Borrowed Millions, Counterfeit Dollars

Doha, the Twenty-Third of December

The Jassim bin Hamad Stadium, Doha, 23 December 2016: floodlights, an Italian trophy played for a very long way from Italy, and the last silver of an empire nobody yet knew was ending. The previous chapter has already told the night itself — the teenager's save, the Croat's decisive kick; what it could not yet tell is what that silver would come to mean.

It proved the only silverware of the 2016-17 campaign and — though nobody in Doha could have known it that night — the last trophy of the Berlusconi ownership, the closing entry of thirty-one years. There is an irony in the geography that no novelist would dare invent: an era made in Lombardy gathered its final silver in the Gulf, in an exported December, before flying home to be wound up by lawyers. Great houses seldom fall in the piazza where they were built. They fall in boardrooms, behind glass, in foreign time zones, in clauses.

The winter that followed administered its customary corrections. On 25 January the Coppa Italia quarter-final brought Juventus again, and this time there were no penalties to hide behind: Milan went out, and the season narrowed to the league table and to the long wait for a signature that kept not arriving.

The Thirteenth of April

It arrived, after deadlines postponed so often that the postponements had become a form of civic folklore, on 13 April 2017: Fininvest sold Milan to Rossoneri Sport Investment Lux, the vehicle of a Chinese businessman named Li Yonghong, at the price agreed the previous August. The figures were fixed, and counted out, a summer earlier. What April added was the manner of the closing, and that is the part this year must keep: the purchase was finally secured with a loan of roughly three hundred and three million euros, at punishing interest, from an American hedge fund called Elliott Management. The new Milan, in other words, was born already owing money to its own future — a palazzo taken possession of on a mortgage raised against hope.

The following day Li was confirmed as chairman, with Marco Fassone as chief executive and Massimiliano Mirabelli as sporting director. Silvio Berlusconi was offered the honorary presidency and declined it, so that the gilded chair in the corner, where departed owners are traditionally seated, stayed empty: the first empty seat of the new age, and the most eloquent. One may read the refusal several ways, and the kindest reading is probably the right one — a man who had owned the thing entirely for thirty-one years perhaps could not bear to attend it as a guest.

Thirty-one years is not a tenure; it is a climate. Supporters had been born, schooled, married and greyed under a single owner, and whatever one thought of the man — and Italy thought everything of the man, often simultaneously — his going changed the light over the city: more of it, certainly, but also a strange nakedness, and no promise whatever about what the light would show.

Two Days an Owner

The new proprietor had been in his chair barely two days when the city staged its oldest argument for his instruction. On 15 April, at the Giuseppe Meazza, the derby: and for a half Milan played as though attending someone else's occasion, conceding late in the first period to Candreva and then to Icardi, and walking to the dressing room two goals down. What followed belongs to the derby's long anthology of cruelties and mercies. Romagnoli pulled one back with eight minutes left; and in the seventh minute of stoppage time — a minute that exists only in Milan, granted by referees and denied by physics — Locatelli headed the ball down in the crowd and Zapata volleyed it home. Two-two: a point carried out of the fire in bare hands, and a first lesson for the new ownership in what this fixture does to men who believe they have bought a business.

The season closed sixth: sixty-three points from thirty-eight matches — eighteen won, nine drawn, eleven lost, fifty-seven scored, forty-five conceded — the record of a decent trattoria — honest, filling, and not remotely the standard on which this club was raised. At San Siro Milan were nearly formidable, twelve wins against five defeats; on the road they were somebody else entirely, a side that travelled badly, like certain wines. Montolivo wore the armband, Bacca finished top scorer with thirteen league goals and fourteen in all competitions, and Vincenzo Montella's reward for sixth place was a prize that would have read as humiliation twenty years earlier and now read as reprieve: the Europa League, European football again after years locked out of the continent's rooms.

Two Hundred Millions

Then the new money did what new money always does in its first summer: it went shopping. The spree touched two hundred million euros, and its centrepiece was designed less as a purchase than as a proclamation — Leonardo Bonucci, the champions' own centre-half, six consecutive scudetti and two Champions League finals in his legs, crossing the divide for forty-two million and being handed Milan's armband almost before he had hung up his coat. A rival's defensive cornerstone bought and crowned in a single gesture: whatever else the Chinese Milan lacked, it did not lack theatre.

