2023 — The Year of the Five Derbies, and of the Long Goodbyes | Le Cronache

Two Tribes Under One Madonnina

There are years that arrive like a well-made risotto, patient and golden, each addition folded in at the proper moment; and there are years like 2023, which arrived like fog off the Navigli in January and never entirely lifted, so that Milan the club spent twelve months groping for landmarks it had known all its life and finding, again and again, that a neighbour had moved them. The neighbour, of course, wore black and blue. Five times in the calendar year the two tribes of the city met — for a Super Cup in the Arabian desert, for league points in winter and in autumn, and twice, unforgettably and unforgivably, for a place in the final of the Champions League — and five times Internazionale won. A derby is a family argument conducted in public, and in 2023 one side of the family did all the talking.

And yet to write the year off as mere humiliation would be to read only the scoreline and not the match. This was also the year the Diavolo went deeper into Europe than at any time since the Athens night of 2007; the year Rafael Leão, the loping Portuguese who plays as if the pitch were slightly downhill in whichever direction he happens to be facing, bound his future to the club until 2028; the year the reigning champions of Italy surrendered their title to a Napoli drunk on its first scudetto since 1990 and still finished fourth, seventy points, twenty wins, back among Europe's aristocracy. Triumph and grief came plaited together like the strands of a good bread. To understand the New Rossoneri you must hold both in the mouth at once.

Sandro Tonali and Rafael Leão at the Stadio Giuseppe Meazza on 23 April 2023, during Milan-Lecce. Within six weeks Leão had signed to 2028 with a €175m release clause; within three months Tonali, the Brescia boy who had grown up a Milan supporter, was sold to Newcastle United. The same photograph holds the man Milan kept and the man Milan sold.
Saggittarius A, via Wikimedia Commons — CC BY-SA 4.0

January, or the Winter of Short Cups

The year began with two evictions in a single week, which even for a club of Milan's dramatic appetites is brisk work. On the eleventh of January, at San Siro, Torino came to town for a Coppa Italia round of sixteen and stayed until deep into extra time, and although the granata finished the night with ten men it was they who scored, Michel Adopo in the 114th minute, and Milan who went home — out of the cup at the first hurdle, beaten 1-0 in their own kitchen by a side cooking with one hand. There is a particular Lombard silence that follows such evenings, the silence of men buttoning coats against the cold and declining to discuss it, and it had barely thawed when the squad flew to Riyadh.

There, on the eighteenth, at the King Fahd International Stadium, the first derby of the year was staged a continent from the Madonnina, the Supercoppa Italiana having become a travelling exhibition. Federico Dimarco after ten minutes, Edin Džeko after twenty-one, Lautaro Martínez to finish it: 3-0, Inter's second consecutive Super Cup, and a trophy lost not narrowly but categorically. By the fifth of February, when Inter took the league derby 1-0 as well, the pattern of the year had announced itself the way frost announces itself on a window — quietly, completely, and before anyone inside had noticed the temperature drop. The defending champions of Italy were defending nothing; Napoli were away over the horizon toward a title that would be theirs by right and by margin, their third ever, and Milan's winter business became the salvage of fourth place, which they would in the end secure with the unglamorous arithmetic of 70 points from 38 games, 64 scored, 43 against. Championships are operas; fourth place is bookkeeping. But bookkeeping, that year, bought the ticket that mattered.

The Road Back to the High Table

For while the league was being lost the continent was being remembered. On Saint Valentine's night, the fourteenth of February, Tottenham Hotspur came to San Siro for a round-of-sixteen first leg and were met by a goal after seven minutes from Brahim Díaz, a small man's goal in a big man's stadium, and that solitary strike proved the entire tie: in London on the eighth of March Milan defended the nought-nought with the patience of a fisherman on the Ticino, and passed through 1-0 on aggregate. It was not lavish. It did not need to be. European football at this altitude is less a banquet than a siege diet, and Milan, who had spent sixteen years eating poorly in Europe, showed they had not forgotten how to ration.

Then came Napoli, the champions-elect, in a quarter-final that was really a referendum on the Italian season. In the first leg at San Siro on the twelfth of April, Ismaël Bennacer scored from Leão's invention and Zambo Anguissa collected a red card, and Milan carried a 1-0 lead south. The second leg in Naples on the eighteenth was the sort of night Gianni Brera's whole vocabulary was built for: Olivier Giroud, the old Frenchman with the profile of a Roman consul, had a penalty saved and then scored anyway before the interval; Victor Osimhen equalised in the third minute of added time; and in between, Mike Maignan — the goalkeeper as final argument — saved a late penalty from Khvicha Kvaratskhelia that would have turned the tie on its head. 1-1 on the night, 2-1 across the two legs, and Milan were in a Champions League semi-final for the first time since the club last owned the trophy itself. The city permitted itself, for perhaps a fortnight, the luxury of dreaming with both eyes closed.

