The Foreclosure and the Homecoming

Fog on the Navigli

There are years that arrive like guests and years that arrive like bailiffs, and 2018 presented itself at the gates of Milanello with a briefcase, a writ and impeccable manners. Italy spent that June and July doing something it had not done since 1958: watching a World Cup from the sofa, uninvited, the playoff defeat to Sweden the previous November still lodged in the national throat like a fishbone. In Rome a new government of populists took office under Giuseppe Conte in June; in Genoa, on the 14th of August, the Morandi bridge came down and took forty-three lives with it, and a country that had once built autostrade the way the Romans built aqueducts stared at the broken span and wondered what else had been quietly rotting while nobody checked the accounts.

That last question, as it happened, was also the question of the year at Milan. The scaffolding of the club — the operatic Chinese ownership that had bought out Berlusconi in the spring of 2017 with money borrowed at Manhattan rates — was about to be inspected, and inspections in 2018 did not end kindly. On the pitch, at least, there was a man in charge who understood the older virtues. Gennaro Gattuso had taken the bench in late November 2017, when Vincenzo Montella was sacked, and by the time the new year's fog lifted off the Navigli the team had a jaw again.

The Growl

Gattuso deserves his refrain, so let us coin it and keep it: the Growl. As a player he had been the honest artisan among aristocrats, the man who carried water so that others might turn it into wine, and as a coach he asked of his young side only what he had asked of himself — that they run, that they mark, that they treat a lost ball as a personal insult. The results were not opera but they were solid Lombard cooking, risotto rather than soufflé: by the end of the 2017-18 championship Milan had won eighteen, drawn ten and lost ten, scored fifty-six and conceded forty-two, and their sixty-four points were worth sixth place and a passage into the Europa League.

The captain that season was Leonardo Bonucci, a Juventino borrowed against his nature, of whom more presently; the leading scorer, and this is the detail that warmed the old hearts, was Patrick Cutrone, a boy from the academy who finished with ten league goals and eighteen in all competitions — a centre-forward of the classical school, all appetite and proximity, the kind of striker the Milanese crowd adopts on sight because he plays as they imagine they would.

Rome, and Other Ways of Dying

Europe offered first a canapé and then a lesson. In February the Bulgarians of Ludogorets were dispatched with professional courtesy, 3-0 away and 1-0 at San Siro, and then in March came Arsenal. At San Siro on the 8th of March, Mkhitaryan and Ramsey won the first leg 2-0 for the Londoners; at the Emirates a week later, on the 15th, Welbeck scored twice and Xhaka once, Calhanoglu replied for the honour of the shirt, and the tie closed 5-1 on aggregate — a scoreline that told the club, with English bluntness, precisely how far the road back to Europe's high table would be.

The harder death came in Rome. On the 9th of May, in the Coppa Italia final at the Olimpico, Milan held Juventus scoreless for a half and then conceded four times in twenty minutes — Benatia in the 56th, Douglas Costa in the 61st, Benatia again in the 64th, and in the 76th an own goal from Kalinic, a striker who thus achieved against his own colours what he too rarely achieved against anyone else's. Donnarumma, the young giant in goal, fumbled two of them, and one watched him with the sympathy owed to a boy carrying a cathedral on his back. It was Juventus's fourth consecutive Coppa and their thirteenth in all, to set beside a seventh straight scudetto that same spring; the Torinese hegemony was by now less a sporting fact than a climate, and Milan were learning to farm in its shadow.

The Foreclosure

Now to the accounts, because 2018 at Milan was above all the year the accounts came due. Li Yonghong, the elusive gentleman from China, had bought the club from Berlusconi in April 2017 for some 740 million euros, of which 303 million was borrowed from Elliott, an American fund whose business is lending money to people who may not be able to repay it and knowing exactly what to do when they cannot. On the 6th of July 2018 Li missed an installment of roughly 32 million euros on a capital increase; on the 10th, with the efficiency of a guillotine, Elliott enforced its security and assumed 99.93 per cent of AC Milan, pledging 50 million of fresh capital on arrival. Li would later be declared bankrupt. Thus did a club of Europe's old aristocracy pass into the hands of a hedge fund — not a romance, certainly, but after a year and more of financial fog even a bailiff's certainty felt like weather one could plan a harvest around.

Ten days later came a second mercy, this one from Lausanne. UEFA's financial policemen had thrown Milan out of the 2018-19 Europa League for breaching the break-even rules — the bill for a shopping spree of more than 200 million euros the previous summer — but on the 20th of July the Court of Arbitration for Sport ruled the exclusion disproportionate, noting the change of ownership and the improved finances, reinstated the club, and sent the file back to UEFA for a punishment better fitted to the crime. Milan would play in Europe after all; the sentence was commuted to the mere embarrassment of having deserved one.

And Elliott, whatever one thinks of funds, understood one thing the previous regime had not: that a club is a memory before it is a balance sheet. Paolo Scaroni was installed as chairman on the 21st of July and Leonardo returned as sporting director, and beside him, in the first week of August, with the title of sporting strategy and development director, appeared Paolo Maldini — inside the club's management for the first time since he had folded away the shirt in 2009. The bandiera had come home, and for many of us that appointment, more than any signing, was the true beginning of the rebuild: the day the repossessed house got back its household gods.