Around him a squad was assembled wholesale, in the manner of a shopping list written from the top down. Andre Silva came from Porto for thirty-eight million to lead the line; Çalhanoğlu from Leverkusen for twenty million and change to bend the dead balls; Conti from Atalanta for some twenty-four million plus a player; Musacchio from Villarreal for eighteen, Biglia from Lazio for about seventeen, Ricardo Rodriguez from Wolfsburg for fifteen; Kessié arrived from Atalanta on a loan carrying an obligation of roughly twenty million, Kalinic came from Fiorentina on the same species of arrangement, and Borini from Sunderland likewise. The transfer filings differ on the exact garnish of bonuses; the scale of the banquet is not in doubt. Out went De Sciglio to Juventus for twelve million, Honda on a free, Kucka to Trabzonspor, and Bacca — top scorer of the spring — on loan to Villarreal: one team dismantled and another assembled between June and August, as though an army were being re-equipped while still in the field.

July gave the new squad its first airing, in China. In Guangzhou on the 18th, before a crowd of nineteen thousand, Borussia Dortmund won 3-1, Bacca scoring Milan's goal; four days later at the Longgang Stadium in Shenzhen, before very nearly forty thousand, Milan beat Bayern Munich 4-0 — Kessié after fourteen minutes, a header and a poacher's finish from a nineteen-year-old academy forward called Patrick Cutrone, Çalhanoğlu near the end — and for one evening the scoreline was permitted to mean everything the summer wished it to mean. Pre-season is football's dress rehearsal: it tells you the curtain still rises, and nothing whatever about the play.

Dollarumma

And yet the summer's truest story was smaller than all of this and heavier than most of it, and it concerned a goalkeeper aged eighteen. Gianluigi Donnarumma was the academy's masterpiece, Milan's first choice while still legally a boy, and in June the club announced that he would not be renewing his contract. The city turned on him overnight, with that particular ferocity families reserve for their own: it is one thing to be robbed by a stranger, quite another to hear that your own son has consulted a lawyer.

What followed was the modern passion play in all its stations. Away with Italy at the European Under-21 Championship, on 18 June, in the opening group match against Denmark in Krakow, furious travelling supporters showered his goalmouth with fake dollar bills — plastic money, printed accusation — and hung a banner reading Dollarumma, naming him and his agent, Mino Raiola, as partners in greed. A week later he posted a conciliatory message, deleted his Instagram account within the hour and then said that the account had been hacked, while Raiola tweeted his own scoreline against the haters; and the whole dispute was tried and sentenced where such disputes are now tried and sentenced, on lit screens held at arm's length, faster than any club statement could travel. A goalkeeper's trade is solitude. His is the one position from which the whole pitch can be surveyed and nothing escaped, and there he stood, an eighteen-year-old with counterfeit banknotes drifting into his six-yard box, like a man asked to sweep up the evidence at his own trial.

Then, on 11 July, the reversal: he re-signed until 2021, at a reported six million a year, the contract carrying besides a verbal understanding that his elder brother Antonio would come as backup goalkeeper — for in Italy even betrayals are settled as family matters. He apologised to the supporters, and the supporters, in the main, chose to believe him, partly because forgiveness is cheaper than a new goalkeeper and partly because everyone could see what the boy himself perhaps could not yet say: that he had spent a month being pulled apart by club, agent and terrace, three masters shouting into one helmet, and that at eighteen a man signs whatever peace is nearest. Note only this. In the first summer of a Milan bought with borrowed millions, the terraces chose counterfeit dollars as their instrument of protest; both sides of the argument were paying in paper.

