2026 — The Fairytale with the Last Page Torn Out | Le Cronache

A Second Coming in the Lombard Fog

Every football city keeps a drawer of old keys, and in the spring of 2025 Milan went rummaging in theirs and drew out Massimiliano Allegri, eleven years after he had last hung his coat at Milanello. He returned on the thirtieth of May, a man the game had long since filed under pragmatist, a hoarder of one-nils, and the appointment was received the way Lombardy receives its autumn fog: with resignation, with a certain grumbling comfort, and with the private knowledge that fog, whatever else it does, keeps the temperature from falling too far. The club he inherited was not the one he had left. It belonged now to RedBird Capital Partners, the American fund of Gerry Cardinale, holder of 99.93 per cent of the shares, with Zlatan Ibrahimovic prowling the corridors as senior advisor and Paolo Scaroni presiding in the boardroom; the armband had passed to a goalkeeper, Mike Maignan, with Rafael Leao and Matteo Gabbia his lieutenants — an order of succession that told you where the certainties of this Milan resided: at the back, in the gloves.

The summer that followed was a demolition and a rebuilding all of its own. Tijjani Reijnders, the most elegant midfielder of the previous vintage, was sold to Manchester City for a fee reported around fifty-five million euro; Theo Hernandez, for so long the left flank incarnate, went east to Al-Hilal; Malick Thiaw to Newcastle, Noah Okafor to Leeds. Into the vacated rooms came a whole pensione of newcomers — Adrien Rabiot from Marseille, Samuele Ricci from Torino, Ardon Jashari from Club Brugge, Christopher Nkunku from Chelsea, Pervis Estupinan from Brighton, Koni De Winter from Genoa, joining the January arrival Santiago Gimenez of Feyenoord — and, above them all, travelling on a free transfer from Madrid with thirteen seasons and a museum of silver behind him, Luka Modric. Milan had signed a metronome, and would spend the year discovering that a metronome, however exact, cannot also be a heart.

Luka Modrić and Rafael Leão on opposite sides at Croatia v Portugal, 2 July 2026 — five weeks after the Rossoneri season ended in fifth place, the 40-year-old metronome and Milan's second captain met again at the World Cup.
Bryan Berlin (Berlination) / Wikimedia Commons — CC BY-SA 4.0

The Old Man of the Navigli

Let us give the old man his own section, for he earned it. Modric arrived at nearly forty, a Ballon d'Or in his luggage, to play Serie A for the first time — an age at which most midfielders are opening restaurants or television careers. His debut, on the twenty-third of August, was a 2-1 defeat to Cremonese, and the sceptics permitted themselves a knowing nod. Then he turned forty on the ninth of September, and days afterward — at forty years and five days, the accountants noted — he scored his first Milan goal, against Bologna, and the nod froze on their faces. What followed was the season's one long argument against the calendar: in his fortieth year the Croat started thirty-two of Milan's thirty-eight league matches, appeared in thirty-seven across all competitions, and finished with two goals and three assists to his name — a ledger that describes what he did roughly as well as a shopping list describes a dinner.

To watch him was to watch risotto being stirred by a man who has made it ten thousand times — no gesture wasted, no hurry, the rice arriving at creaminess as though by appointment. Around him younger legs sprinted and erred; il Vecchio, the Old Man of the Navigli, simply received, turned, and gave, and the ball went where the game required it to go. He was the living argument for Milan's candidacy and, in the end, the innocent witness to its collapse; but we run ahead of ourselves, which is something he never did.

Winter Wounds, and Two Derbies of a Single Colour

The winter had already administered two slaps before the calendar year turned. On the fourth of December, in Rome, Mattia Zaccagni rose in the eightieth minute and headed Milan out of the Coppa Italia at the first asking, 1-0 to Lazio in the round of sixteen. A fortnight later, in the four-team Supercoppa transplanted to Riyadh, Napoli dismissed the Rossoneri 2-0 in the semi-final — Neres and Hojlund the executioners, on the eighteenth of December — and went on to lift the trophy themselves. Two competitions, two exits, one December: the season had been narrowed to the league alone, and a narrowed season is a knife that cuts both ways.

