The Number Six Under Southern Skies

The Coat Already on Its Peg

This chapter opens with the work already done. The Allegri recalled to Milanello in the spring, the coat taken down from its peg after eleven years, the summer of demolition and rebuilding that followed — the sales, the pensione of newcomers, the free transfer from Madrid the whole city spent a month savouring — all of that was set out in the previous year's pages, fee by fee. What 2026 inherits is the arrangement, not the argument: a Milan with no European midweeks to bleed it, a goalkeeper wearing the captain's armband, an old Croat setting the tempo in front of him, and a season already running hard when the year turned.

Of that summer only one thing needs saying twice. Milan had signed a metronome, and would spend the year discovering that a metronome, however exact, cannot also be a heart.

Forty Years Old, and Thirty-Seven Matches

Let us give il Vecchio his own section, for he earned it. How he came, at what age, out of what museum of silver, the last chapter has told; this one takes him from the whistle. His debut, on the twenty-third of August, was a 2-1 defeat to Cremonese, and the sceptics permitted themselves a knowing nod. Then, days after the birthday — at forty years and five days, the statisticians noted, counting it like men checking a receipt — 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 — figures that describe what he did roughly as well as a shopping list describes a dinner.

To watch him was to watch a man do a difficult thing for the ten-thousandth time: no gesture wasted, no hurry, the ball arriving where the game required it as though by appointment. Around him younger legs sprinted and erred; the old man received, turned, and gave. 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 administered two slaps before the calendar year turned. On the fourth of December, in Rome, Mattia Zaccagni headed Milan out of the Coppa Italia at the first asking in the eightieth minute, 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 Højlund the executioners, on the eighteenth of December — and lifted 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, at San Siro, Pervis Estupiñán — the Ecuadorian full-back, of all the summer's arrivals — struck his first Milan goal 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 with a cushion of nine points over fifth place. Read that line again, slowly, the way one reads a will: second, with nine points of insurance against catastrophe. What followed remains one of the crueller lessons Italian football has to teach.

Ten Games to Undo a Year

From the March derby onward Milan played ten league matches and took exactly ten points — three victories, one draw, six defeats — a famine arriving exactly where a modest harvest would have sufficed. The rot set in the following weekend in Rome, Gustav Isaksen's twenty-sixth-minute goal giving Lazio a 1-0 win; it deepened on the sixth of April in Naples, where Matteo Politano settled matters with eleven minutes left. The nadir came five days later, on the eleventh of April, when 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 fell 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 August: the caution that 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 but 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 had long ceased to be the question. Inter settled it on the third of May, beating Parma 2-0 at home with three matches to spare, taking their twenty-first scudetto and finishing 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. The question on the final day, the twenty-fourth of May, was more brutal: whether Milan, third when the afternoon began, could hold what a whole 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 Rodríguez made it one-two. Modrić played inside a protective mask, a cheekbone broken and mending. Maignan made nine saves — nine, in a match his side needed only to draw — the statistic of a goalkeeper carrying an entire season on his back. The table churned around the peninsula, and when the last results were in 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 assembled while finishing outside the top four, a record of a kind, and precisely the kind nobody wants. Inter, Napoli, Roma and Como went to the Champions League; Milan and Juventus 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.

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 began, and this time the club did not stop at the bench: chief executive Giorgio Furlani, sporting director Igli Tare and technical director Geoffrey Moncada followed him out, a clear-out so complete one expected the espresso machine to resign. Cardinale and RedBird, with Ibrahimović 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 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. And Allegri? On the third of July he was unveiled at Napoli, successor to Antonio Conte, employed by the 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.

As for the ground, the city had settled that argument in a council chamber at an hour set down in the previous chapter — the vote, the sale of San Siro and its land to the two clubs, the arena to rise where the old one stands. What belongs to this season is not the decision but the living inside it. Every match was played inside a countdown, beneath stands already 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.

