When the Fog Lifted: The Nineteenth Scudetto

The Fog Lifts on the Navigli

There are winters in Milan when the fog comes down off the Lombard plain and sits on the Navigli for weeks, and the city learns to walk by memory; and there are rarer, sweeter seasons when the fog lifts all at once and the Madonnina stands up golden against the far white teeth of the Alps, and everyone remembers why they endure the place. The footballing year of 2022 was the second kind. Eleven years had passed since the scudetto of 2010-11 — eleven years in which the Diavolo had been sold and resold, dismantled and reassembled, mocked, pitied and at last patiently rebuilt — and in the spring of 2022 a young side, its two leading scorers a twenty-two-year-old Portuguese winger and a thirty-five-year-old Frenchman bought for almost nothing, walked out of that fog carrying the nineteenth league title in the club's history.

It was not a team of emperors. Stefano Pioli, the quiet professor of the touchline, had been given the cheaper stalls of the market and had cooked from them the way a good Lombard kitchen cooks: patience, broth, and the nerve to stir slowly. Olivier Giroud had arrived from Chelsea in the summer of 2021 for about a million euros, the price of a decent second-hand saloon by the standards of the modern game; Rafael Leão, the strolling panther of the left wing, played as though the match owed him money and he had all afternoon to collect; Sandro Tonali ran the midfield with a miner's lungs and an accountant's tidiness; and above them all, in every sense, stood Zlatan Ibrahimović, forty years old, of whom more — much more — presently.

Two Minutes in February

Honesty first, because the year demands it. Milan's return to the Champions League in 2021-22, their first since 2013-14, had been a lesson administered without anaesthetic: a group containing Liverpool, Atlético Madrid and Porto, from which they extracted one win, one draw and four defeats, six goals scored and nine conceded, finishing bottom before December 2021 was out. When the new year opened, the European door was already shut. There remained Italy — and Italy, as it turned out, was enough.

On 5 February 2022 came the evening on which the season pivoted, as seasons will, on a handful of minutes. The derby, at San Siro; Ivan Perišić put the reigning champions ahead, and for a long while Milan pressed against the glass of the match like a man locked out of his own house. Then Giroud — the Frenchman with the corsair's beard, bought almost as an afterthought — scored in the 75th minute and again in the 78th, two blows delivered within a breath of each other, and the derby was turned on its head, 2-1. Milan moved to within a single point of Inter, and something less measurable moved with them: the conviction, from that night onward, that the mountain could actually be climbed.

The cup was less generous. In the Coppa Italia Milan reached the semi-final and drew Inter again: a goalless first leg on 1 March that satisfied nobody, then defeat in the return on 19 April, and it was the cousins who went on to the final. Two wins, a draw and a loss was the season's cup ledger — a small wound, and perhaps a useful one, for a team that has just been refused tends to sit down to its next meal with a sharper appetite.

Six Steps Up the Mountain

What followed in the league was a run-in of a kind Milan had not produced in a decade: the final six matches all won, behind a defence that from the twentieth matchday onwards conceded just nine goals — figures that read like the pulse of a man who has simply decided not to panic.

On 24 April, Lazio were beaten 2-1 by a goal in stoppage time from Tonali — Tonali, who kept arriving in the closing pages of matches like the moral of a story. A week later, on the first of May, Fiorentina were dispatched 1-0 at San Siro, one of those lean, unlovely victories that older supporters trust more than any festival of goals, because a title is mostly built out of them the way a farmhouse is mostly built out of plain stone.

Then Verona, away, on 8 May, where Milan fell behind and where Tonali — again Tonali — scored first the equaliser and then the winner in a 3-1 victory, two goals from a boy who ran as if the shirt itself were the wage. On 15 May, Atalanta were beaten 2-0, and the arithmetic narrowed to a single Sunday: Milan needed only a point away to Sassuolo, and all of Lombardy began, cautiously, superstitiously, to believe.

Reggio Emilia, Before the Interval

Reggio Emilia, 22 May 2022, the Mapei Stadium. A point would have sufficed, and the Italian instinct in such circumstances is to defend the point like a dowry; Pioli's young men did the opposite. Giroud scored in the 17th minute and again in the 32nd; Franck Kessié added the third in the 36th; and every one of the three goals grew out of the running of Leão, who spent the half tearing at the Sassuolo flank the way one tears bread. Three-nil before the interval — the feast served before the guests had unfolded their napkins — and the remaining hour was not football so much as one long, disbelieving embrace between a team and its travelling people.

The numbers deserve their line in the ledger, because they were a club record: 86 points, from 26 wins, 8 draws and 4 defeats; 69 goals scored against 31 conceded; two points clear of Inter, who finished second on 84. Giroud and Leão shared the club's top league scoring with 11 goals apiece, 14 each across all competitions, and after the final whistle at Sassuolo the Portuguese was handed the league's MVP award for the season — 11 goals, 10 assists, and a spring in which he had made defending look like an imposition on his time.

And Milan the city did what Milan the city does once a decade if it is lucky: it poured out of the bars and the tram stops and filled its piazzas with red and black, eleven years of swallowed pride going up all at once like the lid coming off a pot. The scudetto was the nineteenth. That night it felt like the first.

