Resurrection in an Empty House

The Fog That Came in March

The fog comes off the Navigli in most winters like a courtesy, a grey curtain drawn each evening and lifted each noon, and Milan has always known how to live inside it — how to cook its risotto, run its looms and its printing presses, and fill San Siro on Sunday regardless. In the early months of 2020 a different fog came down, one that did not lift at noon. Lombardy became the first Western epicentre of the pandemic; Bergamo, an hour up the road, became a name the whole world learned to say with lowered voice. On 9 March Serie A stopped mid-breath. When football returned in June it returned to locked gates and empty concrete, and the great bowl of San Siro — but for a token thousand admitted on one September evening — would stay silent for the rest of the calendar year.

It is worth fixing the institutional frame before the story runs away, because 2020 is a hinge and hinges 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, 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, a caretaker for the fog. The year would make an architect of him.

The Corsair Comes Home

The announcement had come on 27 December 2019, between the panettone and the new year: Zlatan Ibrahimovic, thirty-eight years old, lately of LA Galaxy, would return to Milan on a free transfer, effective with the January window. The cynics — and Milan had bred a decade of cynics by then — saw a nostalgia signing, a poster to sell in a difficult winter. They misread the man. Great strikers age the way great vinegars do, losing volume and gaining concentration, and Ibrahimovic returned 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.

The rest of the window was quieter and, in hindsight, 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.

A Name Told Three Times

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.' The moralist pauses over 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.

February's Lesson

A week later came the derby, and the derby of 9 February deserves to be studied the way one studies a burnt risotto: to learn, not to enjoy. Milan led Inter 2-0 at the interval, Ante Rebic striking on forty minutes and Ibrahimovic 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; but on the night it tasted only of the old fragility, the decade's most familiar dish.

Four evenings later Juventus arrived for the first leg of the Coppa Italia semi-final, and Ante Rebic — the Croatian who would finish the season as the club's leading league scorer with eleven, a fact nobody had forecast in August — 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 until 12 June — the first competitive match in Italy after the lockdown, in an empty stadium in Turin — and it finished 0-0, Ibrahimovic 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.

Music in the Empty House

The league resumed in the third week of June behind closed doors, and here the year turns on its hinge. Football without a public is a rehearsal, an x-ray of a team with the flesh removed, and what the x-ray revealed 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 all Italy in that strange, 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: Ibrahimovic from the penalty spot on sixty-two, Kessie on sixty-six, Rafael Leao on sixty-seven — three goals in five minutes — and Rebic on eighty to close the account 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, in a hollow stadium; and yet ask around the city and everyone seems to remember exactly where they were.

The ledger of 2019-20 closed at sixth place with sixty-six points — nineteen wins, nine draws, ten defeats — and sixty-three goals scored, Milan's richest league harvest since 2012-13. More telling still was the other column: 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, the quiet arithmetic of a defence learning to breathe. Thirty-five of the sixty-three goals, too, came in that final dozen matches, 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.

The Long Road Through Europe

Europe, when it came, 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 Bodo/Glimt a week later, a match in which the teenager Lorenzo Colombo, deputising for an Ibrahimovic 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 Calhanoglu 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 Bodo/Glimt, the very club he had scored against 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, though the evening itself was a cold shower taken, for once mercifully, without witnesses in the stands.

Christmas at the Summit

The summer's business had been 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. Ibrahimovic signed on until the following June. Around the old corsair the spine had set like good stock left overnight: Donnarumma in goal, Kessie and Bennacer in the middle, Theo Hernandez on the left, Leao ahead, and Zlatan at the prow.

The new league year opened on 21 September with Bologna beaten 2-0 at San Siro, both goals Ibrahimovic'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, Ibrahimovic 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 the longest time: 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 behind them, still unbeaten in the league, leading the table at the winter break for the first time in years, with Ibrahimovic — despite injury, despite his own bout of COVID — the league's leading scorer for much of the autumn. Genuine title relevance had not visited this address since the scudetto of 2010-11. It returned, of all years, in the one year nobody could come through the turnstiles to see it.

Every honest chronicle of 2020 must end in mourning as well as arithmetic, 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 paused to grieve a man who had once made it delirious with joy. That is the true weight of the year: a season played in silence between two griefs, and in the middle of it, improbably, a resurrection. An old striker who refused the mercy of nostalgia; a coach hired as a stopgap who built a house; a boy named Maldini stepping into stoppage time; a city locked out of its own cathedral, watching through glass as its team climbed back toward the light. The fog, as Milan has always known, eventually lifts. What matters is what you have been cooking underneath it — and by Christmas 2020, at long last, the kitchen smelled of something worth the wait.