The Prodigal at Three in the Morning

A Republic of Two Popes

The fog came down early over the Navigli that winter and stayed, as if the city had decided that 2013 was a year best examined through gauze. Italy itself could hardly be seen clearly: the general election of February produced not a government but a shrug, and it took until April for Enrico Letta to assemble something that answered to the name; in Rome, more astonishingly still, Benedict XVI laid down the papacy that same February — the gesture of a man setting down a weight he no longer wished to pretend was light — and by March the cardinals had given the world Pope Francis. A republic of two Popes and, for a season, no parliament worth the name: the Milanese, who have watched empires come over the Alps and go back again, poured another espresso and turned to the sports pages, where the news was scarcely more reassuring.

For the Milan of Silvio Berlusconi — still the owner through Fininvest, honorary chairman of a club whose presidency sat formally vacant, with Adriano Galliani as vice-president and managing director doing the actual shopping — was a house after the auction. The summer before, the club had accepted Paris Saint-Germain's money for Thiago Silva and Zlatan Ibrahimovic almost in the same breath, and had let Gattuso, Inzaghi, Seedorf and Nesta walk off into legend elsewhere; financial constraint, that most unglamorous of tacticians, forbade like-for-like replacement. What remained was a squad of the young, the borrowed and the inexpensive, and a manager, Massimiliano Allegri, asked to cook a risotto with the rice but without the saffron.

And above them all sat Juventus — Antonio Conte's Juventus — taking the 2012-13 scudetto as they would take the next, with the appetite of a house that has decided the decade belongs to it. The old powers of the peninsula, Milan and Inter among them, slipped down the table and toward memory. This, then, was the landscape of 2013: decline admitted, austerity practised, and yet, as we shall see, a year that kept producing nights no money could have bought.

The Storm-Child of January

Into this frugal house, in the January window, walked Mario Balotelli. Galliani fetched him from Manchester City for a fee reported at around twenty million euros — a fortune by the new arithmetic, a bargain by the old — even as Alexandre Pato, the flickering promise of an earlier project, departed for Corinthians and Brazil. Around the storm-child were arranged the borrowed and the growing: Bojan Krkic, on loan from Roma since the summer, young M'Baye Niang still learning the trade. It was not so much a squad as a wager, and Galliani had placed it in midwinter with the calm of a man who has counted the table twice.

The wager paid on the very first evening. On 3 February, at San Siro against Udinese, Balotelli scored after roughly twenty-five minutes and then, with the match level and the clock showing the ninety-third, converted the penalty that won it 2-1 — a debut brace delivered with the serenity of a man signing a receipt. It was a fourth league win in five, and the city understood, through its fog, that the winter had changed key.

Two Nights with Barcelona

Then came the first of the year's two great nights with Barcelona. On 20 February, 79,532 souls — the largest home crowd of the season — filled San Siro for the Champions League round of sixteen and watched a Milan of workers and wagers do to the finest team of the age what nobody else was doing to them. Kevin-Prince Boateng struck on fifty-seven minutes, Sulley Muntari on eighty-one, and the 2-0 that went into the ledger was no accident of fortune but a plan executed: the spaces closed, the passing lanes filled with Lombard bodies, Messi and his geometers reduced to sketching triangles that led nowhere.

Three weeks later, on 12 March at Camp Nou, the geometry took its revenge. Messi twice, David Villa, Jordi Alba: 4-0 on the night, and Barcelona through 4-2 on aggregate — and let the record be kept honestly here, because lazy memory calls the whole tie a 4-0 and it was not; the 4-0 was only the second act. What Barcelona did that evening no side had ever done before: overturn a 2-0 first-leg deficit without even an away goal to lean upon. Milan came home with the peculiar consolation of the eliminated who had, for one February night at least, been better than the unbeatable.

The Spring Harvest

In the league, meanwhile, the climb proceeded with the patience of a mule track. Siena were beaten 2-1 on 6 January; a goalless afternoon at Sampdoria followed a week later; Bologna were taken 2-1 on 20 January with a brace from Pazzini; and El Shaarawy's goal won it at Atalanta on the 27th. Victory over Parma on 15 February lifted Milan to fourth, a point above Inter, and on 2 March Lazio were dismantled 3-0 — Pazzini twice, Boateng between — to carry the club into third. The foundations had been poured in the autumn before by Stephan El Shaarawy — Il Faraone, the boy-pharaoh, whose sixteen league goals, twenty in all competitions, made him the season's top scorer and its first saviour — and the spring masonry was Balotelli's.

The run had a shape even the statisticians could love: across the whole second half of the campaign, the half that belonged to calendar 2013, Milan lost only three matches in all competitions. A fourteen-game unbeaten league sequence carried them to 21 April, when Juventus — of course Juventus — ended it 1-0 in Turin's favour. The Coppa Italia had already closed at the quarter-final stage, quietly, a side dish nobody remembered ordering. When the ledger shut, it read: third place, seventy-two points, twenty-one wins, nine draws, eight defeats, sixty-seven scored, thirty-nine conceded, and passage to the Champions League play-off round. From the wreckage of the fire-sale this was not a triumph; it was something rarer, a recovery — and recoveries, like convalescence, are measured in appetite regained.

