Pre-season kept its old liturgy — Milanello, a 12-0 canter away at Solbiatese on 20 July, then the Audi Cup in Munich at the month's end, where Milan drew 1-1 with Bayern and lost the shoot-out before drawing 2-2 with Internacional and losing that one too.

The season's true opening was staged a hemisphere away. On 6 August, in the Beijing National Stadium, Milan met Inter for the Supercoppa Italiana, and after Sneijder had put the neighbours ahead in the 22nd minute the champions turned the evening around with the patience of men who knew their own worth: Ibrahimović in the 60th, Boateng in the 69th, 2-1, the first trophy of the new season lifted in China — Italian silverware travelling the silk road in reverse.

Autumn set two tables. In Europe, Group H dealt Milan the hardest card in the deck: Barcelona, with BATE Borisov and Viktoria Plzen for company. The campaign opened with a 2-2 draw away to Barcelona on 13 September, Pato and Thiago Silva scoring, and proceeded through 2-0 wins over Plzen and BATE at San Siro, a 1-1 in Belarus, a 2-3 home defeat to Barcelona on 23 November that was nobler than its scoreline, and a closing 2-2 in Plzen: nine points, second place behind Barcelona's sixteen, and passage to the last sixteen. In Italy the champions strung twelve matchdays together without defeat — ten won, two drawn — and climbed level with Juventus at the head of the table before the December pause. What waited beyond the calendar's edge is the next chapter's to count: the points that would separate Milan from Turin in May, and what the metronome given away in this one would be worth to the side that took him for nothing. Honesty need only whisper, here, that the Swede would have the best scoring season of his Milanese life, and that none of it would be enough.

The Second Night in Rome

And then the night that puts every league table in its place. On 29 October 2011 Milan won 3-2 away at Roma, and Antonio Cassano played in the city that had bought him a decade earlier, out of Bari, for sixty billion lire — at the time the largest fee ever paid anywhere for a teenager. In the early hours after the match, arriving back in Milan, he fell ill — his vision disturbed, his speech disturbed, his movement disturbed — and was rushed to hospital, where the doctors pronounced a sentence no dressing-room is built to hear: an ischaemic stroke, traced to a patent foramen ovale, a congenital defect of the atrial septum — a small opening in the wall between the upper chambers of the heart — that he had carried, unknowing, through every feint and every storm of his career. He had walked off a football pitch fit, and hours later he was fighting for his life.

The bulletins that followed were, by the standards of such weeks, merciful. Seventy-two hours of instrumental and neurological tests found no permanent damage; the flaw would be closed with what the club called a small operation, and on 4 November Cassano underwent cardiac surgery, Galliani — the club's practised voice of reassurance — declaring there was no risk to his career and setting the absence at four to six months. He would indeed return in the spring of 2012, on a date the next chapter keeps for itself. Through that winter there was an empty seat on the Milan bench where the most instinctive footballer of his generation should have been sitting, and something in the story resists its happy ending and demands to be kept: a man who had spent a career being told he did not take life seriously, discovering that life had not been entirely serious with him either.

November, and the Narrowing

November completed the year's education. On the 12th, with the sovereign-debt crisis at the gates, Silvio Berlusconi resigned as Prime Minister of Italy and the technocrats of Mario Monti took over the national accounts; at Milan, meanwhile, nothing changed on paper — president, owner and patron he remained, with Adriano Galliani running the football as vice-president and chief executive, as he had for a generation. But the tightening was real. The money that had built the great squads of the Berlusconi decades was narrowing to a thinner column, and within a year the champions would begin selling their best — a sorrow that belongs to the next chapter, though its shadow falls across this one.

So the year must be held in both hands at once. On the field, Milan in 2011 were the best team in Italy: champions in May with 82 points and a defence of bronze, winners again in Beijing in August, strong enough through autumn to climb level at the top of the league and to trade blows with Barcelona. In the same twelve months they gave Pirlo away for nothing, watched their owner's Italy hand itself to the accountants, and learned from a hospital bed in Rome how thin the wall is between a Saturday night and everything else. The eighteenth tricolour went up on the shirt that May. It would remain the newest one there for a very long time.