In June the internationals scattered toward the World Cup of that American, Canadian and Mexican summer, and with them went the oldest of all. Reports travelled with him: that Modrić was weighing retirement once the tournament was done. He had crossed Europe at forty for one more Champions League campaign at San Siro; had played thirty-seven matches in his fortieth year; had broken a cheekbone and come back behind a mask to stand against Cagliari on the last afternoon of all; and had finished one place short of the thing he came for, which will not now be played, at least not by the Milan that promised it. If you wish to understand the season, do not study the table. Study that.

Rozzano, at Dawn

Franco Baresi was admitted to the Humanitas clinic at Rozzano on the twenty-seventh of July, after a rapid decline, and at dawn on Friday the thirty-first he died there, sixty-six years old. No cause was given by club or family; the Italian press went no further than a severe pulmonary condition at the end of a long illness. What had been disclosed officially amounted to a paragraph: in August 2025 surgery to remove a pulmonary nodule, and afterwards immunotherapy. He had said nothing beyond that, and had spent a life saying nothing beyond what was required. His last public appearance came in February, at the opening ceremony of the Milano Cortina Winter Olympics, when he carried the Olympic torch into San Siro shoulder to shoulder with Giuseppe Bergomi — the eternal captain of Milan and the eternal captain of Inter sharing a flame in the stadium they had shared for twenty years, and which the council had already voted to pull down.

The numbers, for those who want them: one club, 1977 to 1997, 719 official matches, 532 in Serie A, thirty-three goals; six scudetti, three European Cups, two Intercontinental Cups, four Italian Super Cups; captain for fifteen seasons, through the dynasties of Sacchi and Capello; the number 6 withdrawn from circulation after him, the first shirt any Italian club had retired; honorary vice-president from 2020, honoured in 2024 for fifty years with the club; eighty-one caps for Italy, world champion in 1982, runner-up in 1994 with a knee freshly operated on, second to Van Basten in the Ballon d'Or of 1989. And the numbers, as always with him, tell the least interesting part. On the thirteenth of July the club had invited him to the pre-season gathering at Milanello, arranging his transport and laying out a kit for him to wear. He was too weak to go. "Mi dispiace, proprio non ce la faccio" — I'm sorry, I just can't manage it — and then he asked whether somebody might bring the kit to the house instead. He spent his last two weeks in his apartment between Via Monterosa and Piazza Amendola with his wife Maura, his sons Edoardo and Gianandrea and his brother Beppe, exchanging occasional messages with old team-mates, mostly in silence.

"Milan is in tears", the club's announcement began, saying his example and integrity were etched into its DNA as permanently as the number 6; Cardinale said he had embodied the values, character and excellence that define the place. Paolo Maldini published a letter that same day and asked the only question anybody in the city was asking — how will we manage without our Captain? — writing that Baresi had taught him to fight to his last breath, had protected him as a child, guided him as a young man and inspired him as an adult, and was the greatest footballer he had ever had the honour of standing beside. After a letter like that, the rest could only be echo. Clarence Seedorf called him an eternal symbol of leadership, loyalty, elegance and class; Gianluigi Buffon remembered his 1995 debut against him as the day he understood what it meant to represent football with class. The state, the governing bodies and the rival clubs sent their homage in the proper words, and the proper words were not enough.

The wake was private, at the family's wish — relatives and close friends, a register to sign — a public camera ardente at Casa Milan set aside out of the reserve the Brescian papers called his distinguishing trait to the very end. So the city improvised its own: for days the milanisti queued outside Casa Milan to leave scarves, messages and silence at a memorial altar, while the comune declared a day of mourning, flags at half-mast. The funeral was said at eleven on Tuesday the fourth of August in the Basilica of Sant'Ambrogio, which had buried Cesare Maldini a decade before, with thousands outside. Maldini, Van Basten, Filippo Galli and Massaro carried the coffin; Bergomi, his mirror-image in blue and black, gave the first reading; Costacurta, Tassotti, Evani, Virdis and Roberto Baggio sat in the pews, with delegations from Real Madrid, Barcelona, Inter and Roma and wreaths from Infantino and Shevchenko. The crowd applauded Maldini and Van Basten and booed Cardinale and Scaroni — one way a city separates what it loves from what merely owns it. Dida, leaving, said only that he had been a great man and a great father. The Curva Sud came with the old BARESI 6 flag and a banner — immortal legend, inimitable flag that will never stop waving — ending: Goodbye Captain. The coffin arrived to "There's only one Captain" and "You are forever Franco Baresi". Within days the Gazzetta reported the club's idea of dedicating the Curva Sud to him, and Tuttosport a movement to carry the name into the curva of the stadium not yet built — the second ring of that Curva Sud being where his people had stood for twenty years.