For a long while it cut Milan's way. The first derby, on matchday twelve in November, had gone to the Diavolo by a single goal from Christian Pulisic, the American whose punctuality in front of goal was the most reliably transatlantic thing about the club. And on the eighth of March, beneath the gaze of the Madonnina, Pervis Estupinan — the Ecuadorian full-back, of all the house's new residents — struck his first Milan goal some ten minutes before the interval, and it sufficed: 1-0, a derby double over the eventual champions, Inter's lead at the top pared to seven points, and Milan second in the table with a cushion of nine points over fifth place. Read that arithmetic again, slowly, the way one reads a will: second, with nine points of insurance against catastrophe. What followed remains one of the crueller lessons in the actuarial tables of Italian football.

Ten Games to Undo a Year

From the March derby onward Milan played ten league matches and harvested from them exactly ten points — three victories, one draw, six defeats — a famine arriving precisely where a modest, prudent harvest would have sufficed. The rot set in the following weekend, in Rome, where Gustav Isaksen's twenty-sixth-minute goal gave Lazio a 1-0 win; and it deepened on the sixth of April in Naples, where Matteo Politano settled matters with eleven minutes remaining. The nadir came five days after that, on the eleventh of April, at home, where Udinese — respectable, unglamorous Udinese — won 3-0 at San Siro: an own goal turned in by young Davide Bartesaghi on the half-hour, Jurgen Ekkelenkamp's second ten minutes later, Arthur Atta's third in the seventy-first. Seventy-four thousand had come, and the whistles came down from the tiers like the first hail of a Lombard spring. Allegri's football, which in autumn had seemed a sensible overcoat, now looked like a man wearing that overcoat in a burning house: the caution that had built the position proved helpless to defend it.

There was one more great evening, though it produced no goals. On the twenty-sixth of April, against Juventus, 75,681 souls — the largest congregation the old Meazza would gather all season — filled the tiers for a goalless draw, ninety minutes of tension with nothing to show for itself but the noise. Milan remained third on sixty-seven points, and hope, that most indestructible of Milanese weeds, pushed up once more between the paving stones. It had four weeks left to live.

Cagliari, and the Sound of a Season Breaking

The title, by then, had long ceased to be the question. Inter had settled it on the third of May, beating Parma 2-0 at home with three matches to spare to claim their twenty-first scudetto and finish on eighty-seven points; Napoli, the deposed champions, took second on seventy-six with the Supercoppa for consolation; Roma were third on seventy-three; and fourth, on seventy-one, came the season's romance — Cesc Fabregas's Como, the lake club, sailing into the Champions League while half of Italy applauded and the other half checked the table again in disbelief. The question that remained on the final day, the twenty-fourth of May, was simpler and more brutal: whether Milan, who began the afternoon third, could hold what an entire spring had been loosening.

They could not. Saelemaekers scored in the second minute, and for eighteen minutes the world was in order; then Gennaro Borrelli equalised for Cagliari in the twentieth, and in the fifty-seventh Juan Rodriguez made it one-two. Maignan made nine saves that afternoon — nine, in a match his side needed only to draw — which is the statistic of a goalkeeper carrying an entire season on his back and feeling it grow heavier by the minute. The table churned around the peninsula, and when the ledger finally settled the Rossoneri stood fifth with seventy points, from twenty wins, ten draws and eight defeats, one point ahead of sixth-placed Juventus and one place outside paradise. Seventy points: the largest total any Milan side has ever assembled while finishing outside the top four, which is a record of a kind, and precisely the kind nobody wants. Inter, Napoli, Roma and Como went to the Champions League; Milan and Juventus were consigned to the Europa League; Atalanta, seventh, took the Conference play-off road. A nine-point cushion in March, and on the last evening of May, nothing. Football has no cruelty more refined than the slow kind.

San Siro photographed on 28 March 2025, months before Milan City Council voted to sell the ground to Milan and Inter — 2025-26 would be one of the last full seasons in the old Meazza before demolition.
Nabbegat / Wikimedia Commons — CC BY-SA 4.0

The Broom and the Wrecking Ball

The reckoning took twenty-four hours. On the twenty-fifth of May Allegri was dismissed, almost a year to the day since his second coming had begun, and this time the club did not stop at the bench: chief executive Giorgio Furlani, sporting director Igli Tare and technical director Geoffrey Moncada all followed him through the door, a cleaning of the house so complete that one half expected the espresso machine to be asked for its resignation. Cardinale and RedBird, with Ibrahimovic at their elbow, took three weeks over the succession and settled, on the sixteenth of June, on Ruben Amorim, the Portuguese formerly of Sporting and of Manchester United, sacked at Old Trafford in January and now handed, on a three-year deal, the oldest second chance in football: Milan. There are ambitions, he said on arriving, that stay with a man his whole career, and coaching Milan had always been one of his. And Allegri? On the third of July he was unveiled at Napoli, successor to Antonio Conte, employed by the very club that had knocked Milan out of the Supercoppa and finished above them — an irony so neat it could have been drawn with a ruler.

