Four Helmsmen in the Fog

The Fog Over Milanello

The Lombard winter of 2014 arrived with its usual apparatus — fog on the Navigli, the Madonnina gilded and remote above a city already rehearsing for its Expo — and it found Associazione Calcio Milan in precisely the condition the fog seemed invented to describe: a club that could no longer see its own outlines. In the space of one calendar year, four different men would sit on the technical bench of the Rossoneri. First the coach who had delivered the scudetto of 2011; then, for forty-eight hours, a loyal old lieutenant keeping the seat warm; then a champion who took off his boots on a Tuesday in Brazil and wore the manager's suit by Thursday; and finally a centre-forward who had spent his entire playing life inside the six-yard box. No institution changes helmsmen four times in twelve months because things are going well.

The bridge of the ship was itself a study in fog. Silvio Berlusconi remained honorary chairman, the club still wholly owned by his Fininvest, but the chairmanship proper stood vacant, and along the corridors a quiet war of direction simmered between Adriano Galliani, the old consigliere of the trophy-laden years, and Barbara Berlusconi, the daughter of the house. On the pitch, Riccardo Montolivo wore the captain's armband; above the pitch, nobody quite wore anything. And away to the west, Juventus were completing a third consecutive scudetto under Antonio Conte, and would end the 2013-14 championship on a record hundred and two points, forty-five ahead of Milan — a distance measured not in form but in epochs.

Four Goals from a Boy of Nineteen

The year's first executioner came not from Madrid or Turin but from Sassuolo, a town the football atlas had barely registered, and he was nineteen years old. On 12 January at the Mapei Stadium in Reggio Emilia, Milan went two goals up inside a quarter of an hour through Robinho and Balotelli and proceeded to play with the distracted elegance of a nobleman who assumes the estate runs itself. Domenico Berardi then scored four times — four, in a single league match, the first man in the history of Serie A ever to put four past Milan in the championship — and Sassuolo won 4-3, Montolivo's reply serving only as punctuation. There are defeats that are accidents and defeats that are diagnoses. This was a diagnosis.

Massimiliano Allegri, who had brought the club its scudetto of 2010-11 and had been living ever since on the dwindling interest of that capital, was dismissed the next day, 13 January. He left as such men usually leave — judged less on the title he had won than on the squad he had lately been given, a risotto ordered without the saffron and sent back for lacking colour. Milan lay eleventh in the table. Eleventh: a word which, set beside this club's name, read like a misprint.

The Metronome Takes the Baton

What followed was Milanese opera staged in a boardroom. On 14 January, Clarence Seedorf announced the end of his playing career, its last two years spent at Botafogo in Brazil; on 16 January he was unveiled as head coach of Milan, with Mauro Tassotti, most faithful of servants, holding the tiller for the two days in between. Seedorf had never coached anybody. He had, however, been the Metronome of the great sides of the previous decade — a red-and-black decade, 2002 to 2012, with the Champions Leagues of 2003 and 2007 kept in his pocket like a watch — and Berlusconi, in summoning him, was really summoning a memory, as if the past, invited to dinner, might consent to stay and balance the books.

The sentiment was genuine, the expectation impossible, and Seedorf, to his lasting credit, did not drown. From a side he inherited in eleventh place he extracted thirty-five of the fifty-seven league points on offer — the fourth-best haul in Serie A across that stretch — and lifted Milan to eighth. And on 4 May he was granted the one evening that redeems a purgatorial season: the derby. Nigel de Jong, a midfielder whose art was subtraction, rose in the sixty-fifth minute to add — his header from Balotelli's free-kick beat Inter 1-0 at San Siro. The faint arithmetic of Europe flickered a while longer that night, and the old stadium allowed itself, briefly, to believe.

Diego Costa, Twice, and the Cold Arithmetic

Europe, meanwhile, was composing its farewell. The Champions League's round of sixteen paired Milan with Atlético Madrid, Diego Simeone's magnificent scavengers, and the tie unfolded with the pitiless logic of a fable. At San Siro on 19 February, Diego Costa struck in the eighty-third minute — 0-1, an away goal lodged like a splinter under the skin. At the Vicente Calderón on 11 March the splinter became a wound: Costa after three minutes, Arda Turan on forty, Raúl García on seventy, Costa again on eighty-five. Four-one on the night, five-one on the aggregate; Atlético marched on all the way to that season's final, and Milan went home to consider what home now meant.

Yet the Calderón preserved one image for the sentimentalists. In the twenty-seventh minute Kaká scored — a Milan goal in Europe from the last of the club's princes — and though nobody could certify it at the time, it was a parting gesture: on 30 June his contract was terminated and he departed, towards São Paulo on loan and then Orlando. The domestic cups offered no refuge either. Udinese had ended the Coppa Italia at the quarter-final stage on 22 January, in front of 10,227 spectators — the smallest home congregation of the season, an attendance that was itself a species of criticism. Then on 2 March, Juventus visited San Siro before 75,589, the largest league gate of that season, and won 0-2 through Llorente on forty-four minutes and Tevez on sixty-eight. The full house had come to measure the distance, and the distance was duly measured.

