The Selling of the House

Fog on the Navigli

There are years that arrive like guests and years that arrive like bailiffs, and 2012 presented itself at the gates of Milanello with an inventory under its arm. The city itself was counting its spoons: Mario Monti's government of professors was administering austerity to a Republic feverish with euro-zone debt, and through the belly of Italian football the calcioscommesse betting scandal rumbled on like a meal that would not be forgiven. Milan — the city of fog on the Navigli, of the Madonnina keeping her small golden watch over everything — regarded both of her footballing children that winter and found each in transition: Inter sliding down from recent eminence, and the Rossoneri preparing, though nobody yet said it aloud, to dismantle with their own hands the side that was still defending the title of champions of Italy. Beyond the Alps of the mind, in Turin, an old rival was going unbeaten through an entire league season, had opened a stadium of its own the previous autumn, and had begun quietly laying the first stones of a dynasty.

For the historian of the Diavolo, 2012 divides as cleanly as a risotto is divided from the empty plate that follows it. In the first half of the year there was abundance: a title defended almost to the last, a Swedish colossus scoring at industrial rhythm, one famous European night when San Siro roared with its old lungs. In the second half came the reckoning: the two best players sold to Paris in a single July transaction, a generation of grey eminences released into legend, an autumn spent nearer the relegation places than the summit — and then, because football is a moralist with a taste for late plot-twists, a resurrection that began with a November victory over the champions. Decline and rebirth in one calendar year, with the fold of the newspaper falling precisely across the dog days of summer.

Eighty Points, and the Four That Mattered

The Milan of early 2012 was still, on its good evenings, a side of imperial bearing. Allegri had at his disposal a spine any manager in Europe would have traded his tailor for: Thiago Silva reading the game like a man who had seen the script in advance, Nesta beside him lending the defence its old patrician calm, Robinho darting between the lines with a street-footballer's cheek, and above them all Zlatan Ibrahimovic, the great Swede, converting arrogance into goals with the regularity of a municipal clock. Through March the champions were still leading the table, and when the mood took them they fed handsomely — four without reply away to Palermo on the third of the month, Ibrahimovic taking three of them; a taut 2-1 over Roma on the twenty-fourth, both goals again the Swede's. But the discerning palate had already caught the warning note in February: a 1-1 draw with Juventus on the twenty-fifth, a point applauded on the night and mourned by May, the way one mourns the small early economies one failed to make.

The run-in undid them. Across the final nine rounds Milan managed five wins, two draws and two defeats — the arithmetic of an honest side, not of a champion, and fatal in a season when Juventus declined all year to lose a single league match. The home defeat by Fiorentina on the seventh of April, 1-2 at San Siro, was the evening the title began audibly to creak; the derby of the sixth of May, lost 2-4 to Inter with Milito helping himself to three, was the evening it fell. Milan closed on eighty points, four short of Juventus's eighty-four — four points, the width of a February draw and an April stumble — and to give the season its full Turinese flavour they had also been put out of the Coppa Italia at the semi-final stage by the same opponent. Ibrahimovic at least kept his private empire in order: twenty-eight league goals and the capocannoniere's crown, thirty-five in all competitions — numbers that read now like a lavish farewell dinner, for it proved to be his final full season in red and black.

One Night of Plenty, Two Nights of Famine

Europe that spring served Milan the full menu — the feast, the fright and the famine. The feast came on the fifteenth of February, when Arsenal were received at San Siro for the first leg of the round of sixteen and dispatched 4-0 before 64,462 witnesses: Boateng after a quarter of an hour, Robinho twice either side of the interval, Ibrahimovic from the penalty spot with eleven minutes remaining. It was the old San Siro of the great European midweeks — lungs full, winter fog pierced by floodlight — and a wise man would have bottled the evening and cellared it, knowing what the year would later charge for such vintages.

The fright followed three weeks later at the Emirates, where Milan contrived to lose the second leg 0-3 with the whole calamity compressed into one half — Koscielny after seven minutes, Rosicky after twenty-six, a Van Persie penalty before the interval — and spent half-time contemplating one of the great European humiliations before hanging on, white-knuckled, to pass 4-3 on aggregate. A tie won by four goals had been survived by one, and the lesson in mortality was wasted on nobody.

The famine was administered, as in those years it usually was, by Barcelona in the quarter-final. At San Siro on the twenty-eighth of March, before an enormous congregation of 76,169, Milan held the Catalans to a goalless first leg — ninety minutes of held breath and disciplined suffering, a defensive liturgy Nesta's generation knew by heart. At the Camp Nou on the third of April the service ran to the home rite: a Messi penalty inside a quarter of an hour, answered on the half-hour by Nocerino — one candle of hope lit in the cathedral — before a second Messi penalty and a goal from Iniesta settled the argument and sent Barcelona through 3-1 on aggregate. Milan were not disgraced; but the frontier between the good and the supreme had been marked out once more in white chalk.

The Heart of Antonio Cassano

Every year keeps one parable for itself, and 2012's belonged to Antonio Cassano. The urchin genius from Bari had frightened the whole of football on the twenty-ninth of October 2011 when, arriving back in Milan from the away fixture in Rome, he suffered an ischaemic stroke. The doctors traced it to a patent foramen ovale — a small congenital opening in the wall between the upper chambers of the heart, carried unknowing through every feint and every quarrel of his career — and on the fourth of November he underwent cardiac surgery. Galliani, ever the club's reassuring maître d', declared that the career itself was in no danger and predicted an absence of four to six months; for once a director's optimism was honoured by the calendar.

