A Trophy in the Desert, a Watchmaker in the Fog

A Trophy in the Desert

The year began not in the Lombard fog, where Milanese winters teach a man patience whether he asks for the lesson or not, but under the sodium glare of Riyadh, where modern football has taken to holding its January feasts; and it began with a club changing cooks in the middle of service, for Paulo Fonseca had taken charge of his last match on 29 December and Sérgio Conceição, a man of flint and vinegar, was installed from the 30th, handed the apron, and told that the Supercoppa Italiana — a semi-final against Juventus within four days — would be his audition, his baptism and quite possibly his ambush, all in the same week.

He passed the examination the way one passes an exam one has not had time to dread. On 3 January, in his very first match as Milan's head coach, Juventus were beaten 2-1; three days later came Inter in the final at Al-Awwal Park, and by the restart the derby had gone wrong in the old familiar way — Lautaro Martínez in first-half stoppage time, Taremi two minutes after the interval, two-nil, the cup apparently bound for the other shore of the Madonnina. What followed belongs in the small anthology of Milanese resurrections: Theo Hernández on 52 minutes, Christian Pulisic on 80, and in the third minute of added time Tammy Abraham — of all the borrowed princes — with the winner. Three-two, and the trophy came home.

No Milan had come from two goals down to beat Inter since 21 February 2004, and the statisticians exhumed that date while the players hoisted the silver; Conceição had been in the job a week and had already won something, which by the standards of Milan's recent seasons amounted to indecent haste. But the desert is a country of mirages, and this one — a cup gleaming above the dunes — promised a spring that never arrived. It was the first trophy of 2025 and, as the year would insist with mounting cruelty, the only one.

The Rain in Rotterdam

Europe ended in February, in the rain. The Champions League's new geometry had deposited Milan into a knockout-phase play-off against Feyenoord, and fate, who evidently reads the transfer bulletins, had arranged the casting in advance: in January Milan had paid a reported thirty-two million euros to take the striker Santiago Giménez from Rotterdam, adding Warren Bondo from Monza for ten more, while Álvaro Morata departed on loan to Galatasaray — so the tie carried the intimate smell of a family quarrel. On 12 February, on a wet surface at Feyenoord's ground, Igor Paixão struck after three minutes, and the ball — this is the detail the year kept underlining — slipped through Mike Maignan's gloves. One-nil to Rotterdam.

Six days later at San Siro the script feinted toward mercy. Giménez, inside the first minute, levelled the tie against his former club, and the old stadium permitted itself to believe; then Theo Hernández was sent off and, in the same breath of the same seventy-third minute, Julián Carranza rose and headed Feyenoord through, 2-1 on the aggregate, into a silence you could have carved and served cold. Milan were out of Europe before the crocuses, and the season that had promised in Riyadh to be a feast now revealed itself as a long Lenten fast.

Note Theo, because the year kept noting him: scorer in the desert comeback of January, expelled in the ruin of February, and not yet finished with his own subplot. The chronicler's trade is to love players as fallible men, and few of Milan's moderns gave the moralist's eye such steady employment as this full-back, who could win you a final and cost you a tie inside the same five weeks and feel, in both acts, entirely himself.

Rome, and the Arithmetic of Eighth

There remained the Coppa Italia, and Milan treated it with the seriousness of a man down to his last good suit. Sassuolo were dispatched, then Roma, then Inter over a two-legged semi-final won on aggregate — a derby scalp that briefly returned the colour to Milanese cheeks — and so to Rome on 14 May, the Stadio Olimpico, 68,490 souls beneath the pines. Bologna waited there, and history waited with them: no major trophy in fifty-one years, nothing since 1974, and destiny takes a keen professional interest in round numbers.

The goal, when it arrived on 53 minutes, was a small essay on Milan's season: a challenge by Theo Hernández on Orsolini, the ball breaking loose, and Dan Ndoye arriving to write his name into Bolognese legend. One-nil, no reply; the red-and-blue half of Emilia went home to a celebration half a century in the preparing, and Milan went home to the arithmetic. The arithmetic was pitiless. Eighth place, 63 points from 38 matches — eighteen won, nine drawn, eleven lost, sixty-one scored, forty-three conceded — and, for the first time in years, no European football of any kind waiting in the autumn.

