A vivid pink scooter skids by and the night fireflies take flight. Springtime has unfold itself throughout Milan like an open palm, and by some trick of the mild San Siro is bathed in a magical purple glow from each path. Climb considered one of the epic spiral walkways at simply the proper second and your reward is considered one of the nice sensory overloads in European soccer, a spot that feels nearer to heaven than Earth.
In the distance, the Milan skyline blinking and twinkling in the setting solar. In the foreground, the swell of noise and the odor of narcotics and the billow of flags: black and blue, black and pink, delete as acceptable. Another evening singing hymns. Another evening chasing desires.
Then a whistle blows and what follows is – frankly – not nice. Milan, resting half a dozen first-team gamers, are attempting and largely failing to break down Cremonese, who’re making an attempt and failing to stave off relegation to Serie B. As Divock Origi runs into lifeless ends and Charles De Ketelaere retains tripping over the ball, the Milan trustworthy start to grumble.
A person in a Wu-Tang Clan T-shirt swears loudly in between sucks of his vape. An injury-time equaliser from Junior Messias salvages an unlovable 1-1 draw. Two hours up the street, their metropolis rivals, Internazionale, have crushed Verona 6-0 to transfer forward in the Serie A desk. Napoli are 15 factors clear and taking part in the following evening. This is Milan’s final evening as champions and no one fairly is aware of what occurs subsequent.
The following morning, a Milan membership worker who for apparent causes should stay anonymous is telling me he’s determined for Manchester City to win this season’s Champions League, simply so Inter don’t. “The final will be Manchester City against Inter,” he declares glumly. “In this moment, Inter are stronger. Only Pep Guardiola can help us.”
Most of the Inter followers I communicate to are slightly extra optimistic about their possibilities, however make an identical admission: the anticipation of victory is vastly outweighed by the dread of defeat. “I have a sick feeling,” says Alfio, an Inter fan in a distressed leather-based jacket shopping for Pall Malls close to the canal. “To lose to Milan in the semi-final, after 20 years, will be the most horrible thing.”
Perhaps all derbies are this manner to a sure extent. But in fact that is no regular derby: a Champions League semi-final, two legs over six days that may subsume a complete metropolis in red-on-blue psychodrama.
It is the greatest Milan derby in twenty years: a neighborhood cleaning soap opera taking part in out in entrance of a worldwide viewers, a recreation of previous romances and new anxieties.
The stakes are nearly unthinkably excessive. Unlike with City or Real Madrid, there are not any ensures both staff will qualify for subsequent season’s competitors. To lose can be crushing sufficient; to accomplish that in opposition to their sworn enemies provides a quantum of terror that neither membership can totally ponder. Small surprise Alessandro Nesta, a veteran of the basic 2003 semi-final that Milan gained on away targets, is predicting an unsightly, conservative recreation. “The two teams fear each other,” he stated.
Neither membership is in the finest form. For Milan the draw in opposition to Cremonese continued a depressing run of simply three wins in 12 video games since the begin of March. Any remaining fumes of a title defence disappeared after the World Cup break. “After January there was no consistency to fight,” the coach, Stefano Pioli, admitted. And so in a season of strife, the Champions League has thrown them a life raft: an opportunity to reclaim not just some satisfaction and silverware, however a bit of themselves.
It’s exhausting to overstate the significance of this competitors, and people seven victories between 1963 and 2007, in developing Milan’s sense of self. At the membership museum, guests are greeted by an enormous three-metre reproduction of the Champions League trophy. “When you join AC Milan you understand that the DNA of the club is the Champions League, the European Cups, the tradition,” says Filippo Inzaghi in a recorded video. The membership’s wealthy and gilded historical past is lovingly curated and chronicled and introduced to life. Until 2011, when the exhibit abruptly stops.
Outside the museum, chatting to a Milan fan from close by Monza, I make the mistake of suggesting that this semi-final is an efficient factor for the metropolis as an entire, a great addition for Italian soccer, placing these two toppled giants again on the map. He sniffs in disdain. “It’s good for us,” he says. “Inter can go fuck themselves.”