He returned on the seventh of April 2012, five months after the stroke, sent on with eleven minutes to play in place of Nocerino while Fiorentina were busy winning 2-1 at San Siro. Milan lost the match, and in the ledger of the title race the loss cost them dearly; but the stadium rose to Cassano and gave its standing ovation to a man who had come back from the border of things, and for those minutes the scoreboard was the least important instrument in the ground. Football's moralists keep such moments filed under grace: the game remembering, briefly, that it is played by mortal men.

The epilogue was pure Milanese irony, dry as an aperitivo at dusk. In the dog days of August 2012 — the agreement struck on the twenty-first, the paperwork completed the day after, as paperwork is — Milan swapped Cassano to Inter, of all addresses, receiving Giampaolo Pazzini and paying a balancing fee reported at some seven and a half million euros to the Nerazzurri. A man who had cheated a stroke to pull the red-and-black shirt over his mended heart was, within five months of his ovation, sent across the city to the enemy. The moral is left, as always, to the reader.

July, and the Selling of the House

What happened in July had the character less of a transfer campaign than of a probate sale. Paris Saint-Germain, newly moneyed and eager to announce itself among the powers of Europe, arrived and took both Ibrahimovic and Thiago Silva — the sword and the shield of the reigning runners-up — for a combined fee commonly reported at some sixty-five million euros, of which around forty-two were said to be for the Brazilian alone; the accountants have always quarrelled over the precise split, and the chronicle will not adjudicate. Milan sold, in one stroke, its best forward and its best defender; Paris bought, in the same stroke, its seat at the high table. On the scales of the club's new austerity the transaction balanced; on the scales of the heart it did not, and the tifosi knew the difference before the ink was dry.

Around that central amputation, a generation quietly left the building. Nesta, Gattuso, Inzaghi, Seedorf, Van Bommel, Zambrotta — contracts expiring and not renewed, the grey eminences of two decades released into legend in a single summer — and Cassano swapped away besides. Ambrosini stayed to carry the armband, with Abbiati as his vice-captain: honest custodians of a house whose silver had gone to auction. Above them the old order was at least formally intact — Berlusconi, whom the board had named honorary president on the twenty-ninth of March, hovering over a club whose daily command belonged to Galliani, vice-president and chief executive — but even the boardroom now spoke the language of balance sheets rather than of galaxies. The era of decline had found its plainest expression: not a defeat, but an inventory.

Seven Points, and the Silence

The autumn presented the bill. The rebuilt Milan took seven points from its opening seven league matches, losing four of them, and then lost an eighth away to Lazio in October to stand third from bottom of Serie A — the club's worst start to a season since 1941-42 — while Allegri coached each week with the executioner's shadow lying across his technical area. The derby offered no refuge: on the seventh of October Inter won 1-0, completing a calendar year in which Milan lost all three derbies played — 1-0 in January, 2-4 in May, 1-0 in October — a bruising trilogy for a public raised on the assumption that the city, whatever else happened, was theirs. San Siro in those weeks had the acoustics of a cathedral between masses: vast, echoing, short of faith. The young men in the shirt were learning their trade in public, and the public, to its credit and against its instincts, was learning patience.

The Twenty-Fifth of November

And then, because Italian football is a serialised novel and never a treatise, came the twenty-fifth of November. Juventus arrived at San Siro wearing the champions' crown of a season without defeat and leading the table besides, and were beaten 1-0: a Robinho penalty just past the half-hour, then an hour of siege endured without conceding, as though the old house still remembered one or two of its own recipes. The victory sat at the heart of a turnaround of real substance: from the eighth round to the winter break Milan gathered six wins, two draws and three defeats — five matches unbeaten from the November draw at Napoli to the win over Pescara before Christmas — and closed the calendar year on twenty-seven points, out of the cellar and back in the upper half of the table. And the revival was carried not by expensive replacements — there were none — but by youth: El Shaarawy, a boy shouldering a grown club's attack, and Mattia De Sciglio, home-grown at Milanello, learning the full-back's trade under the floodlights. Rebirth, when at last it showed its face, wore an adolescent's.

Europe, meanwhile, was navigated in the new spirit of economy. Group C of the Champions League yielded a modest but sufficient harvest: a goalless September evening against Anderlecht at San Siro; a fine 3-2 win away to Zenit at the Petrovsky in October; a 0-1 defeat at Malaga's La Rosaleda three weeks later; 1-1 with the same Spaniards at home in November; a 3-1 victory in Brussels; and finally, in December, a 0-1 home loss to Zenit that cost nothing but pride. Second place in the group with eight points — two won, two drawn, two lost, seven scored, six conceded — and passage to the knockout phase. It was not the arithmetic of the great Milans; it was the arithmetic of survival, and in 2012 survival was the honest ambition, honestly met.

The Verdict

The national summer had already rehearsed the year's lesson in miniature. Italy — with the mended Cassano in the squad, a detail the sentimental chronicler refuses to surrender — reached the final of the European Championship in Poland and Ukraine, and there were taken apart 4-0 by Spain: a scoreline that instructed the whole peninsula, gently and completely, in the distance between dignity and dominion. It was the summer's second dismantling, and Milanese readers, fresh from their own, recognised the genre at once.

So how should the chronicle judge 2012? Harshly, and then gently. Harshly, because a title defended at the top of the table into spring was surrendered by four points and a late-season wobble; because a team of champions was sold room by room; because a club that had feasted on Arsenal in February was down among the relegation places by autumn, and lost every derby it played all year. Gently, because out of the inventory and the silence came something the money could not have bought: El Shaarawy and De Sciglio, a win over champions who had not lost a league match in the previous season, qualification out of a Champions League group earned on thrift and nerve. The year began with Ibrahimovic and ended with a boy; it began with abundance and ended with hope, which is only abundance deferred. On the Navigli the December fog came down as it always does, and Milan — the city and the club — walked into it poorer, younger, and not entirely without a lantern.