A Sale in July, a Boy in November

A Motion Carried in March

On the twenty-ninth of March 2012 the board of A.C. Milan carried a motion and made Silvio Berlusconi honorary president. Nothing changed that afternoon and everything did. The daily command of the club already belonged to Adriano Galliani, vice-president and chief executive, and it would go on belonging to him; but a title conferred across a boardroom table is a form of punctuation, and this one closed a long sentence. Beyond the glass the Republic was being taught thrift by Mario Monti's government of professors, austerity administered to a country feverish with euro-zone debt, while through the belly of Italian football the calcioscommesse betting scandal rumbled on, unfinished. Both of the city's footballing children were in transition that season: Inter sliding down from recent eminence, and the Rossoneri still wearing the crown of champions of Italy while preparing — though nobody yet said it aloud — to take that side apart with their own hands. In Turin an old rival was going through an entire league season without losing a match, in a stadium it had opened for itself the previous autumn, and was laying the first stones of a dynasty.

The year splits at the summer, and splits cleanly. Before it, abundance: a title defended almost to the final round, a Swedish colossus scoring at industrial rhythm, one famous European night when San Siro used its old lungs. After it, the reckoning: the two best players in the squad 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 an appetite for late plot-twists, a resurrection that began with a November win over the champions. Decline and rebirth inside one calendar year, the fold of the page falling exactly across the dog days.

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 been shown 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 Ibrahimović, the great Swede, converting arrogance into goals with the regularity of a municipal clock. Through March the champions were still top of the table, and when the mood took them they fed handsomely: four without reply away to Palermo on the third of the month, three of them Ibrahimović's; a taut 2-1 over Roma on the twenty-fourth, both goals again the Swede's. But the warning note had been struck 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 a small economy one failed to make.

The run-in undid them. Across the final nine rounds Milan managed five wins, two draws and two defeats: the record of an honest side, not of a champion, and fatal in a season when Juventus declined all year to lose a single league match, their midfield conducted by the metronome Milan had handed them on a free transfer the previous May. 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 second on eighty points against 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 been put out of the Coppa Italia at the semi-final stage by the same opponent. Ibrahimović at least kept his private empire in order: twenty-eight league goals and the capocannoniere's crown, thirty-five in all competitions, the best tally of his Milanese life. Those figures 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 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, Ibrahimović from the penalty spot with eleven minutes remaining. It was the old San Siro of the great European midweeks, 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 a single 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 lit against the dark — 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 — though only its second half, the mending rather than the wound. The stroke that had felled him the previous October, the small congenital opening in his heart and the surgery that closed it, are told in the chapter where they happened; what belongs to this year is the coming back, and Galliani's four-to-six-month promise arriving on time.

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 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. Such moments are filed under grace: the game remembering, briefly, that it is played by mortal men.

The epilogue was pure Milanese irony, and it was transacted at a desk in August — 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.

The Sword and the Shield Go to Paris

What happened in July had the character less of a transfer campaign than of a probate sale. Paris Saint-Germain, newly moneyed and impatient to announce itself among the powers of Europe, arrived and took both Ibrahimović 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. Reports differ on how that sum divided; the figure most often given for the Brazilian alone is around forty-two million, and this chronicle will not pretend to settle the point. 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 left the building without ceremony. 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 — with Cassano swapped away besides. Ambrosini stayed to carry the armband, Abbiati beside him as vice-captain: honest custodians of a house whose silver had gone to auction. Above them the old order stood formally intact, Berlusconi honorary since March, Galliani in daily command; but the talk behind the boardroom glass had shrunk from galaxies to what could be afforded. The era of decline had found its plainest expression. Not a defeat: an inventory.

Seven Points, and the Silence

The autumn came without mercy. 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 sound of a very large room holding too few people, the noise going up into the girders and finding nothing to come back off. 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 crown of a season without a single 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 the things it used to know. 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. The revival was carried by no expensive replacement, there being 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 was navigated in the same 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 on eight points — two won, two drawn, two lost, seven scored, six conceded — and passage to the knockout phase. It was not the kind of European autumn the great Milans had known. But in 2012 survival was the honest ambition, and it was honestly met.

Two Dismantlings

The national summer had already rehearsed the year's lesson in miniature. Italy — with the mended Cassano in the squad, a detail sentiment declines 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.

Both halves of the year are true, and neither cancels the other. A title held at the top of the table into spring was given away by four points and a stumbling run-in; a team of champions was sold room by room; a side that had put four past Arsenal in February stood among the relegation places by October and lost every derby it played all year. Out of those same twelve months came something no money in Paris could have bought: El Shaarawy and De Sciglio, a win over champions who had gone a whole league season unbeaten, a Champions League group survived on thrift and nerve. The year opened with Ibrahimović and closed with a boy. It opened with abundance and closed with hope, which is only abundance deferred. The house had been emptied to the walls; and what walked into it that December was young enough not to have counted what was missing.