Fabio Capello is in mourning. Speaking to La Gazzetta dello Sport in the wake of Franco Baresi’s passing, the former AC Milan and Real Madrid manager was emotional, unguarded, and entirely generous in his tribute to one of the greatest defenders Italian football has ever produced.
“I feel like crying,” Capello said simply. “Give him a Ballon d’Or in his memory. He would deserve it — for who he was and for how he conducted himself. He lived to make the Milan family happy. It gives me goosebumps to say it, but it is truly so: a part of the history of the great Milan has come to an end.”
The Juventus Story That Has Never Been Told — Until Now
Among the tributes and memories, Capello revealed a detail that will send ripples through Italian football’s historical consciousness: there was a moment when Franco Baresi almost left AC Milan for Juventus — and it was Capello himself who talked him out of it.
The backdrop was the early turbulence of the Arrigo Sacchi era at Milan. Sacchi’s arrival in 1987 brought with it a radically new footballing philosophy — pressing-based, positionally demanding, and initially disorienting for players who had learned the game in an entirely different register. Baresi, whose instincts as a libero were at odds with some of Sacchi’s requirements in the opening phase of that revolutionary period, experienced a moment of genuine doubt about his future at the club.
It was in that moment that Juventus made their move. And it was Capello — then still playing, and already deeply embedded in the Milan environment — who interceded. The precise nature of those conversations has never been made public before, but their outcome is the stuff of footballing legend: Baresi stayed, Sacchi’s revolution took hold, and Milan went on to win back-to-back European Cups in 1989 and 1990 with Baresi as their indomitable captain and heartbeat.
What Might Have Been
The counterfactual is almost too large to contemplate. A Baresi-era Juventus — already formidable in those years with figures like Michel Platini and later Roberto Baggio and Gianluca Vialli — would have been a different proposition entirely. And a Milan without Baresi in the Sacchi years would almost certainly have been a less dominant force in European football’s history.
Instead, he stayed. And he became what he became: the defining Italian defender of his generation, the man who played through a serious knee injury at the 1994 World Cup only to miss the decisive penalty against Brazil in the final, and ultimately the player whose number six shirt at San Siro was retired in his honour — the only such gesture in the club’s history.
Capello’s call to award him a posthumous Ballon d’Or carries real weight. Baresi was famously overlooked during his playing career for an individual award that, by almost any measure of influence, leadership, and sustained excellence, he deserved more than many who received it. The conversation, it seems, is not over.
