The Year of Farewells and the Southern Cross

A City of Two Springs

There are years that pass through a football club like weather and years that pass through it like surgery, and 2024, for the Associazione Calcio Milan, was emphatically the second kind: a twelvemonth under the knife, in which a five-year cycle was closed, a captaincy changed hands, a beloved centre-forward was walked with full honours to the gate, a Portuguese coach was hired in June and dismissed in December, and the club's hundred-and-twenty-fifth year ended not with silver but with a standing ovation for men who were leaving. The Lombard winter came down over the city as it always does, the fog rolling in off the plain and pooling along the Navigli until the trams seemed to swim rather than run, and beneath that grey lid the two football houses of Milan went about their business at very different temperatures: the neighbours were boiling towards a twentieth title, while the Rossoneri simmered on a low flame, cooking down the last of the Pioli years to their concentrated essence — honourable, nourishing, and no longer enough.

Let the accountants have their line first, because in this era the accountants always eat before the poets: second place in Serie A, seventy-five points, direct passage back to the Champions League secured; Olivier Giroud the leading league scorer with fifteen; Paolo Scaroni in the chairman's seat, Davide Calabria wearing the armband, RedBird Capital in the counting-house above them all. And eighteen points between Milan and the champions, which is not a gap but a landscape — you do not close eighteen points with a January signing and a rousing team-talk, you close them the way one crosses the Alps, slowly, with provisions, and with a plan drawn by somebody who has made the crossing before. Whether Milan possessed such a cartographer was the question 2024 would spend twelve months failing to answer.

The Cups That Emptied Themselves

The year opened with a cup tie that told the season's fortune with the bluntness of a village card-reader. On the tenth of January, at San Siro, Milan met Atalanta in the quarter-final of the Coppa Italia, and when Rafael Leão scored on the stroke of half-time the evening seemed arranged; but Bergamo's men are bred on hills and do not respect arrangements, and Teun Koopmeiners struck twice — once in first-half stoppage time, barely two minutes after Leão's goal, so that the interval arrived with the arrangement already cancelled; once from the penalty spot on fifty-nine minutes, the kick conceded by young Álex Jiménez in the way young men concede such things, with more enthusiasm than geometry — and the cup was gone, one-two, in Milan's own dining room.

There remained Europe, the second table of Europe, and for a while Milan ate well at it. In February the Europa League play-off brought Rennes, dispatched three-nil at San Siro on the fifteenth with an ease that made the return leg at Roazhon Park a week later — lost three-two, survived five-three on aggregate — feel less like a fright than a digestif taken too quickly. In March came Slavia Prague, beaten four-two at home and three-one in Bohemia, seven-three across the tie, and the arithmetic began to whisper that this squad, whatever its domestic ceiling, could still score in volumes when the opponent consented to play football rather than siege.

Then April, and Roma, and the consent was withdrawn. The all-Italian quarter-final was the kind of tie Italian football reserves for its own instruction: the first leg at San Siro lost nil-one on the eleventh, the second at the Olimpico on the eighteenth effectively decided inside twenty-two minutes, Mancini and Dybala scoring before Milan had finished its coffee, Matteo Gabbia's late header on eighty-five minutes serving only to make the aggregate — three-one to Roma — look like a conversation rather than a lecture. With that, the last realistic hope of a trophy in 2023-24 folded its napkin and left, and everyone at the club understood, without a word being printed, that the remaining weeks belonged not to ambition but to farewell.

The Derby That Crowned the Neighbours

History, which is patient and has a cruel sense of theatre, had never before allowed a scudetto to be decided in a Derby della Madonnina; it chose the twenty-second of April 2024 to correct the omission, and it chose Milan to be the witness rather than the bride. At San Siro, with Inter the designated hosts in the house both families share, Francesco Acerbi scored on eighteen minutes and Marcus Thuram added a second on forty-nine, and though Fikayo Tomori pulled one back with ten minutes to run, the evening had long since stopped being a football match and become a coronation: Inter's twentieth title, the second star stitched onto the shirt, sealed in front of the cousins whose colours share the same cathedral of concrete.

It was, moreover, the sixth consecutive derby Milan had lost — six, a number that ceases to be a run of results and becomes a diagnosis — and it fell across Stefano Pioli's final weeks like a shadow across a sundial, stopping the clock at the worst possible hour. Pioli had given the club a scudetto in 2022 and five seasons of dignity, and no verdict on his cycle should be written without that sentence at the top; but football is a Lombard business, and in Lombardy a business that watches its rival celebrate in its own warehouse does not renew the manager's contract out of sentiment. The ending was already written; the derby merely supplied the ink.

The Last Supper of Olivier Giroud

On the twenty-fifth of May, a packed San Siro sat down to say goodbye, and the menu was pure Milan: generous, emotional, and slightly overcooked at the finish. The opponent was Salernitana, already relegated, and the match ended three-three in the manner of a banquet where the host keeps refilling every glass including the guests'. Rafael Leão struck on twenty-two minutes and Davide Calabria, the departing season's captain, on seventy-seven; and between them, on twenty-seven, Olivier Giroud — thirty-seven years old, the old artisan of the penalty area, the man who had arrived in 2021 and helped carry the 2022 scudetto home — scored his forty-ninth and final goal in the red and black. Twice Milan led by two, and twice would have been enough for any team not busy weeping. Simy had already halved the first cushion on sixty-four; then Sambia struck for Salernitana on eighty-seven and Simy again on eighty-nine, and nobody in the stadium greatly minded, because the scoreboard had ceased to be the point an hour earlier.

