Resurrection Behind Locked Gates

A Bronze Man Cut Off at the Ankles

On 5 January 2020, outside the stadium in Malmo, somebody finished the job on a statue. It stood three metres high and weighed half a tonne, cast by Peter Linde and unveiled on 8 October 2019 before a thousand people. Then Zlatan Ibrahimović bought a stake in Hammarby, of Stockholm, and Malmo decided its most famous son had insulted it. The bronze was set alight and sprayed; on 12 December the nose was sawn off; a toe went missing; and in the first week of January what was left was cut through at the ankles and carted away for restoration. One hundred and seven days on public display, 228,700 kronor of damage, a police investigation open. Sweden's greatest footballer began the year without a likeness in his own home town.

He had somewhere else to be. January delivered what December had only promised. The announcement had come between the panettone and the new year, as the previous year's chapter told it; now came the medical, the unveiling and the first mornings back at Milanello among team-mates young enough to be his sons. The cynics — and Milan had bred a decade of them — saw a nostalgia signing, a poster to shift in a difficult winter. They misread the man. Great strikers age the way great vinegars do, losing volume and gaining concentration, and he came back not as a memory of himself but as a standard raised in the middle of the dressing room, a daily rebuke to anything resembling comfort. Call him the old corsair, come back for one more sea.

Fix the frame first, because 2020 is a pivot and pivots bear weight. This was Milan's sixth consecutive season outside the Champions League, the property of Elliott Management, with Paolo Scaroni in the president's chair, Paolo Maldini as technical director, Frederic Massara beside him as sporting director, Zvonimir Boban above them both as chief football officer, and Alessio Romagnoli wearing the armband. On the bench sat Stefano Pioli, appointed the previous October to replace the sacked Marco Giampaolo — a hire greeted, it is fair to say, as an interim measure. The year would make an architect of him.

The Quiet Window, and San Ante

The rest of the window was quieter and no less important. Simon Kjaer arrived on loan from Sevilla to bring an elder's calm to the defence, Asmir Begovic came from Bournemouth to keep goal in reserve, and a quick, willing Belgian named Alexis Saelemaekers slipped in on loan from Anderlecht with barely a headline to his name. Krzysztof Piatek, the finisher of the previous winter's daydreams, left for Hertha of Berlin for some twenty-seven million euros, and Fabio Borini went to Verona. Windows like this one win no front pages in January; they win the following autumn.

What did win front pages in January was a Croatian nobody had listed among the assets. Ante Rebic scored three times in two appearances off the bench — a brace to take Udinese 3-2, then the winner at Brescia thirteen minutes after coming on — and the Italian papers went happily out of their minds. La Gazzetta dello Sport rechristened the ground San Ante. Corriere dello Sport reached for 'Ante odluke', Ante decides, and for the portmanteau that stuck: Ibrahirebic. Read from Zagreb it looked like confirmation: the old Swede and the willing Croat were the beginning of something. Rebic would end the season as Milan's leading league scorer with eleven, a total nobody had forecast in August.

A Surname in the Ninety-Third Minute

On 2 February 2020, in a 1-1 league draw with Hellas Verona at San Siro, a boy of eighteen came off the bench in the ninety-third minute, and with those few seconds a single surname stretched itself across three generations of the same club. Daniel Maldini's grandfather Cesare had first pulled on the rossonero shirt sixty-six years earlier, winning four league titles and lifting the European Cup of 1963 as captain; his father Paolo, watching now from the directors' box not merely as a parent but as the club's technical director, had played six hundred and forty-seven league games — every one of them for Milan, a Serie A record — and gathered seven scudetti and five European Cups along the way. No other family had given three generations to one Italian club at this level.

'My debut was a dream, shame about the result,' the boy said afterwards, with the family talent for understatement. 'We could have done more, but there was still a lot of emotion.' Note the composition of the scene: a son introduced into the first team his father was rebuilding, on the pitch where his grandfather had been captain. Clubs speak endlessly of DNA, and mostly they mean marketing. Here, for once, the metaphor walked on two legs into stoppage time of a drawn game.

