Fifth Place Bought Nothing

The Borrowed King and the Bought Pole

Gonzalo Higuain came to Milan on loan to play the king, and the previous chapter left him being led from a San Siro pitch in November, raging at a referee and at his own biography. On the twenty-third of January the loan was cut short. Back to Juventus on paper; on to Chelsea in fact, where Maurizio Sarri, his old choirmaster from Napoli, stood waiting. The option Milan held to buy him outright for thirty-six million euros was folded away unused, and nobody at the club mourned him extravagantly. A centre-forward who is promised, priced and never quite arrives is not, whatever the paperwork said, a centre-forward at all.

In his place, up from Genoa, came Krzysztof Piątek, 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 nickname ought to fit the work it describes, and Piątek'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 up in the glossy pages.

A Derby, a Semi-Final, One Point

The spring dealt its cards face up. On the seventeenth of March came the derby, and the other half of the city took 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: seventy thousand people falling quiet in the same second, each of them having worked it out alone.

May settled the matter without argument. Fifth, sixty-eight points, one point behind the Inter side that took fourth and carried the last Champions League chair away with it. Gennaro Gattuso had coached the whole campaign with the ferocity of a man defending his own doorstep, and fifth was one rung — one single rung — below the European high table. Elsewhere fifth is a decent harvest, worth a modest festival. In Milan it was a wound, and the club understood perfectly well that the wound, and not the harvest, was what it would be judged by.

Rino Leaves the Money on the Table

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, refusing payment for a job he judged himself to have left half-done.

One may argue with his tactics, and plenty did, in print and in the bars where such matters are settled nightly with far more conviction than they ever are on a training ground. One cannot argue 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.

Rebuilt From the Attic Downward

June rebuilt the club 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 — proprietors at one remove, reading Milan through boardroom glass, 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. So the club of the great European nights prepared for a season with no Europe in it at all, barred not by any opponent on grass but by its own ledger.

A Table in Ibiza, a Deadline in Frankfurt

The summer market, conducted now by Maldini and Boban, went shopping for youth the way a collector buys a painter before the name is made. Its most consequential purchase began at a restaurant table in Ibiza in June, where the Spanish press photographed Maldini sitting across from Theo Hernandez and selling him a rebuild: El Chiringuito broke the picture, and Madrid read it as a door being closed — Ferland Mendy signed, Marcelo still in possession, no room left for the boy. Napoli, where Ancelotti was then working, wanted him too, and his agent Manuel Garcia Quilon said so without decoration; Bayer Leverkusen stood in the queue behind them. Milan concluded it in July, taking the Real Madrid left-back for about twenty million. From Lille, for around twenty-eight, came Rafael Leão, a Portuguese forward of twenty; from Empoli, for around sixteen, came Ismael Bennacer, an Algerian to keep the midfield's time; and with them Rade Krunic from Empoli and Leo Duarte from Flamengo. Going the other way, Patrick Cutrone — one of the club's own, which always stings — left for Wolverhampton, and Manuel Locatelli went to Sassuolo. The captain's band stayed on the arm of Alessio Romagnoli.

Ante Rebic came last and latest. On the second of September, with the window closing, Boban and Maldini assembled a two-year loan out of Eintracht Frankfurt carrying a purchase option of twenty-five million, Andre Silva travelling the other way in exchange, half of any eventual fee owed onward to Fiorentina; Zagreb's Index.hr, counting the minutes as Croatia does when one of its own is on the move, reported the thing sealed less than two hours before the market shut, and noted that Rebic had asked Frankfurt to leave him out of the Sunday match so it could be pushed through. He was the ninth Croatian to wear the shirt. He came out of Vinjani Donji in the Imotski karst — Boban's own stony country — and had, the previous July and in complete silence, paid off the bank loans of everyone in his village, and did the like again in 2019; two years later he would give ten thousand euros to the Zlatni cekin children's rehabilitation centre in Slavonski Brod, whose director, the Franciscan Ilija Jerkovic, called him "a great and noble man". Nobody could yet say which of the new names would carry weight and which would merely fill a shirt. Squads do not declare themselves in September. They declare themselves in February.

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 air of a side still learning its own address. The wider Italian landscape offered no shelter either. 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.

One Hundred and Eleven Days

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 Milanese derby 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, one hundred and eleven days after his appointment, 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 appointment reached Milan as everything now reaches it, a line of text on a phone screen, and the shrug that met it was the loudest sound of the week. 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 Pašalić 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. 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 record of a mid-table club in a city that has never learned the vocabulary of mid-table. From that rung of the ladder one could see neither Europe nor, on the clearest of days, 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 Ibrahimović — 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 toward Lombardy 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 warning issued to the rest of the league.

The medical, the unveiling and the first mornings of the January window 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 leave it. The twelve months of 2019 make a grim little pile: 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, five goals conceded among the bells of Bergamo. Underneath the pile, dated the twenty-seventh of December, lies the shortest item of the lot — six months, with an option — and it is the only one anybody now troubles to remember.