The Last Supper, and the Southern Cross

Count the Leavings First

Count the leavings first. Inside one calendar year the Associazione Calcio Milan closed a five-year cycle, moved the captain's armband from one arm to another, walked a beloved centre-forward to the gate with full honours, hired a Portuguese coach in June and dismissed him in December — and ended its hundred-and-twenty-fifth year not with silver but with a standing ovation for men who were leaving. All winter the city lay under the low grey lid of the Lombard plain, and beneath it the two football clubs of Milan worked at very different temperatures: the neighbours climbing hard towards a twentieth title, the Rossoneri holding level and no longer rising, the last of the Pioli years reduced to their essence — honourable, competent, and no longer enough.

Set the plain totals down first: 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 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 team-talk, but 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 bluntly. 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, cancelling the arrangement before the interval; once from the penalty spot on fifty-nine minutes, the kick conceded by young Álex Jiménez with more enthusiasm than geometry — and the cup was gone, one-two, before the second week of January was out.

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 at Roazhon Park a week later — lost three-two, survived five-three on aggregate — feel less 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 suspicion took hold that this squad 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 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 settled inside twenty-two minutes, Mancini and Dybala scoring before Milan had finished its coffee, Matteo Gabbia's late header on eighty-five serving only to make the aggregate — three-one to Roma — look like a conversation rather than a lecture. With that the last hope of a trophy in 2023-24 went quietly out of the building, and everyone understood that the remaining weeks belonged not to ambition but to farewell.

The Derby That Crowned the Neighbours

History 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 chose Milan to be the witness rather than the bride. At San Siro, with Inter the designated hosts in the ground both families share, Francesco Acerbi scored on eighteen minutes and Marcus Thuram 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 also 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 last weeks like a shadow across a sundial. Pioli had given the club a scudetto in 2022 and five seasons of dignity, and no honest account should omit it; but football is a Lombard business, and a club that watches its rival crowned on the pitch it calls home does not renew a manager's contract out of sentiment. The ending was already written; the derby merely supplied the ink.

The Twenty-Fifth of May, and the Forty-Ninth Goal

On the twenty-fifth of May a packed San Siro gathered to say goodbye, and the afternoon was pure Milan: generous, emotional, and a little too long in its final act. The opponent was Salernitana, already relegated, and the match ended three-three, a banquet where the host keeps refilling every glass including the guests'. 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, 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 halved the first cushion on sixty-four; Sambia struck on eighty-seven and Simy again on eighty-nine, and nobody minded, because the scoreboard had ceased to be the point an hour earlier.

Giroud was withdrawn on eighty-four so 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 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 it was saying two goodbyes at once. The Frenchman's legend was already secure and already faintly comic in the way the best legends are: in October 2023 he had pulled on the goalkeeper's jersey at Genoa after Maignan's red card and made a match-winning save, as if 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, leaving a club measurably poorer in goals and immeasurably poorer in character, which would spend the rest of 2024 learning the price of both.

The Farewell Carried South

And then, six days later, 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 one improbable week an Italian argument moved into an Australian winter: the first time in three decades the Diavolo had set foot on the continent, and the beginning of a story in three acts. For the Australian faithful — no congregation more devoted than the one that keeps vigil in Adelaide, where following the Diavolo means rising at two and three in the morning to watch San Siro by the light of a screen in a dark room — this was the rarest of gifts: for once the 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 side led not by Pioli, already departed, but by Daniele Bonera — days earlier a technical collaborator on Pioli's staff, within a month the first head coach of Milan Futuro — 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, Azmoun on seventy-seven; for Milan, Theo Hernández on thirty-seven, with a volley from outside the area of the kind that needs no competitive edge to be beautiful, and Noah Okafor on fifty-five. Bonera's team-sheet read like a promise to the future — Sportiello behind Calabria, Kalulu, Gabbia and Theo; Pobega, Adli and Reijnders in the middle; Florenzi, Giroud and Jiménez ahead — 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 insisting he would be given time. And there in the starting eleven stood Giroud one more time; so the very last appearance of Olivier Giroud in a Milan shirt may well have come 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, the gravest 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 clubs 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 the Italy he had known at Roma between 2019 and 2021. Around him the chart of the New Rossoneri was drawn 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. The armband migrated too: Calabria had captained 2023-24, but under Fonseca it passed to Mike Maignan, with Theo Hernández his deputy, so that the team would 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 a defender's calm no fee could have measured; and Charles De Ketelaere, sold permanently to Atalanta for around twenty-two million, closing a melancholy recent chapter with at least the consolation of a respectable figure. On paper it was a squad refreshed; but squads play in autumn, not on paper, and autumn was coming.

Nights When the Old Blood Stirred

Fonseca's beginning stuttered and the city began its familiar murmuring; 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, 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, headed a free-kick in. Two-one, the six-derby famine broken, and San Siro learning again what its own voice sounded like at full volume. Gabbia's April header at the Olimpico had consoled nobody; his September one consoled an entire tribe. Football's justice is erratic but not absent.

Europe, meanwhile, had redesigned itself: the Champions League now opened with a league phase of thirty-six clubs, the continent reduced to a single table glowing on a screen, 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. Then the pulse: Club Brugge 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; Slovan Bratislava three-two away on the twenty-sixth of November; 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.

One of those six nights deserves to be lifted out 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 front of their own people. Malick Thiaw headed the Rossoneri ahead on twelve minutes; Vinícius Júnior levelled from the penalty spot; 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 where its full stop lives. For one November night the New Rossoneri looked less like a project and more like an heir: this 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.

Two Portuguese and a Red Card

And yet the table is the table: Milan finished 2024 marooned in eighth place, a station not fit for this shirt. The last entry came on the twenty-ninth of December, a one-one home draw with Roma in which Reijnders scored again 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 did not yet know 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. Amid it all, Pulisic had quietly become the team's leading scorer — the most dependable voice in a loud and unhappy year.

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 grinding through Milanese municipal politics 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, asking supporters to believe 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.

What the hundred-and-twenty-fifth year left behind was not silverware but a handful of things worth keeping: 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 front of their own people; and one evening in May when the Diavolo played beneath a sky its most distant family could see with the naked eye. The last whistle of 2024 sounded at San Siro on the twenty-ninth of December, the cabinet still empty, the bench about to change hands for the second time in six months. Half a world south, in a room in Adelaide, somebody was already setting an alarm for the next one.