Eighth Place, and the Door

The league season closed on 18 May with a 2-1 win at San Siro over Sassuolo — January's tormentor reduced to May's footnote — confirming eighth place. The ledger read sixteen victories, nine draws, thirteen defeats; fifty-seven scored, forty-nine conceded, fifty-seven points; level on points with Torino in seventh, three short of Inter in fifth, forty-five adrift of Juventus. The almanacs quarrel politely over the framing — the first failure to qualify for Europe since 1997-98 by one reckoning, or, by another, a coming 2014-15 that would be the first season without continental football since 1998-99 — but the substance was single and heavy: for the first time in a generation's working memory, autumn at San Siro would carry no European nights.

Seedorf, who had taken over a listing ship and steered it at least to the sandbank, might reasonably have expected the refit. Instead, on 9 June, barely five months after his appointment, he was dismissed. That same day the club announced Filippo Inzaghi, promoted from the Primavera side he had been coaching, on a contract running to 30 June 2016 — his first senior post, exactly as the bench had been Seedorf's first. One legend was shown the door and another handed the identical dream, and a house that had once selected its coaches with a vintner's patience now changed them like a gambler changing tables. That, more than any scoreline, was the emblem of 2014: a proud institution unsure how to administer its own decline.

A Summer of Farewells

The summer confirmed the direction of travel. Kaká went quietly, as recorded. Balotelli went loudly, as was his custom: sold to Liverpool on 25 August for a fee the English press wrote as sixteen million pounds and other tellers rounded otherwise, the figure — like Mario himself — declining to stand still. He left having scored, in June, Italy's winning goal against England at the World Cup in Brazil: one bright flare in an Azzurri campaign that expired in the group stage and carried off Cesare Prandelli with it. By August, Antonio Conte had exchanged the champions' bench in Turin for the national one. Italian football was rearranging all of its furniture at once, and Milan's rooms were emptier than most.

In came the economy class of a club that had once flown only by charter: Jérémy Ménez, free from Paris Saint-Germain, announced on 14 June; Diego López, free from Real Madrid on 12 August; Fernando Torres, borrowed from Chelsea on a two-year loan on 31 August; and, on 1 September, Giacomo Bonaventura from Atalanta for seven million euro — a modest outlay that would begin repaying itself within a fortnight. The pre-season, meanwhile, told its own blunt truth. At the International Champions Cup in the United States and Canada, from late July into early August, Milan lost all three group matches — 0-3 to Olympiacos in Toronto, 1-5 to Manchester City in Pittsburgh, 0-2 to Liverpool — and finished bottom of the group: ten conceded, one scored. Friendlies prove little, say the wise; but they can confess a mood, and the mood was confessed.

The Poacher's Autumn

Inzaghi began, as poachers do, with a strike at first light. On 31 August, in his Serie A managerial debut, Milan beat Lazio 3-1 at San Siro: Keisuke Honda after seven minutes, then Sulley Muntari, then a Ménez penalty, with Lazio's goal arriving only by way of an own goal from Alex, and a late Candreva penalty saved into the bargain. A crowd of 36,674 watched — the public, too, was waiting for proof — but the football carried a briskness that felt, for an afternoon, like spring arriving in the wrong season.

Two weeks later, on 14 September at the Tardini, came the year's baroque masterpiece: Parma 4, Milan 5. Nine goals, both sides finishing with ten men, an afternoon that observed no tactical religion known to man. Bonaventura scored, a fortnight after signing; Honda scored; de Jong, subtraction itself, added again; and Ménez scored twice, once from the spot and once — for Milan's fifth — with a backheel of such insolence that it seemed less a finish than an epigram. Parma's four came through Cassano, Felipe, Lucarelli and a De Sciglio own goal, and the neutral left the ground fed like a man after a four-hour Sunday lunch, unsure whether he had witnessed a feast or a collapse of all discipline. Both, naturally. It was 2014.

Autumn then administered its correctives. At San Siro on 20 September, Juventus won 1-0, Tevez once again the accountant of the difference with a finish on seventy-one minutes. And on 23 November the return derby, played before 79,173 — the fullest San Siro of the season — ended 1-1: Ménez volleyed Milan ahead in the twenty-third minute from El Shaarawy's cross, and Joel Obi levelled just after the hour, on the very evening Roberto Mancini returned to Inter's bench. Ménez, the free transfer, was becoming the improbable talisman of the age; he would finish the season with sixteen goals in all competitions. Beneath him ran the year's most melancholy statistic: that Diego López, the goalkeeper, was so often Milan's best player. When a club's outstanding performer stands between the posts, the confession has already been signed.

The Verdict of the Fog

What, then, was 2014? It was the year in which Milan attempted to pay the debts of the present with the coin of the past, and discovered the exchange rate ruinous. Seedorf in January, Inzaghi in June: two beloved sons summoned to the bench precisely because they were beloved, each asked to perform, without apprenticeship, the most difficult job in Italian football — the resurrection of a great house on a diminished budget, while its owners argued in the corridor. Neither summons was cynical; both were sentimental; and sentiment, as every maker of risotto knows, is no substitute for stock.

The ledger will forever read: eighth place, no Europe for the first time since the nineties, a round-of-sixteen surrender to Atlético, a boy from Sassuolo with four goals in one evening, a legend dismissed after five months. But the honest chronicler records the rest as well: de Jong's derby header, Kaká's farewell goal in the Madrid night, Bonaventura arriving for seven million, a backheel at Parma that historians of the game's small arts may yet catalogue. Beyond the Madonnina the Alps stood where they always stand — indifferent, snow-lit, patient — and beneath her the fog sat on the city and the club alike. Fog on the Navigli always lifts; that is its single mercy. The question, that winter, was only how many seasons the lifting would take.