An Autumn That Curdled

The new season opened as though the receipts had been honest. On 20 August, away at Crotone, Kessié converted a penalty in the sixth minute and Milan won 3-0; and in September, Europe resumed after three seasons' absence — resumed gorgeously. Having come through the third qualifying round and the play-off into a group with Austria Wien, Rijeka and AEK Athens, Milan went to Vienna on the 14th and won 5-1, Çalhanoğlu striking in the seventh minute and then serving Andre Silva, who scored a hat-trick — the tenth minute, the twentieth, the fifty-sixth — the first by a Milan player in Europe since Kaká in 2006. For a fortnight the new age looked exactly as advertised.

Then it curdled. The derby of 15 October told the season's fortune with terrible economy: Icardi opened after twenty-eight minutes; Suso levelled; Icardi volleyed Inter back in front; Milan drew level again when Handanovic, harassed by nothing but fate, carried Bonaventura's shot over his own line with nine minutes left; and in the ninetieth minute Rodriguez was ruled to have pulled back D'Ambrosio, the referee pointed to the spot, and Icardi completed his hat-trick from the penalty. Three-two, a derby lost by the width of a decision that half the city will still be disputing when it has grandchildren. Under Montella the league form dissolved into six wins from the first fourteen; by late November Milan stood seventh, eighteen points behind Napoli at the head of the table, and two hundred million euros were discovered to have bought a squad but not a team — different purchases, from different shops.

November was cruel to Italy generally. That month the Azzurri lost a World Cup play-off to Sweden and, for the first time in sixty years, would not be at the finals; the defeat drew from Buffon, in tears at the final whistle, his announcement that he was finished with the Azzurri, and a country governed that year by Paolo Gentiloni discovered that its most trusted national institution could fail like any other. Against so black a sky, Milan's domestic misery looked almost decorous. On 26 November came a goalless home draw with Torino; on the 27th the club sacked Montella. Juventus, meanwhile, reigned as they had reigned all through these seasons — a sixth consecutive scudetto already banked that spring — and the distance between the two clubs could no longer be explained as luck.

Up from the Primavera

For the succession, the new owners reached not upward but inward. Gennaro Gattuso, thirty-nine years old, was promoted from the Primavera — the youth side — to take the first team: a man who as a player had given Milan thirteen seasons, two scudetti, two Champions Leagues and a Club World Cup, most of it rendered in sweat rather than silk. The sceptics read the appointment as economy dressed up as sentiment; the sentimentalists read it as the one currency the club still owned outright, unborrowed and unmortgaged: blood. Both were right, which is the usual arrangement.

December gave the sentimentalists their evidence, though it made them wait for it. The Europa League group had in truth been settled before Gattuso inherited it — Austria Wien beaten 5-1 a second time at San Siro on 23 November, Andre Silva scoring twice and Patrick Cutrone, the academy striker who was the breakout of the autumn, twice more, top place secured with a match to spare — and the new man's own European debut, at Rijeka on the 7th, was a dead rubber lost 2-0. His first match of any kind, at Benevento on the 3rd, had been drawn 2-2 when the home goalkeeper Alberto Brignoli hurled himself at a free kick in the fifth minute of stoppage time and headed the newly promoted club its first point of the season — the first goal by a goalkeeper in Serie A since 2001, and precisely the joke football reserves for men it intends to test. Then, on 27 December, the year granted its closing scene: a Coppa Italia quarter-final derby at the Meazza before 48,721, Inter's first-half goal annulled by the video referee, extra time stretching thin, and in the 104th minute Suso flicking the pass for Cutrone to turn in. One-nil; the semi-final reached at the neighbours' expense; Gattuso's first derby won by a boy out of the Primavera.

Two things were true of the year at once, and neither cancelled the other. Milan had been sold: thirty-one years signed away on an April morning, the era's last silver already banked in the Gulf, a new flag raised on borrowed millions while Elliott's loan sat quietly in the accounts, accruing, patient as all creditors are patient. And Milan had remembered where it keeps its blood — in a teenager pelted with plastic dollars who found his way back to a contract and an apology; in a thirty-nine-year-old veteran of the old wars called up from the youth pitches to mind the family through winter; in an academy child scoring in the 104th minute of a derby, a boy the summer's two hundred millions had never needed to buy. Paper had bought the club, and paper had been thrown at its goalkeeper. The last goal of the year was paid for in nothing at all.