The Impresario Sells the Theatre

The Last Winter of the Impresario

There are years that pass through a club like weather and years that pass through it like surgery, and 2016 was the second kind, though Milan, being Milan, dressed the operating theatre in velvet and charged admission at the door. The fog came down the Navigli in January as it always comes, indifferent to league tables, and beneath it sat a club that had once ruled Europe now living, like a dowager in a draughty palazzo, on the interest of old glory. Silvio Berlusconi — l'impresario, let us call him, for he had always understood football as theatre — had owned this particular theatre for some thirty years, and in 2016 he would agree to sell it; that is the frame around everything else, the derby afternoons and the cup nights and the boy goalkeeper, all of it painted inside the last winter of an empire.

The reader should hold two truths at once, as the good Lombard holds both butter and saffron in the same risotto. First: this was decline, unarguable and measurable — a seventh-place finish, a third consecutive season without European football, a coach sacked in April. Second: it was also, in the strange way of football, a year of beginnings — a teenager in goal who would carry the club's honour, a boy midfielder beating Buffon from distance, and, in the shortest days of December, in a desert a very long way from the Madonnina, the first trophy in five years. Decline and rebirth are not opposites; they are the same river seen from two bridges.

Three Blows Against the Cousins

The year opened with the one afternoon a Milanese winter cannot spoil. On the last day of January, before 77,043 at San Siro, Milan beat Inter 3-0 in the Derby della Madonnina, and did it with a completeness that mocked the league table. Alex rose to head in Honda's cross on thirty-five minutes — a centre-half scoring the opening goal of a derby is one of football's small moral lessons, the humble labourer paid first — and then, past the hour, Carlos Bacca struck the second on seventy-three and M'Baye Niang the third on seventy-seven, four minutes that emptied the blue half of the stadium of its arguments.

It was Milan's first derby victory in three attempts, and the red half of the city walked home through the cold with that particular warmth no stove provides. A derby is never merely three points; it is a census of pride, taken in public, and for one night the count favoured the rossoneri utterly. That the league season around it remained modest only sharpened the pleasure, the way hunger seasons a meal better than any cook.

The Serb, the Sacking, and the Faithful Servant

Siniša Mihajlović had arrived in the summer of 2015 to succeed Filippo Inzaghi, a hard man for a soft era, and he was dismissed on 12 April 2016 with the team sitting sixth — which tells you much about the arithmetic of expectation at a club where sixth is failure and the memory of first is a form of haunting. In his place the club promoted Cristian Brocchi from the Primavera: a former Milan midfielder, a servant of the house, handed the final six league games and a cup final the way a family hands the keys to a trusted nephew while the patriarch is distracted by larger business.

The season closed seventh, on 57 points — a small climb from the tenth place of the year before, but not enough for Europe, and so for a third consecutive season the continent's midweek music played without Milan in the orchestra. Carlos Bacca, the Colombian centre-forward, finished as the side's honest artisan: eighteen league goals, twenty in all competitions, mined from a team that created little and forgave less. Riccardo Montolivo wore the armband through it all, captain of a becalmed ship, which is a harder posting than captain of a ship in a storm, because there is no enemy to point at, only the absence of wind.

Rome, Extra Time, and the Old Nemesis

The Coppa Italia had offered the season its one navigable channel. Milan beat Perugia 2-0, needed extra time to see off Crotone 3-1, dispatched Sampdoria 2-0, edged Carpi 2-1 in the quarter-final and dismantled Alessandria 6-0 across the two legs of the semi-final — a road of modest tolls, it is true, but roads to Rome are judged by their destination, not their traffic.

The destination, on 21 May at the Stadio Olimpico before 72,698 with Gianluca Rocchi holding the whistle, was Juventus, the era's black-and-white machine, chasing a second consecutive double. Brocchi sent out a team of the old and the new: Montolivo as captain, Kucka and Poli for labour, Honda, Bacca and Bonaventura for hope, Calabria, Zapata, Romagnoli and De Sciglio across the back — and in goal a seventeen-year-old, Gianluigi Donnarumma, of whom more presently, because he is the thread this whole year is sewn with.

Milan held the machine for a hundred and nine minutes. In the hundred and tenth, the substitute Álvaro Morata scored the only goal, and Juventus completed their double while Milan travelled north with the peculiar grief of the almost: no shame in it, and no silver either. Extra time is football's cruellest courtroom — the verdict arrives precisely when the legs can no longer argue the case.

The Deed of Sale

Then, in high summer, the sentence Milan had half-expected for years was finally pronounced. On 5 August 2016, Fininvest — the Berlusconi family's holding company — signed a preliminary agreement to sell 99.93 per cent of the club to a Chinese-led consortium headed by Yonghong Li of Sino-Europe Sports Investment. The valuation: some €740 million, including €220 million of debt, against a deposit of €100 million lodged by the buyers and a stated commitment to fresh capital thereafter. The close kept being deferred, as these things are deferred, and would be formalised only on 13 April 2017. But the meaning did not change. Roughly thirty years of the most decorated ownership of the modern age were ending; the impresario whose three decades had brought trophies without equal was handing the deed of his theatre across a notary's desk, and no derby roar accompanies that kind of full time.