The Changing of the Guard

Summer took its customary toll. Massimo Ambrosini, thirty-six years old, captain, the last water-carrier of the old midfield, left at the expiry of his contract after eighteen years in rossonero; the armband passed to Riccardo Montolivo for the new season. The turnover of the squad went on as though the auctioneer had never quite left the building, and the supporters learned again the oldest arithmetic of decline: that a club sells its past to pay for its present.

August brought the play-off that third place had purchased. In Eindhoven on the 20th, El Shaarawy scored on the quarter-hour and Tim Matavz levelled just after the hour: 1-1 at the Philips Stadion, a result to be defended. At San Siro on the 28th no defending was required: Boateng after nine minutes, Balotelli on fifty-five, Boateng again on seventy-seven — 3-0 on the night, 4-1 the tie, the group stage secured. And then, in that same summer window, Boateng himself was gone, sold to Schalke 04, his farewell performance already given. The man of the Barcelona night and of the PSV return left with the season barely begun, which tells you all you need to know about the economics of the era.

Three in the Morning

But the summer's true story — the one by which this year will be remembered — closed at three in the morning. Four years earlier Milan had sold Ricardo Kaka to Real Madrid for what was then reported as a world-record fee; four seasons in white had brought him twenty-nine goals and thirty-two assists in a hundred and twenty appearances — respectable numbers for an ordinary man, a kind of exile for him. In the last days of August he said in public what everyone had long read in his face: he wanted to leave Madrid.

Galliani negotiates the way other men fish at night — patiently, in the dark, certain the water holds something — and the talks ran deep into the small hours, closing somewhere between half past two and three in the morning. On 2 September the club confirmed it, and Galliani pronounced the verdict in two words: 'Done deal.' A free transfer, nothing owed to Madrid; a two-year contract at around four million net a season, a fraction of what he had been paid in Spain. They gave him back the number 22 he had worn when the world was younger, which was less a line on a squad list than an acknowledgement.

Understand what it was that came home. Kaka was the last Milan player to win the Ballon d'Or, in 2007 — the final jewel of the golden era — and he returned to a club that had sold its champions and was counting its change. The results, as we shall see, turned sour; the love did not. On 26 November, at Celtic Park, he opened a 3-0 win with a header from Birsa's corner after thirteen minutes, and for a moment the whole scattered family of the rossoneri remembered what it was to be led by grace. The prodigal had not come back to a feast — there was no fatted calf left in the larder — but he came back, and in 2013 the coming back was the feast.

Autumn in a Minor Key

The league season that autumn was written in a minor key from its opening bar. On 24 August, newly promoted Hellas Verona beat Milan 2-1, and the pattern announced itself early: a 3-1 dispatch of Cagliari, then a 2-2 at Torino, a 1-2 home defeat to Napoli, a 3-3 at Bologna in which points leaked like wine from a cracked demijohn, a narrow 1-0 over Sampdoria, a 2-3 at Juventus that was braver than its score, a 1-0 over Udinese, a 2-3 at Parma, a 1-1 with Lazio. By the turn of the year — the derby at San Siro lost 1-0 to Inter on 22 December, a last indignity filed under Christmas — Milan sat in mid-table, which for this club was not a league position but a diagnosis.

Europe, strangely, obeyed a different music. Celtic were beaten 2-0 at San Siro in September, Cristian Zapata and Muntari striking late; at Ajax, Stefano Denswil's ninetieth-minute goal was answered by Balotelli from the spot four minutes into stoppage time, the storm-child unbothered by clocks; Robinho scored inside a minute against Barcelona at San Siro and Messi replied three minutes later for 1-1; at Camp Nou Milan fell 3-1, Messi from the penalty spot and again near the end, Busquets between, with Pique's own goal on the stroke of half-time the visitors' consolation. Then Celtic Park, and Kaka's header, and 3-0. And on 11 December a goalless draw with Ajax at San Siro — played most of the night a man short after Montolivo's red card — sealed second place in the group behind Barcelona and passage to the last sixteen. Ten men holding the door: the whole year in a single image.

Allegri had by now coached this club through the fire-sale, the recovery and the relapse, and the entire calendar of 2013 sat under his stewardship. His reward waited just across the year's border: on 12 January 2014 Milan would lose 4-3 at newly promoted Sassuolo, and on the 13th he would be dismissed, with Clarence Seedorf — one of the very elders let go in 2012 — summoned back to replace him. But that is the next chapter's business. In December 2013 he was still there, a man managing decline with the tools of decline, and history has judged him more kindly than that winter did.

The Verdict

One event of November belongs in this chronicle though it happened in Rome. Silvio Berlusconi, who had bankrolled this club since 1986 and built upon its trophies a stage for everything else he became, was expelled from the Senate following his conviction for tax fraud. Whatever one's politics — and this chronicler keeps his in a drawer with the fishing tackle — the symbolism required no translator: the owner diminished in the capital, the club diminished on the peninsula, the two declines walking arm in arm like old men along the Navigli at dusk.

So what was 2013? It was a third place built from a fire-sale, which deserves more honour than it was given; one immortal February night against Barcelona and one humbling March one; the boy-pharaoh's goals and the storm-child's nerveless penalties; an autumn that curdled, and a European group saved by ten men. Above all it was a homecoming concluded at three in the morning — because the truest transactions of the heart are always signed at hours when sensible men are asleep. Milan ended the year in mid-table and unmistakably mortal, holding in Kaka's return not a solution but a candle: not enough, in that fog, to cook by, but enough — just — to see the way home.