The Euroderby: Two Nights, One House, No Mercy

The draw, with the sense of theatre that fate reserves for cities that think they have suffered enough, produced Inter. A European Cup semi-final between the two halves of Milan, both legs in the one stadium they share like an old married couple sharing a bed and a grievance: the tie was billed as the Euroderby, and the whole peninsula stopped to watch the family argument go continental.

It lasted, as a contest, eleven minutes. On the tenth of May, in the first leg, Edin Džeko scored in the eighth minute and Henrikh Mkhitaryan in the eleventh, and Milan — nominally the home side, in their own house, before their own curva — were two goals down before the espresso had cooled. They did not recover in that match and they did not recover in the next: on the sixteenth, with the shirts reversed and the same roof overhead, Lautaro Martínez struck in the 74th minute, 1-0 on the night, 3-0 on the aggregate, and Inter walked on to their first final since 2010 while Milan walked the shorter, infinitely longer walk down the same corridor. That Inter then lost the final 1-0 to Manchester City was a consolation of the kind that consoles nobody: the Diavolo had gone to the semi-final of the Champions League, a genuine resurrection after sixteen thin years, and would be remembered that season chiefly as the landscape through which the neighbours marched. Football's morality is an unsentimental accountant. It records how far you went, and then it records who stopped you, and the second column is written in the larger hand.

June: The Month That Closed an Epoch

What the spring had begun, June finished, and it finished it with the thoroughness of a notary settling an estate. On the fifth of the month, after a strategy meeting with Gerry Cardinale — the owner whose RedBird Capital had completed its purchase of the club the previous August — Paolo Maldini was told that his work as technical director was finished, the club confirming it in writing the following morning; and Ricky Massara, the sporting director who had built the scudetto squad beside him, went with him. One does not need to editorialise; the noun suffices. Maldini. The surname that had run through the club like a watermark runs through good paper, the man the tifosi called Mr. Milan, dismissed after a meeting that went badly, with chairman Paolo Scaroni and chief executive Giorgio Furlani stepping forward into the space he left. The backlash from the faithful was heavy and immediate, and it was not really about football at all. It was about whether a club is a lineage or a portfolio, and the answer, in the sixth month of 2023, was delivered without ceremony.

Seven days later the question became bereavement. On the twelfth of June, Silvio Berlusconi died at eighty-six. Whatever Italy made of the man — and Italy made of him everything it is possible to make of a man — the football club knew precisely what it owed him: rescued from the edge of bankruptcy in 1986, owned until the Chinese sale of 2017, eight league titles, five European Cups, the greatest sustained splendour any club of the twentieth century's end could claim. Carlo Ancelotti was among those who paid tribute, and for a few days the arguments of the present were suspended while the city buried the impresario of its grandest opera. In one week Milan had lost the father of its modern empire and dismissed the son who embodied it. The old Milan, the Milan of dynasty and blood-memory, ended in June 2023 as surely as any era ends: not with a match, but with a meeting and a funeral.

Mike Maignan in the Milan goal at San Siro on 13 March 2023, against Salernitana. Five weeks later, in the Champions League quarter-final second leg in Naples, he saved Khvicha Kvaratskhelia's penalty to send Milan through 2-1 on aggregate and into their first European semi-final since 2007.
Calciopedia, via Wikimedia Commons — CC BY-SA 4.0

The Boy Who Wrote to Saint Lucy

And still June was not done, for the estate had one more asset to liquidate. Sandro Tonali was born in Lodi, in the flat rice country south of the city where the fog is a resident and Milan is a religion, and was schooled as a footballer in the academy at Brescia. As a child, in the custom of those Lombard provinces where the gifts are brought not by the man in the red coat but by Santa Lucia, he wrote the saint a letter, and what he asked for was to become a professional footballer — and, while she was about it, a Milan kit. His grandmother Gina kept the letter. The saint, unusually punctual, delivered on both counts. He arrived on loan from Brescia in September 2020, made the move permanent, took the No. 8, and in 2021-22 drove the midfield of the side that won the club's first scudetto in eleven years — a tifoso in the team of his own devotions, the rarest and most valuable thing a football club possesses, because it cannot be bought. It can, however, be sold.

In the summer of 2023, with the balance sheet requiring what balance sheets require, Tonali was sold to Newcastle United and their Saudi-backed project for seventy million euro, with ten million more in add-ons should the clauses ripen — a figure that made him the most expensive Italian footballer the game had yet produced. Newcastle announced him on the third of July, not two months after his twenty-third birthday, and the chronicle needs no scene of weeping to reckon the cost: the boy who had asked a saint for one shirt, the man many had hoped would carry the armband as a bandiera for fifteen years, packed instead for the North Sea. The fee was enormous and the logic was impeccable and the loss was total, and all three of those things are true at once. That is the RedBird era in a single transaction: nothing about it was wrong except everything the supporters felt.