The Discarded One

The summer market pivoted, as so much of Italian life did that July, on Cristiano Ronaldo, whom Juventus signed and thereby rendered surplus a centre-forward who had scored fifty-five goals for them in two seasons, forty of them in the league. Gonzalo Higuain arrived in Milan on loan — 18 million for the year, with an option to buy at 36 — a man not so much transferred as discarded, and the word matters, because everything he did in the rossonero shirt that autumn was done by a discarded man. Leonardo, freshly installed as sporting director, brought him in; the Growl built the attack around him; and Milan, a club freshly repossessed, embraced a striker freshly repossessed. Let us call him the Discarded One, and watch the nickname earn itself by November.

Around him the squad was turned over with Elliott's blessing and Leonardo's address book. Mattia Caldara came from Juventus for 35 million while Bonucci went back the other way for the same figure — a swap in everything but name, the captaincy of Milan handed back after a single season like a hotel key. Bakayoko arrived on loan from Chelsea, Pepe Reina came free from Napoli to sit behind Donnarumma like a wise uncle, Castillejo cost 25 million from Villarreal, Laxalt 14 from Genoa, and Kalinic — he of the own goal in Rome — departed for Atletico Madrid, pursued by no great lamentation.

The armband, vacated by the returning Juventino, was given to Alessio Romagnoli, a defender of twenty-three, and here the club touched something old and good in its own soil: he was the youngest permanent captain of Milan since a certain Franco Baresi in 1982, and if the comparison was a burden it was also a compass. A team that had spent two years not knowing who owned it now at least knew who led it out of the tunnel.

Autumn at the Madonnina

The autumn had its wounds, and the deepest was inflicted at San Siro, on one of those nights when the ground belongs to the other half of the city. On the 21st of October, beneath the Madonnina's distant gaze, the derby was goalless deep into added time when Vecino crossed and Icardi rose — the 92nd minute, Donnarumma stranded in no man's land — and Inter took the city 1-0, in the cruellest grammar football knows: the sentence that ends just as you had decided it contained no verb.

In Europe the group with Olympiacos, Real Betis and the Luxembourgers of Dudelange began obediently — 1-0 in Dudelange on the 20th of September, Olympiacos beaten 3-1 at San Siro — and then wobbled, Betis winning 2-1 in Milan and holding 1-1 in Seville. Dudelange were beaten 5-2 at San Siro on the 29th of November, which left the arithmetic simple enough for a child: hold Olympiacos in Piraeus and the winter would be spent in Europe. Instead, on the 13th of December, Milan lost 3-1 in Piraeus — Zapata scoring at both ends inside three minutes, Fortounis settling it from the penalty spot with nine minutes left — and went out behind Betis and the Greeks, level with Olympiacos on points and beaten by the tie-break. It was the first time since 2000-01 that the club had been eliminated at a European group stage, and if you wish to know what a rebuild costs before it pays, that is the receipt.

In the league Milan ground through December as through thick fog: Parma beaten 2-1 on the 2nd, then a stodge of goalless draws with Torino and at Bologna, a 1-0 defeat to Fiorentina three days before Christmas, another blank at Frosinone on the 26th, and finally SPAL beaten 2-1 on the 29th to close the calendar. The Discarded One had six league goals, all he would ever score in the rossonero shirt, the team hovered in the hunt for the Champions League places — a hunt that would end, when the season closed the following spring, in fifth — and the football was what convalescent football always is: honest, laboured, and better judged by the doctor than by the critic.

The Penalty and the Fury

But the image of 2018, the one the year will carry into the archive, was made on the 11th of November, when Juventus came to San Siro and the Discarded One met the club that had thrown him away. Mandzukic had already headed Juventus in front inside eight minutes; then, shortly before the interval, Higuain won a penalty against his old employers and — of course — insisted on taking it himself, because for a number nine of his temperament such a kick is not a shot but a deposition. In the Juventus goal stood Szczesny, until that summer his team-mate; the Pole tipped the weak thing onto the post. And nine minutes from the end, with a novelist's sense of cruelty, Ronaldo — the very man whose arrival had displaced him — thrashed in a rebound parried out by Donnarumma for the second in a 2-0 defeat.

Seven minutes from time it broke. Higuain, booked for a challenge on Benatia, was shown a second yellow for his protests, and what followed was not a sending-off but a small tragedy in the round: a great striker raging at the referee, raging at the evening itself, restrained and led away by team-mates and staff — a man shouting, in the end, at his own biography. Italy being Italy, the deputy prime minister, Salvini, declared himself ashamed of the spectacle; Ronaldo, to his credit, defended him publicly. One could moralise, and many did, but I prefer the older reading: we love players precisely because they are fallible men, and Higuain that night was every one of us who has ever been left, and then been asked to shake the hand of our replacement. By the end of the following January he was gone, loaned onward to Chelsea — a comet that crossed our sky in six months and left mostly the memory of its burning.

A Verdict from the Fog

So what was 2018? It was the year the fantasy was foreclosed and the club was returned, by way of a Manhattan ledger, to something like adult supervision. It was the year of a 4-0 humiliation in Rome and a 5-1 aggregate lesson from Arsenal, of a derby lost in the 92nd minute and a European group lost in Piraeus, of a discarded striker's fury on a November night — and yet I decline to file it among the dark years. The Growl gave the team back its jaw; a boy from the academy had led the scoring; a captain of twenty-three took the armband along Baresi's old meridian; and Maldini walked back through the door at Milanello, which is the sort of fact that changes nothing on a Saturday and everything over a decade. The fog on the Navigli does not lift all at once. It thins. In 2018, for the first time in some years, one could make out the far bank.