Giroud was withdrawn on eighty-four minutes so that the farewell could be performed properly, and San Siro rose to him as it rises only for those it has decided to keep forever: a long standing ovation, an embrace for every team-mate, and Luka Jović sent on in his place to inherit a shirt nobody wanted to be seen inheriting. Pioli, taking his own leave after five seasons, was walking out of the same doorway on the same evening, and the crowd understood that it was saying two goodbyes at once. The Frenchman's Milan legend was already secure and already faintly comic in the way the best legends are — this was, after all, the centre-forward who in October 2023 had pulled on the goalkeeper's jersey at Genoa after Maignan's red card and made a match-winning save, as if determined to prove that a true number nine can defend a lead from either end of the pitch. Now he was leaving on a free transfer for Los Angeles and the American league, and the club he left was measurably poorer in goals and immeasurably poorer in character. The moralist notes, because it is his job, that Milan spent 2024 learning the price of both.

Perth, or the Farewell Carried South

And then, six days after the last supper, the story did something stories rarely do: it followed the sun. Milan closed the season not in Lombardy but on the far side of the planet, at Optus Stadium in Perth, Western Australia, where on the thirty-first of May the Rossoneri met Roma in a post-season friendly played under the Southern Cross. For the club's Australian faithful — and there is no more devoted congregation than the one that keeps vigil in Adelaide, where following the Diavolo ordinarily means rising at two and three in the morning to watch the fog of San Siro through the small window of a screen — this was the rarest of gifts: for once the world's clocks were not an enemy, for once Milan came to them. Fifty-six thousand five hundred and twenty-two souls filled the stadium to watch a Milan side led not by Pioli, already departed, but by Daniele Bonera — until days earlier a technical collaborator on Pioli's own staff, and within a month the first head coach of Milan Futuro — entrusted here with a squad of fringe men and boys.

The football itself was a carnival rather than a contest, and Roma won it five-two: Baldanzi on twenty-seven, Abraham in first-half stoppage time, Angeliño on fifty-four, Dybala on fifty-seven and Azmoun on seventy-seven for the giallorossi; Theo Hernández on thirty-seven minutes, with a volley struck from outside the area of the kind that needs no competitive edge to be beautiful, and Noah Okafor on fifty-five for Milan. Bonera's team-sheet read like a promise to the future — Sportiello in goal behind Calabria, Kalulu, Gabbia and Theo; Pobega, Adli and Reijnders in the middle; Florenzi, Giroud and Jiménez ahead — a sheet with Leão and most of the season's principals absent, and the young Spaniard Álex Jiménez, who in January had given away the penalty that ended the Coppa Italia, restored to the front line as if the club were quietly insisting that the boy would be given time. And there, in the starting eleven, stood Giroud one more time; so it may well be that the very last appearance of Olivier Giroud in a Milan shirt came not at San Siro but on Australian soil, a fact the antipodean congregation will be forgiven for treasuring like a relic.

The night carried one more grace note, and it was the gravest and most beautiful of them: both clubs joined in tribute to Agostino Di Bartolomei, who had captained Roma and afterwards worn Milan's shirt, and who had died on the thirtieth of May 1994 — thirty years, almost to the day, before this match was played. Roma's men carried his name on their shirts and the tribute was given three words that need no translating in either half of Italy: Ago, ieri, oggi, sempre. A man belonging to both houses is the right ghost to preside over a match between them played so far from home. Football clubs are forever declaring themselves global; it is in gestures like this — two old Italian institutions bowing together to a shared memory in front of a Perth crowd — that the declaration briefly becomes true.

The Portuguese Summer

On the thirteenth of June the club named its new cartographer: Paulo Fonseca, appointed head coach on a three-year agreement running from the first of July, arriving from Lille and returning to an Italy he had known at Roma between 2019 and 2021. Around him the institutional furniture of the New Rossoneri was arranged with American precision: RedBird Capital holding roughly ninety-nine point nine-three per cent of the club since taking control in 2022, Scaroni presiding as chairman, and Zlatan Ibrahimović — who had once terrorised these corridors as a player — now stalking them as senior operating adviser to the ownership, a Swede recast as éminence grise. The armband itself migrated: Calabria had captained 2023-24, but under Fonseca it passed to Mike Maignan, with Theo Hernández his deputy, so that the team would now be led from the goalmouth, which given the year Milan was about to have proved almost prophetic.

