The Fair, the Fog and the Boy from Castellammare

A City in Lights, a Club in Shadow

There are years when a city and its football club walk in step, and there are years when they turn their backs on one another like an old couple quarrelling over the risotto, and 2015 was emphatically the second kind. From the first of May to the last day of October the world came to Milan for Expo 2015, the Universal Exposition, to discuss the feeding of the planet; the city glittered, the trams ran full of delegates and dreamers, and for six months Lombardy permitted itself to believe it was once again the centre of the civilised world. Down the line at San Siro, meanwhile, the club that had once fed Europe the richest football it ever ate was living on reheated broth: no continental campaign for a second successive season, a berth in the grey middle of the table, and a boardroom that could not decide to whom it belonged.

The calendar year straddled two campaigns and two benches. Its first half was the joyless run-in of 2014-15 under Filippo Inzaghi, in what would remain his only season as Milan's head coach; its second half was the beginning of 2015-16 under Sinisa Mihajlovic, the Serb appointed in the summer to impose discipline where sentiment had failed. In neither season did Milan play a single minute of European football, and that absence — unthinkable a decade before, when the club treated the great continental nights as a birthright — is the fog through which every event of this chapter must be read. The Madonnina still watched over the city from her spire, and beyond her, on the clear days, the Alps; but between the golden lady and the mountains lay a club that had misplaced its compass.

The Winter of Pippo

They had given the bench to Superpippo on the theory that a man who had spent a career living off the last centimetre of the offside line could teach others the scent of a goal, and the theory perished the way such theories do, not in one catastrophe but in a slow leak of points. In January the club practised its now-annual alchemy of loans and swaps: on the fifth, Fernando Torres — who had arrived to fanfare and would depart to relief — had his move from Chelsea made permanent only to be loaned the same day to Atletico Madrid, with Alessio Cerci travelling the other way in the exchange, two expensive forwards crossing in mid-air like courier pigeons carrying each other's bad news. Suso was bought outright from Liverpool on the seventeenth, Salvatore Bocchetti came on loan from Spartak Moscow, Mattia Destro on loan from Roma on the twenty-ninth, and in the first days of February Luca Antonelli arrived from Genoa and Gabriel Paletta from Parma. It was not a strategy; it was a shopping list written in the dark.

The cup, the last realistic silver of the season, was surrendered on 27 January at San Siro, 0-1 to a Lazio side that played most of the night with ten men. Lucas Biglia converted a penalty in the 38th minute after a handball by Michelangelo Albertazzi; Lorik Cana collected his second yellow card before the interval; and for the better part of an hour Milan besieged ten men and could not score, a late Cerci goal chalked off for offside as if the evening required one final refinement of its cruelty. The arithmetic favoured Milan and the football did not, which is as concise a summary of the Inzaghi year as any tribunal could draft.

The spring derby, on 19 April with Inter nominally the hosts, drew 74,022 to the Giuseppe Meazza and gave them precisely nothing: 0-0, two anxious neighbours feeling each other's pulse and finding both faint. The season closed tenth, with 52 points from 38 matches — thirteen won, thirteen drawn, twelve lost, 56 scored against 50 conceded — the club's worst league finish in over a decade, and two victories in the final two rounds served only to polish the coffin's handles, for Europe was already out of reach. The leading league scorer was Jeremy Menez with sixteen, a figure that honoured his invention and indicted the poverty around him. Inzaghi, loved as a player beyond all reason, left the bench judged a failure; the moralist notes, without cruelty, that clubs which appoint from the heart must be prepared to dismiss from it too.

Berlin, Seen Through the Fog

Elsewhere, Italy still knew the road to the great occasions. Juventus took a fourth consecutive scudetto and travelled to Berlin on 6 June for the Champions League final, where Barcelona beat them 3-1; and the Milanista of a certain age watched that final the way an exiled duke watches a coronation, with a connoisseur's eye and a beggar's stomach. It was not so long since finals in that competition had been an appointment in the rossonero diary, pencilled in each May as naturally as the first asparagus. Now Milan were not merely absent from the final; they were absent from the competition, absent from all competitions beyond the borders, and the continent had stopped setting a place for them at the table. Absence is the cheapest seat in the house and the most expensive lesson in football, and in 2015 Milan held a season ticket to it.

