The Year Without Europe, and the Knock at the Door

A Prince Departs, a Pole Arrives

January in Milan is a month with its collar up. The fog comes off the plain and settles on the city like a lid on a pot of broth, the Navigli show black water between grey stones, and football, which in August pretends to be a matter of dreams, admits in January that it is a matter of accounts. On the twenty-third of that month the accounts spoke plainly: Gonzalo Higuain, the centre-forward borrowed to play the king, had his loan from Juventus cut short and was passed along to Chelsea, where Maurizio Sarri, his old choirmaster from Napoli, waited; the option Milan had held to buy him outright for thirty-six million euros was quietly folded away, unused. Milan did not mourn him extravagantly. This is a city that invented saffron risotto and knows better than most that a dish which never quite arrives at the table is not, whatever the menu promised, a dish at all.

In his place, up from Genoa, came Krzysztof Piatek, a Pole bought outright for around thirty-five million with a contract inked through to June 2023, and for a few bright winter weeks the ground permitted itself the oldest superstition in the game — the belief that a new man with cold eyes will repair everything the famous old names could not. Call him il Polacco, since a chronicler's trade is to give a man a name that fits his work, and Piatek's work was precisely that: work. He finished the campaign as the side's leading scorer, nine goals in the league, eleven in all competitions — figures that are honest rather than grand, like a trattoria that feeds you well and will never once be written about in the glossy pages.

Spring of Small Cruelties

The spring dealt its cards face up. On the seventeenth of March came the Derby della Madonnina, and the little golden Madonna above the Duomo watched the other half of her city take it. Vecino scored inside three minutes, which is less a goal than an ambush laid before the visitors have hung up their coats; De Vrij rose to head a second six minutes into the new half; and though Bakayoko — all knees, lungs and honest labour — pulled one back on fifty-seven, Lautaro Martinez restored the distance from the penalty spot, and Milan's own Musacchio, a defender doing a poacher's work on seventy-one, could only bring it to 2-3: near enough to touch, too far to hold. Inter climbed above Milan into third, which that season was not merely a position in a table but a prophecy read aloud.

April was no kinder, merely quieter about it. In the Coppa Italia semi-final Milan had drawn 0-0 at the Stadio Olimpico back in February and required only a modest, competent evening at San Siro; instead, on the twenty-fourth, Joaquin Correa struck in the fifty-eighth minute past Pepe Reina, and Lazio went through 1-0 on the night — one hundred and eighty minutes of football reduced to a single stroke by a house guest — and would go on, on the fifteenth of May, to beat Atalanta 2-0 and lift the trophy itself. There is a particular silence San Siro makes on such evenings, the silence of seventy thousand people privately doing the same arithmetic and arriving at the same unhappy sum.

And so to the ledger of May: fifth, sixty-eight points, a single point behind the Inter side that took fourth and the last Champions League chair with it. Gennaro Gattuso had coached the whole campaign with the ferocity of a man defending his own doorstep, and fifth was one place — one single rung — below the Champions League. In other cities fifth is a decent harvest, worth a modest festival. Under the Madonnina it is thin soup, and everyone seated at the table knew it before the spoon was lifted.

Rino Gives Back the Money

What Gattuso did next belongs less to the history of football than to the moral fables our grandmothers told over the polenta. On the twenty-eighth of May, days after the season closed without Champions League football, he resigned — and, it was widely reported, returned his entire severance to the club, a sum put at around five and a half million euros. Consider that for a moment, and consider it slowly. In an age when men are carried out of football clubs on stretchers upholstered with banknotes, Rino walked out with his pockets deliberately empty, leaving the money on the table like a man who refuses payment for a meal he feels he did not cook well enough.

One may quarrel with his tactics, and plenty did, in print and in the bars along the Navigli where tactics are settled nightly with more conviction than they ever are on training grounds. One cannot quarrel with the timber of the man. Milan has employed coaches of greater refinement and will again; it has rarely been given a more honourable exit, and a club learns as much from how its men leave as from how they arrive.

The Sentence and the Bandiere

June rebuilt the house from the attic downward. On the fourteenth the club announced that Paolo Maldini — Maldini, a surname that stands to this club as the bell tower stands to the village — would become Technical Director, with Zvonimir Boban, once the Croatian prince of Milanese midfields, installed beside him as Chief Football Officer; Leonardo, the Brazilian with the diplomat's smile, departed to direct the sporting affairs of Paris Saint-Germain. Above them sat Paolo Scaroni as chairman, and above him Elliott Management, the American fund that had held the club since July 2018 — owners by way of the ledger rather than the heart, which is a thoroughly modern condition and not always a fatal one. Five days later, on the nineteenth, Marco Giampaolo, a studious and softly spoken man, was appointed head coach and handed the blueprints.

Then, on the twenty-eighth of June, arrived the sentence. The Court of Arbitration for Sport, embodying a settlement between club and UEFA in what the lawyers call a consent award, excluded Milan from the 2019-20 Europa League for breaching Financial Fair Play's break-even rules across the years 2015 to 2018. Fifth-placed Milan surrendered its European place; Roma, sixth, stepped up into the group stage and Torino, seventh, into the final qualifying round; and thus the club of the great European nights prepared for a season with no Europe in it at all — banished not by any opponent on grass but by its own arithmetic. It has long been held on this peninsula that football is played first with the legs and last with the head; in 2019 Milan discovered a third organ in the sequence, the ledger, and the ledger that summer played centre-forward against them.