The summer market was the trading-model in full voice, buying futures and selling sentiment. In came Álvaro Morata from Atlético Madrid for around thirteen million, Youssouf Fofana from Monaco for around twenty, Strahinja Pavlović from Salzburg for around eighteen, Emerson Royal from Tottenham for around fifteen, and Tammy Abraham on loan from Roma. Out went Giroud, free to Los Angeles; Simon Kjær, into retirement, taking with him a defender's calm that no fee could have measured; and Charles De Ketelaere, sold permanently to Atalanta for around twenty-two million, a transaction that closed one of the club's more melancholy recent chapters with at least the consolation of a respectable figure. On paper it was a squad refreshed; but squads do not play on paper, they play in autumn, and autumn was coming.

Nights When the Old Blood Stirred

Fonseca's beginning stuttered, and the city began its familiar murmuring; and then, on the twenty-second of September, the murmuring stopped for one astonished night. In the derby — Inter at home, six consecutive defeats pressing on Milan like a debt — Christian Pulisic, the quiet American, took the ball on his own initiative and scored a goal of pure self-employment after ten minutes; Dimarco replied on twenty-seven; and with the match at one-one and one minute of the ninety remaining, Matteo Gabbia, the defender nobody writes songs about, rose to a free-kick and headed the winner. Two-one, the six-derby famine broken, and San Siro learning again what its own voice sounded like at full volume. Gabbia in April had scored a late consolation at the Olimpico that consoled nobody; in September he scored a late derby winner that consoled an entire tribe. Football's justice is erratic but not entirely absent.

Europe, meanwhile, had redesigned itself: the Champions League now opened with a league phase of thirty-six clubs, and Milan's six matches of 2024 traced the whole electrocardiogram of the Fonseca experiment. First the flat-line: beaten one-three at home by Liverpool on the seventeenth of September, then one-nil at Leverkusen on the first of October, Boniface scoring, two defeats from two and the murmuring resumed. Then the pulse: Club Brugge beaten three-one at San Siro on the twenty-second of October, Pulisic again on thirty-four and Tijjani Reijnders twice inside ten minutes of the second half, on sixty-one and seventy-one — the Dutchman arriving from midfield with the punctuality of a man who has memorised the timetable. Then Slovan Bratislava beaten three-two away on the twenty-sixth of November, and Red Star Belgrade two-one at home on the eleventh of December, Leão opening on forty-two, Radonjić levelling on sixty-seven and Tammy Abraham settling it late: four wins from six after the barren opening, respectability restored by instalments.

But one of those six nights deserves to be lifted out of the ledger and framed, because it was the finest thing the year produced. On the fifth of November, at the Santiago Bernabéu, Milan beat the defending champions of Europe three-one in their own throne-room. Malick Thiaw headed the Rossoneri ahead on twelve minutes; Vinícius Júnior levelled from the penalty spot; and then Morata — of all men Morata, the returning son, facing the club that had raised him — restored the lead before the interval, and Reijnders sealed it on the counter with seventeen minutes left, the move stretching the length of the pitch like a sentence that knows exactly where its full stop lives. For one November night the New Rossoneri looked less like a project and more like an heir: this, after all, is the fixture of the fathers, Madrid and Milan, the two great aristocrats of the European Cup, and the old blood in the shirt remembered itself.

December's Verdict

And yet the league table, that pitiless Lombard bookkeeper, kept its own accounts, and by the year's end they made grim reading: Milan finishing 2024 marooned in eighth place, a station not fit for this shirt. The last entry was written on the twenty-ninth of December, a one-one home draw with Roma in which Reijnders scored once more on sixteen minutes, Dybala answered on twenty-three, and Fonseca, protesting on the touchline, was shown a red card — a coach sent off from a match he was also, though he may not yet have known it, being sent off from entirely. The following day he was dismissed, roughly six months after his unveiling, and Sérgio Conceição, the old Porto commander, was appointed on that same thirtieth of December, on terms running to June 2026. One Portuguese replaced by another; the club changed the driver without changing the road, and the year ended with the engine still running and the destination still unwritten. Amid it all, Pulisic had quietly become the team's leading scorer — the most dependable voice in a loud house.

Around the football, the city argued about its cathedral. The long saga of San Siro's future thickened through 2024 — redevelopment or demolition of the Meazza, the rival project out at San Donato, the whole question marinated in Milanese municipal politics the way an ossobuco marinates, slowly and with much interference from the neighbours — while RedBird pressed on with its younger, trading-model Milan, buying at twenty-two and selling at twenty-nine and asking the supporters to believe that a balance sheet can, in time, be converted back into silverware. The supporters, who have seen every model come and go since 1899, reserved judgement in the traditional manner: loudly.

The verdict on 2024, then, must be written the way Milanese verdicts are, in double-entry. On one side: no trophy; a scudetto lost by a landscape and then handed to the neighbours in the family home; a coach sacked at his own Christmas table; six derby defeats avenged only once. On the other: a farewell to Giroud and Pioli conducted with a tenderness that honoured the club more than a mid-table cup would have; a derby won by the head of an honest defender; the champions of Europe beaten in their own palace; a pilgrimage to Perth where the family on the far side of the world finally got to embrace its team in the flesh. Years like this do not decorate a trophy cabinet; they decorate a character. Milan ended 2024 poorer in points and richer in farewells, and the fog came down over the Navigli as it always does, hiding the city while it decided — as it has been deciding since before any of us was born — exactly what kind of Milan would walk out of it in the spring.