Seven Strangers and an American Summer

The Tonali money did not sit idle; Furlani's Milan spent it the way a prudent house spends an inheritance, widely and on the young. In came Christian Pulisic from Chelsea for some twenty million, Tijjani Reijnders from AZ Alkmaar, Ruben Loftus-Cheek from Chelsea as well, Samuel Chukwueze from Villarreal, Yunus Musah from Valencia, Noah Okafor from Salzburg, Luka Jović on a free — an armful of passports, a squad rebuilt in a single window, joining the previous season's investments in De Ketelaere, Thiaw and Origi. And out, alongside Tonali, went two farewells of very different weight: Ante Rebić to Beşiktaş, and Zlatan Ibrahimović to history, the great Swede retiring at last and taking with him the final echo of the dressing-room voice that had scolded the 2022 scudetto into existence.

The new company rehearsed in America, on the Soccer Champions Tour: Real Madrid at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena on the twenty-third of July, Juventus at the Dignity Health Sports Park in Los Angeles on the twenty-seventh, before a curious eight thousand, and Barcelona at the Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas on the first of August. Real Madrid won that first one 3-2 after Tomori and the teenaged Luka Romero had put Milan in front; Juventus drew 2-2 and took the shoot-out; Ansu Fati settled the Barcelona game 1-0 in the Nevada heat. Three matches, no victories, and nobody in Lombardy was foolish enough to mistake a July scoreline for prophecy. There was one piece of continuity amid the upheaval, and it was the most important piece: on the second of June, after months of difficult negotiation, Rafael Leão signed until 2028, a release clause of 175 million euro standing over the contract like a customs post. Serie A's most valuable player for 2021-22 and the top scorer of Milan's 2022-23 league campaign with fifteen, the loping Portuguese stayed when staying was no longer to be assumed. In a year of severances, one knot held.

Autumn Arithmetic, and a Field in San Donato

Autumn tested the new house's mortar and found it, in one famous place, still wet. On the sixteenth of September the fifth derby of the calendar year completed the whitewash in the cruellest register yet: Inter 5, Milan 1 — Mkhitaryan twice, Thuram, Çalhanoğlu from the spot, Frattesi in added time, with Leão's reply a lone candle in a gale — Inter's fifth consecutive victory in the derby, a run neither half of the city had managed before in the fixture's long history, and the only mercy of the afternoon was that the year had no sixth meeting to offer. In Europe the new Milan were braver and unluckier: drawn into a Group F that resembled a customs queue of the continent's aristocracy — Borussia Dortmund, Paris Saint-Germain, Newcastle United, the last of these now employing a certain midfielder from Lodi — they drew 0-0 at home to Newcastle, drew 0-0 in Dortmund, were dismantled 3-0 in Paris, then beat PSG 2-1 at San Siro through Leão and the old consul Giroud on a night the stadium remembered its own voice. But Dortmund won 3-1 in Milan, Giroud missing a penalty and Chukwueze scoring, and so it came down to St James' Park on the thirteenth of December: Joelinton first, then Pulisic, then Chukwueze in the 84th, Milan winning 2-1 in the pit of the Geordie noise — and eliminated anyway, third on eight points behind Dortmund's eleven and PSG's eight, consigned with Newcastle to the exit and Milan to the Europa League. A victory that tasted of ash: the year's whole flavour, served one last time.

Off the pitch, the club was quietly redrawing its own map. On the eighth of June, by public deed, it had bought ninety per cent of SportLifeCity, the company holding the land in the San Francesco quarter of San Donato Milanese, out in the southern suburbs, where the standing plan had been for a modest arena of some twenty thousand seats; and in the last week of September Paolo Scaroni confirmed that the papers were with the comune for something rather larger — a club-owned stadium of around seventy thousand, with headquarters and museum alongside it. Read that alongside the rest of the year and the shape of the thing becomes unmistakable: a club detaching itself, joint by joint, from every structure it had shared — the shared stadium, the shared city supremacy, the dynastic past, the boyhood heart of its midfield — and wagering that what it built alone would be worth the solitude. So ends 2023 in the chronicle: fourth in the league, semi-finalists in Europe, nil-for-five against the neighbours, one grave, one dismissal, one letter to Saint Lucy returned to sender. The fog will lift, as Lombard fog always does, and reveal either a cathedral under construction or a demolition very tidily managed. The honest chronicler, writing with the year barely cold, records only that the scaffolding is up, and that the city — both halves of it — is watching.

Ruben Loftus-Cheek listening to Stefano Pioli on the San Siro touchline, 19 September 2023, as Milan opened Champions League Group F with a goalless draw against Newcastle United. The rebuilt midfield bought with the Tonali money would finish the group third behind Dortmund and PSG, and fall into the Europa League.
Saggittarius A, via Wikimedia Commons — CC BY-SA 4.0

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