The Milan/Inter rivalry is an odd one. There is not any actual ideological, sociological or geographical divide between them. They even share a stadium. Their followers are fairly evenly unfold throughout the metropolis: neighbourhoods and workplaces and faculties and infrequently even households divided alongside tribal traces. For all the fireplace and fervour of the two golf equipment’ extremely teams, derbies usually move off with little or no incident.
“There’s no hate in the Milan derby,” Andriy Shevchenko as soon as stated and, whereas Wednesday evening will take a look at that assertion to breaking level, usually it holds true. Ask followers of each golf equipment who they genuinely hate and the hottest reply might be Juventus.
“We’re dreamers,” says Luca, a Milanese native who has simply moved again to the metropolis after nearly a decade serving to to organise the London department of the Inter fanclub. “We want to win, but not at the expense of rules and fair play and style. Go back through the history of Inter and you’ll find big highs and big lows. An Inter fan is never happy. But we’ll still always support the team, no matter what.”
One of Luca’s earliest footballing recollections is of Inter signing Ronaldo in 1997. He was about six years previous. He clearly remembers his father coming house from work and saying, as calmly as potential: “We’ve signed the best player in the world.”
after newsletter promotion
These were the days when Italian football was the envy of Europe and this city felt like the centre of the footballing universe, when the Milan derby was like a roll call of world greats: Ronaldo, Shevchenko, Weah, Seedorf, Pirlo, Vieri, Crespo, Rui Costa, Rivaldo, Maldini. It all culminated in the 2003 semi-final: those heady May days when, as Gazzetta dello Sport put it: “The city has never felt so much electricity for football.”
Nesta remembers the silence before: the way even big personalities such as Massimo Ambrosini and Gennaro Gattuso went sullenly about their business all week, the sheer tension and stress eating away at them. Luigi Di Biagio remembers the silence afterwards: the stillness of the losing Inter dressing room, broken only by sobs. He didn’t sleep for several nights. “I spent four wonderful years in Milan,” he would later remember, “but that was the only time I really felt the derby. Tensions, pressures, expectations. Everything came from outside. It was impossible to turn a blind eye.”
In retrospect, it was something of a high-water mark. The good times would continue to roll for some years: another Champions League crown for Milan in 2007, an unforgettable treble for José Mourinho’s Inter in 2010. But the seeds of decline were already being sown. The Berlusconi and Moratti dynasties who owned the two clubs were beginning to scale down their ambitions just as everyone else in Europe was scaling theirs up.
In 2015-16, for the first time in 60 years, neither side was represented in Europe. A revolving door of owners put Milan on the brink of bankruptcy. Inter struggled and stagnated under the new ownership of the Suning Group. Managers and mediocre players came and went. Inter went six years without Champions League football, Milan seven.
This was once one of Europe’s great footballing cities, the only city to boast two European Cup winners. Yet even now, as you walk the weathered, peeling, majestic, history-soaked concourses and staircases of the Stadio Giuseppe Meazza, it’s tempting to wonder whether it is still true.
The last few years, admittedly, have seen something of a revival. Inter recaptured the scudetto under Antonio Conte in 2021; Milan followed them under Pioli last year.
There are signs that both clubs are beginning to emerge from the financial wilderness: Inter via a possible sale this summer, Milan with a concerted programme of debt reduction under the ownership of the American private equity firm RedBird Capital. And now a two-legged semi-final that will stir the senses and memories, even if it’s hard to envisage it producing a potential champion.
Yet Italian football remains in a precarious place, bearing the scars of underinvestment and neglect, choking on the dust of the Premier League. Neither club is really in a position to sign the world’s best players; on the contrary, Milan will have to fight to keep Rafael Leão this summer, while Inter are already resigned to losing Milan Skriniar to Paris Saint-Germain.
None of what happens over the next couple of weeks will really change any of this. And yet as kick-off approaches on Wednesday night this city will come alive again: still singing, still hoping, still dreaming.
Discussion about this post