New Blood on Old Stones

The summer market, conducted now by Maldini and Boban, went shopping for youth the way a prudent cook shops for vegetables still stiff with the morning. From Real Madrid came Theo Hernandez, a left-back costing about twenty million; from Lille, for around twenty-eight, came Rafael Leao, a Portuguese forward of twenty; from Empoli, for around sixteen, came Ismael Bennacer, an Algerian to keep the midfield's time; and with them arrived Rade Krunic from Empoli, Leo Duarte from Flamengo and, on loan from Eintracht Frankfurt, Ante Rebic. Going the other way, Patrick Cutrone — a boy of the house, which always stings — left for Wolverhampton, and Manuel Locatelli went to Sassuolo. The captain's band stayed on the arm of Alessio Romagnoli. Nobody could yet say which of the new names would prove to be load-bearing walls and which mere plaster; squads, like risotto, reveal themselves only with patient stirring, and never to those who lift the lid too soon.

Pre-season muttered its fortune into its beard. In the International Champions Cup, Milan lost 0-1 to Bayern Munich in Kansas City on the twenty-third of July, lost 0-1 to Benfica outside Boston five days later, and drew 2-2 with Manchester United in Cardiff on the third of August before losing the shootout that followed: three matches, no victories, one point in the standings, and the sense of a side still learning its own address. The wider Italian weather offered no shelter. Juventus had just completed an eighth consecutive Scudetto, an empire deep into its baroque period, while across the city Inter had hired Antonio Conte and bought Romelu Lukaku, arming loudly for the new campaign. Even the nation changed its mind that autumn, the first government of Giuseppe Conte falling in August and his second rising in September — so that Italy had a Conte in Rome and a Conte at Inter, and Milan, poor Milan, had neither peace nor Europe.

Autumn of Two Coaches

The September derby, on the twenty-first, retold the March story with fresh ink and the same moral. Brozovic struck on forty-nine and Lukaku on seventy-eight, the Belgian's first Derby della Madonnina and a night he took to as though born in the Curva Nord: 0-2, and no reply worth the name. Milan under Giampaolo resembled a lecture without a thesis — possession held the way a nervous man holds his hat, ideas visible but forever arriving a beat after the music. The professor's football, which had charmed smaller lecture halls, could not fill San Siro's vast auditorium, where the acoustics forgive nothing.

On the eighth of October, after roughly three months in the chair, Giampaolo was dismissed; on the ninth, Stefano Pioli was appointed, and it is fair to say the city greeted him with more scepticism than song. A quiet man, a company man, a mender of other people's seasons — the shrug that met him was as wide as the Alps you can see from the Madonnina on the rare days the fog grants a view. But rebirths rarely announce themselves with trumpets; they arrive dressed as caretakers, carrying modest luggage, and ask only to be allowed to begin.

Five Bells in Bergamo

The year kept its coldest dish for the twenty-second of December, in Bergamo, where Atalanta rang five bells over Milan's bowed head: Alejandro Gomez with ten minutes gone, Mario Pasalic just past the hour — a Milan player on loan only four seasons earlier, a detail fate wrote with a visible smirk — Josip Ilicic twice in the nine minutes that followed, and Luis Muriel near the close. Five to nil. Not since 1998 had Milan lost a Serie A match by a margin of five goals, and the record books had to be fetched down from the high shelf and dusted to confirm it. It was the last fixture of the calendar year, and it felt like the last act of an era that refused to finish dying.

Milan went to the winter break eleventh, with twenty-one points from seventeen matches — six wins, three draws, eight defeats, the ledger of a mid-table club in a city that has never learned the vocabulary of mid-table. It was a rung of the ladder so low that from it one could see neither Europe nor, on a clear day, even the modest foothills of respectability. A club with such a wardrobe of red and black silk, dressed for December in sackcloth: that was the picture, and no one in Milan pretended otherwise, because the one dignity left to the humbled is accuracy.

The Colossus Knocks

And then, on the twenty-seventh of December, five days after Bergamo, the club made an announcement that was less a transfer than a summons answered. Zlatan Ibrahimovic — thirty-eight years old, lately of LA Galaxy, free of any contract — agreed to return to Milan on a six-month deal with an option for one year more. The city remembered him the way one remembers a great tenor: between 2010 and 2012 he had scored fifty-six goals in eighty-five matches and carried the side to the Scudetto of 2011, and now, with the club adrift in mid-table and the rebuild stalling under its new quiet coach, the Colossus was turning his ship back into the Lombard fog of his own free will. "I'm coming back to a Club I hugely respect and to the city of Milan I love," he said. "I'll fight together with my teammates to change the course of this season. I will do everything to make it happen." Coming from most men of thirty-eight this would be a press release; coming from him it read like a weather warning addressed to the rest of the league.

The medical and the unveiling would belong to the new year; the decision, and the emotion of it, belonged entirely to the dying days of 2019, and that is where this chronicle must weigh it. So closes the year: a fifth place that purchased nothing, a resignation nobler than the season that caused it, a sentence handed down by the Court of Arbitration for Sport, two derbies lost without appeal, a five-goal humiliation among the bells of Bergamo — and, at the very end, a proud club, out of Europe and out of excuses, doing the one wise thing still available to it. It remembered who it was, and it telephoned a man who had never for one moment forgotten. Decline was the text of 2019; rebirth was the note slipped inside the envelope, dated the twenty-seventh of December, and history would in time reveal which of the two was written in the more durable ink.