Franco Baresi, who spent his entire twenty-season career at AC Milan and captained the side through the most dominant period in its history, has died at 66. The death was reported Friday by BBC Sport and other outlets including The Guardian and La Gazzetta dello Sport. He died in Rozzano, outside Milan.
A career at one address
Baresi was born in Travagliato, near Brescia, in 1960, and joined Milan's youth system as a teenager. He made his debut in Serie A at 17 and never played for another club. By 22 he was captain, and he held the armband for most of the next decade and a half.
The numbers are 532 appearances, six Serie A titles and three European Cups, the continental trophies coming in 1989, 1990 and 1994. He retired in 1997, and Milan withdrew the number 6 from circulation.
What the numbers do not convey is the position he played and how he played it. Baresi was a libero in the Italian sense, the last defender, and he read attacks early enough that he rarely had to be fast. He stepped up to spring offside traps with a timing that his teammates simply followed, and he started Milan's attacks himself rather than passing the problem to a midfielder. Under Arrigo Sacchi, that back line pushed higher up the field than anyone thought a defense could, a gamble that only worked because the man behind it saw the danger before it arrived.
Italy
Baresi won 81 caps between 1982 and 1994. He was in the squad that won the World Cup in Spain in 1982 but did not play a match in the tournament, a detail worth stating precisely because it is often blurred. He played at the 1990 World Cup, where Italy finished third on home soil.
The 1994 tournament in the United States was his last. He tore a meniscus early in the group stage, had surgery, and returned less than a month later to captain Italy in the final against Brazil at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena. The match went to penalties. Baresi took the first one for Italy and put it over the bar. Roberto Baggio missed the last. That is how his international career ended, ninety miles of freeway from this newspaper's office.
A false report, and then the real one
On July 29, the Italian newspaper Tuttosport reported that Baresi had died. It was wrong, the report spread through the Italian media before it could be checked, and AC Milan issued a statement denying it. Two days later he died.
The episode is a small, ugly footnote, and it is worth recording rather than quietly skipping. It also meant that when the accurate reports came on Friday, a number of newsrooms, this one included, treated them with more caution than usual before publishing.
Pasadena, and after
Baresi stayed with Milan after retiring, working in the club's youth setup and later as an ambassador. He belongs to a generation of Italian defenders, alongside Paolo Maldini and Alessandro Costacurta, whose reputations rest on a style of play that has largely gone out of the game: patient, positional, and built on the conviction that the best tackle is the one you never have to make.
For Southern California, the last image of him in a competitive match is a local one. He captained his country at the Rose Bowl on a July afternoon in 1994, in front of more than 90,000 people, at the end of a tournament that brought the World Cup to this region for the first time.