Around this private transaction, Italy went about its public football. Juventus won a fifth consecutive scudetto and, by beating Milan in Rome, completed a second straight league-and-cup double; rarely had the peninsula's power hung so entirely in one wardrobe. The national side, under Antonio Conte, reached the quarter-finals of the European Championship, where Germany removed them on penalties — Italy in 2016 was a country that competed with dignity and lost by the narrowest instruments, which might serve as the year's epigraph for Milan too.

The Campanian and the Boys of Autumn

For the new season the club appointed Vincenzo Montella, the first Campania-born coach in Milan's history — a southerner brought north to teach a fallen aristocrat how to pass the ball again, and there is something pleasingly Italian in the arrangement, the south sending the north its sunshine in exchange for its industry, as it always has. The market was frugal, almost apologetic: Gianluca Lapadula from Pescara for around nine million, Gustavo Gómez from Lanús, José Sosa from Beşiktaş, Leonel Vangioni on a free from River Plate; while out the door went Stephan El Shaarawy to Roma for €13 million, Fernando Torres back to Atlético Madrid and Jérémy Ménez to Bordeaux, both free. No galácticos, no frescoes; one does not commission ceiling paintings while the notaries are still in the building.

And yet the autumn sang. After losing two of the first three — Napoli and Udinese administering the early lessons — Montella's young side found a rhythm nobody had budgeted for. On 22 October, before 75,829 at San Siro, Milan beat league-leading Juventus 1-0, and the scorer was Manuel Locatelli, eighteen years old, whose rising drive on sixty-five minutes went in off the crossbar past Buffon — Milan's first victory over Juventus since November 2012, the end of a nine-match winless run against them. A boy of eighteen beating the oldest and wisest goalkeeper in Italy with a strike off the woodwork: if you wished to design an emblem for rebirth, you could not improve upon it.

The November derby supplied the season's other autumn text. Suso — the Spaniard with the pastry-chef's left foot — scored twice, on forty-two and fifty-eight minutes, his first goals at San Siro; Antonio Candreva pulled one back between them, and in the second minute of stoppage time Ivan Perišić equalised for Stefano Pioli's Inter: 2-2. A derby surrendered at the death is a sermon on impermanence, and Milan, who had led twice, heard it standing up. Still the table read kindly. This was a team learning, week by week, to be taken seriously again.

The Boy from Castellammare

Every chronicle needs a face, and 2016 belongs to Gianluigi Donnarumma, the goalkeeper from Castellammare di Stabia who had made his debut in October 2015 at sixteen and who spent this calendar year converting prodigy into plain fact. In May he started a Coppa Italia final at seventeen, keeping Juventus at bay deep into extra time with the calm of a man twice his age and the reach of something out of mythology — the boy-colossus, stationed between posts that legends had guarded and had taught to be exacting.

On the first of September, in a friendly against France at the Stadio San Nicola in Bari, he came on at half-time for Gianluigi Buffon — his idol — to become, at seventeen years and 189 days, the youngest goalkeeper ever to play for Italy. Italy lost the match 3-1, and Gian Piero Ventura's first evening in charge of the azzurri was remembered for the substitution rather than the scoreline; there is a whole apostolic succession folded into that changing of the gloves, the old saint stepping aside for the new. And in December, still seventeen, he stood in goal in Doha while Milan won a trophy on penalties. One calendar year: a cup final, a national debut, a first medal. Some careers are ladders, climbed rung by patient rung; his was an express lift, and the boy rode it without once looking down.

Silver in the Desert

The year's verdict was delivered on 23 December, at the Jassim bin Hamad Stadium in Doha — the Supercoppa Italiana exported to Qatar, a Lombard ritual performed under Gulf floodlights, and if the purist sighs at the geography he should attend to what happened there. Giorgio Chiellini put Juventus ahead on eighteen minutes; on thirty-eight, Giacomo Bonaventura rose to head Suso's cross past the champions, and 1-1 it remained through ninety minutes and thirty more, Antonio Damato whistling the formalities.

Penalties, then — the lottery, the firing squad, choose your metaphor, for the Italian game has needed them all. Mandžukić struck the bar. Dybala was saved — the boy from Castellammare again, naturally. And Mario Pašalić, whose name few had learned to spell by August, buried the decisive kick in the top corner: 4-3, and Milan — Donnarumma, Abate, Paletta, Romagnoli, De Sciglio, Bertolacci, Locatelli, Kucka, Suso, Bacca, Bonaventura — had won the Supercoppa Italiana for the seventh time, the club's first trophy of any kind since 2011.

Was it a great trophy? No; the Supercoppa is an aperitivo, not a banquet. But a house that has not eaten for five years treats an aperitivo with reverence, and Milan went into the winter break fifth, on 33 points from seventeen matches — a postponed fixture at Bologna still owing to them, the first half of the season on course to finish as their best since 2011-12 — with a teenager in goal, a teenager who had beaten Juventus, a Campanian coach conducting the recovery, and new owners waiting at the door with promises in their luggage. So the impresario's last full year ended not with a curtain falling but with a curtain rising on an unfamiliar play: the cast younger, the money foreign, the script unwritten. Decline had signed the deed of sale; rebirth had signed the team-sheet. In Milan, in 2016, both signatures were genuine.