Mr Bee and the Unsold Kingdom

Above the pitch, the kingdom itself was for sale and could not be sold. Silvio Berlusconi's Fininvest still owned the club, with the presidency formally vacant and Berlusconi installed as honorary chairman — an arrangement with the flavour of a monarch who has abdicated the crown but keeps the keys to the cellar. Adriano Galliani ran the football as chief executive; Barbara Berlusconi worked the modern side of the house; and in August came the announcement that Fininvest had agreed to sell a 48 per cent stake to the Thai businessman Bee Taechaubol — Mr Bee, inevitably, to every headline writer in the peninsula — for 480 million euros, the agreement struck on the first day of the month with a deadline of the thirtieth of September for the money to appear.

The figure was magnificent and the funds were not: Taechaubol could raise only a fraction of the money, the deal drifted into deadlock as the year turned, and it would ultimately collapse altogether. So the club ended 2015 as it began it, owned by its past and courted by phantoms, a house on the Navigli with the for-sale sign swinging in the damp air while the notary waited for a buyer whose cheque would clear. The true resolution of the ownership question belonged to later chapters and other continents; in 2015 there was only the waiting, and waiting, as every fisherman on those canals could testify, is a discipline that looks from the outside exactly like doing nothing.

Sinisa and the Summer of Millions

To Mihajlovic, then, fell the reconstruction, and for once the club armed its manager with money. Carlos Bacca came from Sevilla for 30 million euros, a Colombian artisan of the penalty area; Alessio Romagnoli from Roma for 25, a centre-half of twenty bought as a promise; Andrea Bertolacci from Roma for 20; Luiz Adriano from Shakhtar Donetsk for 8; Juraj Kucka from Genoa for 3, all elbows and honest running. Out went Adil Rami to Sevilla, Michael Essien on a free to Panathinaikos, Riccardo Saponara to Empoli, Valter Birsa to Chievo. Riccardo Montolivo kept the captain's armband across both campaigns, with the veteran goalkeeper Christian Abbiati, in his final seasons, as his deputy. And from the youth ranks the club promoted a sixteen-year-old goalkeeper whose name, in July, was a footnote on the squad list: Gianluigi Donnarumma. Remember the footnote.

The marquee pre-season was played in China, at the International Champions Cup. In Shenzhen on 25 July, Milan beat Inter 1-0, Philippe Mexes scoring a spectacular winner just after the hour — the Frenchman's genius for the improbable goal being one of the era's few reliable consolations. In Shanghai on the thirtieth, Milan held Real Madrid 0-0 and lost the shootout 10-9, the goalkeeper Kiko Casilla saving the decisive kick from the boy Donnarumma, sixteen years old and already entrusted with a penalty against the aristocracy of Europe; note, in passing, who was trusted to take it. On 12 August the TIM Trophy was won, Inter beaten and then Sassuolo on penalties. Small silver, friendly silver, summer silver — but a club in famine does not turn up its nose at bread.

The Prodigal and the Neapolitan Night

On 27 August, Mario Balotelli came home for the second time, on a season-long loan from Liverpool with no fee, the English club covering part of his wages — terms that told their own story about a talent the market had ceased to trust. The moralist loves Balotelli precisely because he is the argument that ability and wisdom are issued separately at birth, and his second Milanese autumn compressed the whole man into five days. On 22 September at Udine, starting for the first time since his return, he bent a free-kick into the top corner after five minutes, and Milan led 3-0 by the interval before winning 3-2; the old thunder, intact. Five days later at Genoa, in a 1-0 defeat, he played his last football of the calendar year: a groin injury, surgery in Munich, and no further appearance until the middle of January; and when the season's ledger was finally ruled off it would read one league goal in twenty appearances. Rarely has a career offered its own epitome so punctually.