Two Goals Up at the Interval

The derby of 9 February, a week later, is a match to be studied rather than remembered. Milan led Inter 2-0 at the interval, Ante Rebic striking on forty minutes and Ibrahimović adding the second in first-half stoppage time, and San Siro — still full then, seventy-odd thousand of them, one of the last times in the year it would be full — permitted itself belief. Then Brozovic on fifty-one, Vecino three minutes after him, De Vrij on seventy, and Lukaku deep in stoppage time: 4-2, a two-goal lead turned to ash inside half an hour. It would stand, though nobody could know it yet, as the last derby of the calendar year that Inter won; on the night it tasted only of the old fragility, the decade's most familiar flavour.

Four evenings later Juventus arrived for the first leg of the Coppa Italia semi-final, and Rebic put Milan ahead on sixty-one minutes. Milan carried the lead all the way to the door, and then, in the first minute of stoppage time, conceded a penalty that Cristiano Ronaldo converted: 1-1, an away goal surrendered with the last knock of the night. The return leg would not be played for four months.

March: The Gates, and a Dismissal

On 9 March Serie A stopped mid-breath. Lombardy had become the first Western epicentre of the pandemic; Bergamo, an hour up the road, became a name the whole world learned to say with its voice lowered. When football returned in June it returned to locked gates and rows of folded plastic, and the great bowl of San Siro — but for a token thousand admitted on one September evening — would stay empty for the rest of the calendar year, seventy-odd thousand seats tipped up.

Inside the club, a war was on over what Milan was for. Boban had learned that the ownership was courting Ralf Rangnick behind his back, and Maldini's, and Pioli's, and he said so to La Gazzetta dello Sport: it was, in his words, 'a move without respect and elegance... not Milan's way, or at least not what we remember as Milan's way.' He was dismissed for saying it. The courts took their time and sided with him: a first ruling awarded him 5.375 million euros in damages, and though Milan's appeal cut the figure, in November 2024 Italy's Supreme Court found the dismissal unlawful and ordered the club to hand back 1.2 million it had clawed off him. The caretaker kept his bench.

Football Without a Public Is an X-Ray

The Coppa Italia return was played on 12 June, the first competitive match in Italy after the lockdown, in an empty stadium in Turin: 0-0, Ibrahimović absent, Milan eliminated on the away-goals rule without ever losing a game. There are eliminations that read like defeats and eliminations that read like clerical errors; this was the second kind, and it stung the more for it.

The league resumed in the third week of June behind closed doors, and here the year turns. Football without a public is an x-ray, a team with the flesh removed, and what it showed was a Milan nobody had seen in years: organised, quick through the middle third, and suddenly merciless. From the restart to the season's end in August, Pioli's side went a dozen league matches without defeat — nine won, three drawn, thirty points taken from a possible thirty-six — one of the form teams of Italy in that suspended summer.

The night that named the new era came on 7 July, when league-leading Juventus arrived at San Siro and led 2-0 before the hour, Rabiot scoring on the stroke of the second half and Ronaldo adding another. What followed took five minutes to become legend: Ibrahimović from the penalty spot on sixty-two, Kessié on sixty-six, Rafael Leão on sixty-seven — three goals in five minutes — and Rebic on eighty to close it at 4-2. It was Milan's first victory from two goals down since a 4-3 over Sassuolo in October 2016, and it was played to nobody at all; and yet ask around the city and everyone remembers exactly where they were watching, and on what small bright screen.

The season ended sixth on sixty-six points — nineteen wins, nine draws, ten defeats — with sixty-three goals scored, Milan's richest league harvest since 2012-13. The other column told more: forty-six conceded across the whole campaign, but only twelve of them in the dozen matches after the restart against thirty-four in the twenty-six before, a defence learning to breathe. Thirty-five of the sixty-three goals came in that final dozen, a team scoring almost three a game while the country held its breath. Sixth place carried Milan into the Europa League — properly this time, by right of the table, without the financial fair play shadow that had shut the European door after the previous campaign — and on 21 July the club handed Pioli a two-year extension. The caretaker had been given the keys.

