Horncastle: The Devil in Disguise
Last week the club held a shareholders’ assembly. It came only days after the team had made bottom of the table Verona roll back the years to 1985 and look like champions. If it weren’t for the Rossoneri’s 17-year-old goalkeeping sensation Gigi Donnarumma, Milan would have lost by an even more embarrassing margin than 2-1. In all, they conceded 28 shots, 12 of which were on target. Donnarumma saved 10 of them. Up until then, the most he’d had to make in a game this season was only four.
This, need I remind you, was relegated Verona, a team with the league’s worst attack. Luca Toni wasn’t even in the match-day squad. Justifying his decision to sack Sinisa Mihajlovic, Milan president Silvio Berlusconi said, in all his years of watching the team, he had never seen them play as badly as this season. In Verona Cristian Brocchi hit a new low and makes Mihajlovic look like Pep Guardiola with each passing day.
The losses are not limited to the pitch either. Milan announced another one of €89.3m at the AGM. “We’ve been a joke for five years,” explained one shareholder, Boriani, “and it’s no longer a laughing matter.” Every year Milan fans get “sold” a lie that the team is competitive. “The situation is getting worse and worse,” another, Gatti, despaired, “worse than one can possibly imagine.”
The managers change but the results remain the same, underlining how the fault is with those in the boardroom, not on the bench. “The loss is [almost] half what the club is making in revenue,” a lawyer, la Scala, pointed out. He made the case that while not financially bankrupt, the management of the club is failing. Milan has 172 players and staff on their books. Champions Juventus employ 99 by comparison.
Meanwhile, the club’s volte face on building a new stadium in the Portello district of the city even after going to great lengths to win the tender is expected to cost the club millions in penalties for reneging on the agreement. Questions about whether Casa Milan has been worth it were also asked.
Chief executives Adriano Galliani and Barbara Berlusconi did their best to answer them, which meant things got a little awkward when calls were made for Galliani to resign and became even more so when a new alternative board was recommended. The names put forward were decent too: Clarence Seedorf, Gianni Rivera, Demetrio Albertini, Paolo Maldini and Zvonimir Boban.
Fortunately for the regime, the shareholders’ influence does not extend beyond their 0.04% stake in the club. Unfortunately for them, though, the criticism did not stop with the end of the assembly. “Milan hasn’t been [the original] Berlusconi’s Milan for 10 years,” Boban told Radio Anch’io lo Sport. “Now there’s total confusion and disorder within the club. Two people do the same job and the roles are undefined. Galliani is a great manager but the football side of the business is another thing entirely [to the commercial side] and not seeing Maldini at Milan isn’t just absurd, it’s a lot worse than that.”
As Milan came back from behind to rescue a point at San Siro against relegation battlers Frosinone last Sunday, Maldini was in Bilbao. If you follow him on Instagram you would have noticed that he visited the Guggenheim with his great friend Ibrahim Ba. It wasn’t apparent why he was in the Basque country until he emerged on the pitch at San Mames to receive the One Club Man award and the applause of la Catedral.
Celebrated throughout Italy and around the world, he has been left out in the cold by Milan. Memories of his farewell in 2009 and the ingratitude of the Curva Sud still astonish. No one from the club said a word about it. Nobody rushed to his defence. Maldini hasn’t seen or heard from Berlusconi since and that was seven years ago. He has been allowed to withdraw and become more distant. A critic in exile. The dissident. Milan’s Andrei Sakharov.
“The most important thing I have managed to achieve in my life,” he told Sky Italia before Christmas, is not the seven Scudetti and five European Cups. It’s the ability “to think independently.” Everything he says about Milan is only “an act of love” for the club. He means it no harm. “I know very well that it's a lot easier to tell the people you care about that they’re doing well and look great, but it’s a lot more useful to tell them how things really are.”
The club has been too short-termist. There is no project. Milan has lost its identity. Other clubs hold onto it by maintaining a link to the past, a sense of tradition in the form of former-players in positions of authority. This is conspicuous by its absence at Milan. Standards have been allowed to slip. Opinions are not canvased. Decisions go unchallenged. Where in the past there was once Ariedo Braida and Leonardo to scout and offer judgements on whether a player, in addition to talent, had the character to play for Milan, now there is no one. “You need people who understand football and at the moment this is what Milan are missing,” Maldini said.
Milan have fallen to seventh since Brocchi took over from Mihajlovic. They have been overtaken by Sassuolo, a model club, whose manager Eusebio Di Francesco declared amid speculation linking him to the Milan job that: “I will not go where there is confusion.” Instead he has extended his stay at the Mapei Stadium to 2020. By now, all Milan’s eggs are in one basket and that’s winning the Coppa Italia final against the holders’ Juventus. Only that way will they automatically qualify for the group stages of the Europa League.
If they lose it and finish sixth, they will have to go through the preliminary rounds which are due to be held when Milan are participating in the lucrative Champions Trophy in America. It would necessitate their withdrawal and mean walking away from a not insignificant amount of money. The whole thing is a mess.
Last night Berlusconi released a video message on Facebook in which he defended his decisions and the management of Brocchi. These difficult times after years of “champagne and caviar” are only “temporary”, he assured, and must be endured with more “grace”. “To those who say ‘you have got to sell’, I respond that I have been trying to sell Milan for a year but that I would like to leave Milan in good hands, hands that guarantee Milan a future as a protagonist.”
Berlusconi’s intentions are noble and that shouldn’t be forgotten, nor should everything he has done for this club. Mr Bee led him up the garden path and it remains to be seen whether a new Chinese consortium, the identity of whose backers remains strictly confidential, are serious.
In the meantime, the state of Milan is depressing. It can’t be allowed to go on like this for much longer. San Siro hosts this year’s Champions League final and the club that is most defined by it, other than Real Madrid, is on the brink of a third season out of Europe altogether. The heart aches.
James Horncastle @JamesHorncastle