The Knee That Should Not Have Carried Him

Only days after the trophy was lifted did the era's strangest, most moving story come out, and it belonged, inevitably, to Ibrahimović. For roughly six months — half the campaign — the Swede had been playing on a left knee whose anterior cruciate ligament was effectively gone. He revealed that he had taken painkillers every day and barely slept; that he had received more than twenty injections; that the knee had been drained roughly once a week; and that across that whole stretch he had managed full training with his team-mates only about ten times. The medical men will tell you that a knee without its cruciate is a hinge without its pin. Zlatan played Serie A football on it.

He made 23 league appearances that season, only eleven of them from the start, and scored 8 goals, and at forty became one of the oldest men ever to win an Italian league title. The image of him amid the celebrations, cigar in hand, master of ceremonies to a squad half his age, travelled the world as a picture of swagger; only later did we understand it was really a picture of concealment — the grin of a man who had dragged himself through the run-in in constant pain and told no one. When the party ended he flew to Lyon, where surgeons reconstructed the ligament with lateral reinforcement and repaired the meniscus, and the bulletin said around eight months. The moralist notes what the supporter already knew: the body is fallible; certain wills are not.

The Summer of Signatures

The Italy around this triumph was not a tranquil country. In July, Mario Draghi's government of national unity collapsed; a September general election followed; and in October Giorgia Meloni was sworn in as Italy's first woman prime minister. Beneath the politics sat the economics — energy prices and inflation climbing steeply in the wake of Russia's February invasion of Ukraine — so that the same households that hung flags from their balconies in May were reading their gas bills by autumn with a certain dread. Football does not float free of such things; it merely gives people somewhere warmer to stand.

The club itself changed hands at the very summit of its revival. On 31 August 2022, RedBird Capital Partners, the American firm founded by Gerry Cardinale, completed its acquisition of AC Milan from Elliott Management, in a deal valuing the club at about €1.2 billion — some $1.3 billion. The press reported the plumbing: roughly €650 million in cash, with the balance of about €550 million structured as a vendor loan from Elliott at around seven per cent, so that the departing owner kept a minority financial interest in the club it had rebuilt; and Yankee Global Enterprises, the house of the New York Yankees, took a minority stake besides. Paolo Scaroni stayed on as chairman and Ivan Gazidis as chief executive into the transition, while in the background the city's long argument over San Siro — a new stadium with Inter, or the redemption of the old Meazza — went on murmuring like a pot left on the stove.

The squad, too, was rearranged. Kessié, scorer of the third goal of the title afternoon at Reggio Emilia, left on a free transfer for Barcelona — the modern game's habit of letting its treasures walk out with their contracts. Alessio Romagnoli, the captain, went the same way to Lazio, and the armband passed to Davide Calabria, with Théo Hernández as his deputy. Inward came Charles De Ketelaere from Club Brugge for €32 million, the summer's great gamble; Divock Origi on a free from Liverpool; the young defender Malick Thiaw; and Junior Messias, made a permanent Rossonero. A champion team, the old men in the bars observed, is never finished; it is only ever being re-cooked.

Autumn, and the Door to Europe Reopens

The autumn answered the only question worth asking of champions — what now? — with a derby. On 3 September 2022, Marcelo Brozović put Inter ahead in the 21st minute, and Milan replied with the era's own voices: Leão in the 28th, Giroud in the 54th from the Portuguese's pass, Leão again in the 60th — a brace and an assist in one afternoon, the second goal good enough to be voted Serie A's goal of the month — before Edin Džeko narrowed it in the 67th. Three-two, and Milan sat at the top of the table, wearing the shield on the chest as though it had always been there.

Europe, which had schooled them a year before, now received a corrected pupil. In Group E of the Champions League, Milan drew 1-1 in Salzburg on 6 September and beat Dinamo Zagreb 3-1 at San Siro on 14 September, then took their beating from Chelsea — 3-0 at Stamford Bridge on 5 October, 0-2 at San Siro six days later — the kind of double defeat that once would have unstitched a Milanese autumn. Not this one. They went to the Maksimir on 25 October and won 4-0; they closed against Salzburg at San Siro on 2 November and won 4-0 again; and with 10 points, second behind Chelsea's 13, Milan advanced to the knockout rounds of the Champions League for the first time since 2013-14. The apprenticeship, one could finally say, had been served.

Then the world intervened. The Qatar World Cup, played across November and December, halted Serie A in mid-season — an unprecedented winter pause — and Italy, painfully, was not there to contest a tournament Argentina would win. Milan took themselves to a December training camp in Dubai and kept the machine warm with friendlies against Arsenal and Liverpool on the 13th and 16th of the month. And so the year closed in an odd, humming suspension: champions of Italy, back among Europe's last sixteen, owned by new money, carried by young legs. If you ask what 2022 was, the ledger answers plainly: a nineteenth scudetto won with a club-record 86 points, two clear of Inter; a derby turned in a handful of February minutes; a title sealed before half-time in Reggio Emilia; an old Swede's ruined knee carried up the mountain on pure will. The fog will come back to the Navigli — it always does. But that spring, the whole city saw the Alps.