The Eighteenth Tricolour and the Trembling Heart

Fog on the Navigli, Light on the Madonnina

There is a moment, known to anyone who has wintered in Lombardy, when the fog that has sat for months upon the Navigli thins without warning and the Madonnina stands out gold against the white teeth of the Alps; and the winter of 2010 into the spring of 2011 was, for the red-and-black half of Milan, precisely such a moment. For five consecutive seasons 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 — and the club of Berlusconi, still grand but visibly ageing, had not been champion of Italy since 2004. 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's Quiet Geometry

The architect was a newcomer. Massimiliano Allegri had been appointed in June 2010 to replace Leonardo, and he 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 was more instructive than convincing, 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.

On the eleventh matchday Palermo came to San Siro and were beaten 3-1, and Milan went top of Serie A. They never came down. There is a school of criticism that calls such football pragmatic, as though pragmatism were a vice; but risotto, too, is pragmatic — rice, broth, patience, and the discipline not to stir in what the dish does not need — and nobody in Milan has ever apologised for risotto.

The Swede at the Head of the Table

At the head of the table sat the Swede. Zlatan Ibrahimovic had arrived from Barcelona on loan — a loan later made permanent, as loans of that species tend to be — and in his first Milan season he was less a signing than an annexation: fourteen league goals, twenty-one in all competitions, 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. Ibrahimovic 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: Mark van Bommel from Bayern Munich — in the winter window, whatever the hurried almanacs say — with Urby Emanuelson and Nicola Legrottaglie behind him, lungs and muscle and an honest centre-half. On 3 January Antonio Cassano arrived from Sampdoria, where a quarrel 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, the dialect of the Madonnina. 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 mattered beyond arithmetic — after five years of the neighbours' banquets, the geometry of the city had been redrawn.

A Goalless Coronation by the Tiber

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 became mathematics rather than hope, 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; Ibrahimovic, 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 ledger 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 verdict 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.

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, 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: Ibrahimovic 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 does not belong to this chapter, but honesty is obliged to whisper it: Milan would finish that 2011-12 season second on 80 points, four behind a Juventus that did not lose a single match and had, newly arrived on a free, a certain metronome conducting its midfield; Ibrahimovic's twenty-eight league goals would crown him capocannoniere and his thirty-five in all competitions would be the best of his Milanese life, and none of it would be enough.

The Night the Music Stopped

And then there is 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 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, caused by a congenital defect of the atrial septum, a small hole between the chambers of the heart that he had carried, unknowing, for his whole life. 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 in early November Cassano underwent heart surgery, Galliani 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. But something in the story resists its happy ending and demands to be kept: the most instinctive footballer of his generation, 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.

A Verdict in the November Rain

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 finances that had built the great squads of the Berlusconi decades were narrowing, 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 let the verdict be written with both hands. In 2011 Milan were, on the field, 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. And in the same twelve months the club gave away Pirlo, watched its owner's Italy falter, and learned from Cassano's hospital bed how thin the wall is between a Saturday night and everything else. The fog lifted over the Madonnina that spring and Milan saw the summit again, close and golden; what the city could not yet see was that this was the view from the last peak, and that the road ahead ran downhill for a long, long way.