Above them the peninsula staged its own operatic finale: Napoli, under Antonio Conte, took the scudetto on the final day with 82 points, a fourth title for the city of Vesuvius, pipping Inter on 81 — Inter, who then travelled to Munich and lost the Champions League final 5-0 to Paris Saint-Germain, a humiliation so complete it very nearly redistributed sympathy. The Champions League places went to Napoli, Inter, Atalanta and Juventus; Milan's name appeared on no continental list at all. Amid the wreckage one man kept his accounts in order: Christian Pulisic, the quiet American, the club's top scorer with 11 league goals and 17 in all competitions, a craftsman producing fine work in a workshop with half the roof gone.

The Quiet Revolution of May

Great houses respond to shame in one of two ways: they redecorate, or they rebuild the kitchen. Milan, to their lasting credit, chose the kitchen. On 26 May Igli Tare, who had spent more than fifteen years as Lazio's sporting director learning where Serie A hides its truffles, was appointed the first team's sporting director; and on 30 May back through the gates came Massimiliano Allegri — the same Allegri who had coached the club from 2010 to 2014 and delivered the scudetto of 2010-11 and the Supercoppa that followed it — returning like a man who had left his coat behind years ago and always intended to collect it. Above them RedBird Capital and Gerry Cardinale remained the owners, with Giorgio Furlani as chief executive: the ledger, the eye, and the recalled pragmatist, arranged at last in working order.

The summer market read like surgery rather than shopping. Out went Tijjani Reijnders to Manchester City for fifty-five million, Theo Hernández to Al-Hilal for twenty-five, Malick Thiaw to Newcastle for thirty-eight, Noah Okafor to Leeds for nineteen, with Morata's loan carrying him off besides; in came Samuele Ricci from Torino for twenty-three, Christopher Nkunku from Chelsea for thirty-seven, Ardon Jashari from Club Brugge for thirty-four, Pervis Estupiñán from Brighton for seventeen — and, on a free transfer that cost nothing and meant everything, Luka Modrić. Mike Maignan kept the captain's armband, Rafael Leão the vice-captaincy, and the whole apparatus was pointed at a single campaign with no European midweeks to bleed it: one pot on the stove, and Allegri stirring.

The Watchmaker of the Adriatic

On 14 July the club confirmed what the city had been savouring for a month: Modrić — captain of Croatia, winner of the 2018 Ballon d'Or, veteran of thirteen seasons and of every major trophy Real Madrid had to give — had signed until 30 June 2026, with an option for a further year, for a reported three and a half million net, and had taken the number 14 shirt. He put pen to Milanese paper only once his Club World Cup duty with Real was finished, a scruple that tells you the whole man. He was thirty-nine; he would turn forty on 9 September, mid-season, as watchmakers do — without stopping the mechanism to mark the hour.

Understand what he chose. Not a coronation, not a farewell tour beneath palm trees: a rebuilding club with no European football, the eighth-placed patient still on the operating table. He spoke of Milan as a club resembling Real Madrid in stature and in history — which from another mouth would be flattery, and from his was a diagnosis. From the first weeks of the reconstruction he became precisely what Allegri required: the metronome at the centre of the reconstruction, the old watchmaker bent over the movement of a team, setting its escapement, teaching the minute hand not to hurry. Milan has signed many stars in its long life; rarely has it signed so much time in a single pair of boots.

Nine Goals Under the Southern Cross

The new Milan was assembled, fittingly, on the far side of the planet. Pre-season took the squad along an Asia-Pacific arc: Singapore first, where on 23 July Arsenal won 1-0 at the National Stadium through a second-half goal from Bukayo Saka, before 22,813 — a defeat received with the shrug pre-season permits, and softened by a friendly shoot-out Milan took 6-5 — and then Hong Kong, where on 26 July at Kai Tak Stadium, before 49,704, Milan beat Liverpool 4-2: Rafael Leão on ten minutes, Ruben Loftus-Cheek after the interval, and Noah Okafor, in his final weeks as a rossonero, scoring twice, the second in stoppage time.