Twenty-Four Kicks at Vila do Conde

Europe insisted on being earned three times over: the qualifying rounds of a pandemic autumn were sudden death, and Milan survived them all — 2-0 against Shamrock Rovers on 17 September; then 3-2 against Bodø/Glimt a week later, a match in which the teenager Lorenzo Colombo, deputising for an Ibrahimović sidelined by a positive COVID test, scored on his full debut; and finally, on 1 October, in Vila do Conde, the absurd and unforgettable night of Rio Ave. Alexis Saelemaekers had put Milan ahead early in the second half, the Portuguese had levelled and then gone in front in the first minute of extra time, and only in the very last seconds of the second period, with a Rio Ave defender sent off and a penalty given, did Hakan Çalhanoğlu convert to make it 2-2 with the final kick of the night. The shootout that followed ran to twenty-four kicks — both goalkeepers among the takers, both goalkeepers among the failures — before Aderlan Santos missed the twenty-fourth and sent Milan through 9-8. Some qualifications are administrative. This one was operatic.

The group paired Milan with Celtic, Sparta Prague and Lille, and it began handsomely: 3-1 at Celtic Park on 22 October, before three hundred and sixteen souls in a stadium built for sixty thousand, where Rade Krunic struck on fourteen minutes and Brahim Diaz on forty-two and the young Norwegian Jens Petter Hauge — signed that autumn from Bodø/Glimt, for whom he had scored against Milan at San Siro four weeks before — added a third in stoppage time; then 3-0 against Sparta at San Siro a week on. Then, on 5 November, Lille came to Milan and won 3-0, and with that defeat fell a run of twenty-four matches unbeaten in all competitions — the club's longest such sequence in twenty-four years, stretching back to a loss last suffered in March. The French side finished on eleven points; Milan, four wins and a draw set against that single humiliation, took thirteen and won the group outright, passing into the knockout rounds, which is all that history requires; the evening itself was a cold shower taken, for once mercifully, without witnesses.

Christmas at the Summit

The summer's business was of a piece with the January before it: young, precise, unglamorous. Sandro Tonali came from Brescia on loan with an option to buy; Brahim Diaz on loan from Real Madrid; Kjaer's loan was made permanent for a modest three and a half million; Ciprian Tatarusanu arrived to deputise in goal, Hauge to run at tiring full-backs, Diogo Dalot on loan from Manchester United, Pierre Kalulu to learn the trade. Ibrahimović signed on until the following June. Around the old corsair the spine had set: Donnarumma in goal, Kessié and Bennacer in the middle, Theo Hernandez on the left, Leão ahead, and Zlatan at the prow.

The new league year opened on 21 September with Bologna beaten 2-0 at San Siro, both goals Ibrahimović's — one from open play, one from the spot — while Tonali and Brahim Diaz made their debuts. Then the autumn unspooled like a tactician's dream: Crotone beaten 2-0 away, Spezia dispatched 3-0, and on 17 October the derby, won 2-1 in Inter's nominal half of the shared house, Ibrahimović scoring both goals inside the opening sixteen minutes. A wild 3-3 with Roma followed, then a win at Udine, and Milan sat where Milan had not sat in years: on top of Italy.

The proof arrived on 23 December, the last match before the break, when Lazio came to San Siro and the game stood level at 2-2 deep into stoppage time — until Theo Hernandez, the cavalry-charge left-back, arrived at the end of one final attack to win it 3-2. Milan went to Christmas top of Serie A: thirty-four points from fourteen matches, a point clear of Inter and seven clear of the pack stalled on twenty-seven, still unbeaten in the league and leading the table for the first time in years, with Ibrahimović — despite injury, despite his own bout of COVID — the league's leading scorer for much of the autumn.

Every honest account of 2020 must end in mourning as well as in league tables, because on 9 December Italy lost Paolo Rossi, the hero of the 1982 World Cup, and a country that had spent the year counting its dead in Lombardy stopped to grieve a man who had once made it delirious with joy. That is the shape of it: a season played in silence between two griefs, and in the middle, improbably, a resurrection. An old striker who refused the mercy of nostalgia. A coach hired as a stopgap who built something that lasted. A boy named Maldini stepping into stoppage time. A director sacked for saying out loud what the club used to be. And on the night of 23 December, when Theo's shot went in and the sound came back off row upon row of empty seats, genuine title relevance returned to this address for the first time since the scudetto of 2010-11 — in the one year of the century when not a soul was permitted through the turnstiles to see it.