Meanwhile the city had made its own decision about the future. On the thirtieth of September 2025, at three in the morning, after a debate of very nearly twelve hours and a council vote of twenty-four to twenty, Milan's administrators approved the sale of San Siro and its surrounding land to the two clubs for some 197 million euro. They had a deadline, and it was an exquisitely Italian one: the paperwork had to be done before the tenth of November, the date on which the second tier would pass into the custody of the heritage laws and become, in the eyes of the state, undemolishable. The plan: to pull down the ninety-nine-year-old stadium and raise in its place a shared arena of 71,500 seats, designed by Foster + Partners and Manica at a cost approaching 1.2 billion euro, and to have it standing in time for the European Championship of 2032, which Italy is to co-host with Turkey. So every match of this season was played inside a countdown, beneath stands already being spoken of in the past tense; even the record crowd against Juventus had something of the vigil about it. Cities, like squads, are periodically rebuilt, and Milan has never been sentimental about concrete — only about what happened inside it.

Perth, Where the Derby Chases the Sun

Perth had been on the club's mind for some time, and not always happily. This very season was to have carried a Serie A fixture there — Milan against Como, on the eighth of February 2026, exported to the far side of the world because San Siro was busy hosting the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics — until, in December, the scheme collapsed over conditions imposed by the Asian confederation, and the plan was abandoned. So when the club announced, in the spring of 2026 and amid the wreckage of the run-in, that it would return to Australia in the pre-season, the announcement carried the faint air of unfinished business. It would be a third consecutive year with the compass set for Perth, after facing Roma at Optus Stadium in May 2024 — the first Milan visit to Australia in three decades — and dismantling Perth Glory 9-0 at HBF Park in July 2025. This time they would carry the derby itself in their luggage: Milan against Inter, the Derby della Madonnina staged abroad, at Optus Stadium on Wednesday the fifth of August 2026, the centrepiece of an Italian festival in the continent's west in which Inter would also meet Juventus on the Saturday, the eighth. As these pages are written the fixture belongs still to the future — announced, scheduled, unplayed; an appointment rather than a result — and it is in the nature of appointments that they carry hope uncorrupted by any score.

One writes this section with particular tenderness, because the Australian rossoneri are among the purest of the breed. These are the supporters for whom the derby has always arrived in the middle of the night, who have crossed the world's clocks for decades so that the Diavolo might be watched at hours when honest people sleep — in Perth, and further east in Adelaide, where following Milan is a discipline of alarm clocks, strong coffee and faith. For once, in August, the mountain would travel to the faithful: the two towers of the Madonnina, red-and-black and blue-and-black, rising for a night above the Swan River. Whatever the result was to be, the gift lay in the proximity.

The Verdict

As for the Old Man of the Navigli, the summer brought reports that Modric was weighing retirement after the World Cup — that American, Canadian and Mexican summer toward which he and several of Milan's internationals departed once the club season died. He had crossed Europe at forty for one more Champions League campaign at San Siro, played thirty-seven matches in his fortieth year, broken a cheekbone and come back inside a protective mask to take the field against Cagliari on the last afternoon of all, and finished one place short of the prize; the European return he came for will now not be played, at least not by the Milan that promised it to him. If you wish to understand the season, do not study the table. Study that.

The verdict, then. The 2025-26 Milan of Allegri's second coming beat the champions twice and lost the league to Udinese, Cagliari and its own nervous system; it stood second in March with nine points of insurance and stood fifth in May with none; it sold its stadium, sacked its hierarchy, and hired a Portuguese to begin again. Fifth place, seventy points, a derby double, a Europa League ticket, and a fairytale with the last page torn out: this was the year. The fog will lift over the Navigli, as it always does, and beneath the Madonnina the cranes will gather where the Meazza stands; and Milan, who have died more operatically than any club in Europe and always risen for the encore, will open the next act with an old man's lesson in their pocket — that the game punishes nothing so severely as the belief that a lead can defend itself.

Christian Pulisic playing for the United States against Australia at the World Cup, 19 June 2026 — the American whose goal had won Milan the first Derby della Madonnina of the season in November 2025.
Bryan Berlin (Berlination) / Wikimedia Commons — CC BY-SA 4.0

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