And then Australia. On 31 July, at HBF Park in Perth, before 19,226 spectators, Milan met Perth Glory, David Zdrilic's A-League side, and were merciless in the particular way of a team auditioning for its own new manager. Nine goals without reply: Filippo Terracciano after three minutes, Okafor again on 22 and 25, Christian Comotto from the penalty spot on the half-hour, Samuel Chukwueze on 32 — five before the interval — then Leão either side of the evening on 46 and 86, Ricci on 58, Yunus Musah on 80. Tomori marshalled, Estupiñán overlapped, and the scoreboard operators of Perth earned their wage twice over.

It was Milan's second visit to that western city in fourteen months: on 31 May 2024, at Optus Stadium, the club had played Roma in the match that marked its first appearance in Australia in thirty years. The stands at HBF Park told the truer story — the rossoneri of the antipodes, the faithful who keep Milanese time in the southern night, for whom the club comes in the flesh perhaps once in a generation and whose kick-offs otherwise fall at hours no European ever has to consider. When Leão struck his second, the noise had an Italian accent and an Australian heart.

The Scorpion of August

Allegri's second reign opened at San Siro on 23 August against newly promoted Cremonese, and the gods of football, who read scripts chiefly in order to mock them, produced their finest work of the year. Federico Baschirotto rose and headed the visitors in front; Strahinja Pavlović equalised before half-time, and reason appeared restored; and then Federico Bonazzoli arched backwards into the sort of overhead kick that is performed once and replayed for a decade, and struck. One-two. Cremonese had not beaten Milan in Milan since 1925-26, when the rossoneri still played at the Campo di viale Lombardia — a hundred years of hospitality settled by an overhead kick — and San Siro's 75,011 filed out with the particular silence of a congregation that has watched its new priest drop the chalice on the opening feast day.

What followed was the purest Allegri. No panic and no proclamations: only the slow lowering of the temperature, the shortening of the team, the restoration of that ancient Italian premise by which a match not lost is a match half-won. With no European midweeks to bleed the legs, the reshaped side — Modrić conducting, Ricci and Jashari learning the tempo, Pulisic finishing what others began — started to climb, and by the deep autumn the eighth-placed invalid of May was taking the staircase of the table two steps at a time.

The Derby and the Verdict

The proof arrived on 23 November, matchday twelve, in the Derby della Madonnina. Yann Sommer could only parry Alexis Saelemaekers' shot, and Pulisic — who else, in this of all years — arrived first at the rebound on 54 minutes; then, on 74, Hakan Çalhanoğlu stepped up to a penalty given by video review and Mike Maignan, whose gloves had betrayed him in the Rotterdam rain nine months before, saved it as though settling the entire year's accounts in a single dive. One-nil, and Milan rose to second on 25 points, level with Napoli and two behind Roma; November closed with Allegri named the league's Coach of the Month, and the winter break approached with the Rossoneri planted firmly among the leaders — the fog over the title race had a Milanese smell to it again.

The city, meanwhile, was quietly rearranging its own furniture. Through 2025 Milan and Inter pressed the comune to sell them the San Siro area, the ground on which they intend to raise a new shared stadium; on 30 September the council approved the sale, and in November the two clubs completed the purchase of the stadium and the land around it for a hundred and ninety-seven million euros. The drawings promise an arena of some seventy-one and a half thousand seats by Foster + Partners and Manica, with the Meazza itself to come down in the early thirties and a fragment of it kept back for a commercial and entertainment quarter — so the great grey vessel that has carried a century of Milanese noise now sails toward its own transformation. Nothing in this city is ever simply demolished. It is renegotiated, like a family recipe passed down with all the arguments left in.

So ran 2025: a trophy lifted in a desert in January, a European death in February rain, a final lost in Rome in May, an eighth place that tasted of ash — and then, out of the wreckage, the most Milanese of answers: a watchmaker signed for nothing, a pragmatist recalled from memory, nine goals scattered under the Southern Cross, and a derby won with a rebound and a save. Years like this one are the risotto stirred twice — the first serving burnt, the pot scraped clean, the dish begun again with better rice and a steadier flame. When the winter came, nothing had been won that mattered beside that January cup; but everything, at long last, was cooking, and a city that had spent May counting its losses spent December counting the days.