Around him, Mihajlovic's league had opened like a door onto a cold landing. Fiorentina won 2-0 on 23 August; Empoli were beaten 2-1 on the 29th for a first win; the derby on 13 September went to Inter by a single goal, Fredy Guarin on 58 minutes, and the city's other half made the usual carnival of it. Palermo were edged 3-2, Udine brought Balotelli's thunderbolt, Genoa brought defeat and injury — and then, on 4 October, came the nadir: Napoli four, Milan nil, at San Siro. Allan struck on 13 minutes, Lorenzo Insigne twice after the interval, and Rodrigo Ely turned the fourth into his own net late on, as if the scoreboard had insisted on a local signature. A great house may lose away from home and call it misfortune; when it is dismantled in its own dining room, the word is decline, and on that October evening the word sat in every mouth in the stadium.

The Boy from Castellammare

Then, on 25 October, against Sassuolo, the year justified itself. The match was won 2-1 by Luiz Adriano's late goal, but the history of the afternoon stood between the posts: Gianluigi Donnarumma, born in Castellammare di Stabia on the Gulf of Naples, sixteen only since February, promoted in the summer as a third-choice teenager behind Diego Lopez and the vice-captain Abbiati, was thrown by Mihajlovic past them both into the San Siro goal. At roughly sixteen years and 242 days he became the youngest goalkeeper ever to start a Serie A match — or, by another accounting, the second-youngest ever to appear in one, after Milan's own Giuseppe Sacchi, who had entered as a substitute in another age. Let the record-keepers quarrel over the framing; the substance does not move. A boy who should have been worrying about his homework took possession of the most scrutinised goalmouth in Italy, and kept it. He did not give the shirt back. Rebuilding clubs stumble upon their futures in the strangest places, and this one found its beating heart standing on the goal-line, wearing gloves.

The team steadied around him as autumn deepened into the Lombard fog. Chievo were beaten 1-0 on 28 October; on the first of November, Milan went to the Olimpico and beat Lazio 3-1 — Bertolacci, the improbable Mexes, and Bacca, with Ricardo Kishna replying — the club's first win in that stadium against Lazio since 2009. Juventus, in the champions' habitual manner, took their match 1-0 on 21 November; but a week later Sampdoria were dismantled 4-1 at San Siro, Giacomo Bonaventura on 16 minutes, M'Baye Niang from the spot on 38 and again on 49, Luiz Adriano on 79, Eder's late penalty a footnote — the most complete performance of the calendar year, and San Siro allowed itself the luxury of enjoying an afternoon.

December kept the thread. In the Coppa Italia, Crotone were beaten 3-1 after extra time on the first of the month — Luiz Adriano opened, Budimir levelled, and after ninety minutes locked at 1-1 it took Bonaventura's free-kick and Niang's late counter to settle it — and on the seventeenth Sampdoria were beaten again, 0-2 away, in the round of sixteen. That cup road would stretch all the way to a final the following May, and to a grief that belongs to another chapter. In the league, Frosinone were beaten 4-2 away on 20 December, and Milan closed the year seventh — no triumph, but a pulse, which after October's humiliations was itself news. Bacca, the Colombian artisan, would finish the season with eighteen league goals, punctual as a bell-ringer in a side that too often gave him scraps to work with.

The Verdict of an Unloved Year

History will file 2015 under decline, and the file is honest: a tenth-place finish, a cup surrendered to ten men, a second year outside Europe while Juventus contested the final in Berlin, a derby lost, four goals conceded at home to Napoli, and an ownership that dangled between an ageing emperor and a buyer who could not pay. The city, hosting the world at its Exposition, dined in the light; the club dined in the kitchen. All of this is true, and the chronicler who omitted it would be a courtier, not a chronicler.

And yet no year is only its league table. This one gave Milan the composure of Romagnoli, the goals of Bacca, the honest elbows of Kucka; it returned Balotelli just long enough to remind everyone why they had hoped, and took him away again in the manner that reminded them why they had stopped. Above all it gave the boy from Castellammare, promoted as a footnote in July, a penalty-taker against Real Madrid by the end of the same month, and by October the youngest man — the youngest child, the purist mutters — ever to start a Serie A match in goal. When the rebirth eventually came, and it came the way spring comes to the Po valley, imperceptibly and then all at once, its first stone had already been laid on a grey October afternoon against Sassuolo, by a sixteen-year-old with enormous hands and no visible fear. The verdict, then, delivered without appeal: a bad year that behaved, in the end, like a good investment.