One set of mourners was missing from Sant'Ambrogio. The first team was in Western Australia on tour, the return impossible, and only Pulisic and Giménez, both injured and left behind, stood in the basilica for the squad. The rest would have to say goodbye from the other side of the world.

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 because San Siro was hosting the Winter Olympics opening ceremony — until, in December, the scheme collapsed over conditions imposed by the Asian confederation. What Western Australia got instead was a wider consolation: a week of Calcio Italiano at Optus Stadium, the fifth to the eleventh of August — Milan against Inter on the Wednesday, Palermo against Melbourne City on the Friday, Inter against Juventus on the Saturday, the eighth, Juventus against Palermo on the Tuesday. For Milan it was a third consecutive year with the compass set for Perth, after Roma at Optus Stadium in May 2024 — the first Milan visit to Australia in three decades — and the 9-0 dismantling of Perth Glory at HBF Park in July 2025: first a pilgrimage, then a habit, and now, in the shadow of the thirty-first of July, an act of homage. Baresi himself had walked the city's streets with Milan in 2024; the week planned as a festival bowed its head, and the third visit became his.

So the Derby della Madonnina was played, for the first time, in Australia: Wednesday the fifth of August, seven in the evening, thirteen thousand kilometres from the stadium whose name it carries and five days after the captain died. It was Inter's first appearance on Australian soil. Fifty-two thousand three hundred and ten came, some eighty-five per cent of Optus Stadium, and a country watched on Seven's streaming platform. The opening was built out of the two cultures of the night — a ceremony drawn from Aboriginal Australia, then "Nessun dorma", then fireworks over the roof, which is not a sentence one expects to write about a Milanese grudge match. Both squads then walked to the centre circle and stood around a red number 6 shirt laid on the grass for a minute's silence. Milan took the field in Baresi's number, black armbands on their sleeves; his photograph filled the screen, a message ran along the pitchside LEDs, one stand had prepared a choreography, and banners went up in the crowd, among them "6 per sempre capitano". The ceremony overran and kick-off went back ten minutes, which nobody appeared to resent. In the sixth minute the two teams stopped again and the stadium applauded — Inter's own account said the rivals were honouring together a man who belongs to the history of the whole derby.

High above the away end an Australian tifo rose — designed by Milan Clubs Australia — and beneath it AC Milan’s own tribute banner to Baresi, both held fast by supporters’ hands through the full ninety minutes. It is the smallest sentence in this chapter and, for the people who keep these pages, the largest. Milan clubs from across the continent had converged on Perth — five and six hours in the air from Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide — gathering near the team hotel and walking the last kilometre and more in red-and-black scarves, singing for Baresi the whole way. 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 the Diavolo might be watched at hours when honest people sleep. For once the mountain travelled to the faithful, and it arrived in mourning.

As for the football. Milan had the better of the first half and struck the post through Yunus Musah; Inter came out stronger after the interval and Dimarco — a Milanese who plays in blue and black — put them ahead early in the second. Milan's evening turned when the benches emptied: Leão, Gonçalo Ramos on debut, and Modrić, forty years old, walking on beneath the southern sky as though he had stepped outside for air. In the eighty-fourth minute Carlos Augusto hauled Christopher Nkunku back; Nkunku got up, took the penalty himself and drove it into the corner past Provedel. 1-1, and the two halves of the city split the night as they have split so many. Dimarco, asked beforehand what a derby can mean at that distance, said it always has a different feel, then spoke of the opposing club's captain: a legend, someone who made football history, admired by supporters of every colour. In the morning Milan's aircraft lifted north for Jakarta and Chelsea on the Saturday, Inter staying in Perth for Juventus the same day; and behind them, on a field on the far side of the world from the ground that is about to come down, somebody folded up a number 6 shirt and carried it in off the grass.