April 6 1997 is a date that is long ingrained in the consciousness of Italian football. It was a day that saw Juventus officially rubberstamp their superiority over Milan as the tectonic plates shifted within Serie A. It’s been 25 years since Marcello Lippi’s all-conquering side travelled to San Siro and put on a show of dominating force that had never been seen before, or since.
“It was a fantastic game,” Christian Vieri tells TGU. “We played 90 amazing minutes, scored six goals, and our team was fabulous. And no one ever beat Milan 6-1 at home.”
One could make the argument that it’s a tad hyperbolic to say this one game altered the course of history, but it’s worth noting Milan had won four of the previous five Scudetti by 1997. Since then, they’ve won only three. Juve by contrast, have won 13. Milan’s enduring dominance over Serie A never returned. Moreover, it positioned Lippi as one of the preeminent coaches of the era, and emphatically put the seal on Arrigo Sacchi’s coaching career.
“Milan had big players, so for us it was a game where everything went right, and everything went wrong for them. I think we scored all of our chances, and they missed theirs,” reflects Vieri. “But I think we were just unstoppable, you get those games in a year where whatever you do, everything comes off, and I think that’s what happened.” Milan had never lost by that much before, and haven’t done since. It’s their heaviest league defeat in the club’s 123-year history.
If you are a Milan fan, you may want to stop reading.
Both teams had started the 1996/97 season optimistic of winning trophies. Milan were the reigning Italian champions, having deposed Juve of their title the season before through the underrated partnership of George Weah and Roberto Baggio. A ludicrously talented squad was strengthened further (well, at least on paper) with the summer signings of Edgar Davids and Michael Reiziger from Ajax in some of the first examples of the Bosman rule kicking into force. Christophe Dugarry, fresh from scoring twice against Milan in the UEFA Cup with Bordeaux in 1995/96, was also brought in, as was future Man United winger Jesper Blomqvist. Veteran defender Pietro Vierchowod also signed from Juve, just months after starting in the Champions League final win over Ajax in Rome.
European champions Juve meanwhile had dismantled their squad that summer. Out went Gianluca Vialli, Fabrizio Ravanelli, Paulo Sousa and Vierchowod, replaced by Vieri, Alen Boksic, Paolo Montero and a French midfielder called Zinedine Zidane.
But Milan’s biggest change would come in the bench. Fabio Capello, who’d overseen Milan’s stranglehold of the Italian game for most of the decade, moved to Real Madrid. Capello was replaced by Oscar Tabarez, who was soon replaced by a returning Arrigo Sacchi.
Tabarez was sacked following a shock 3-2 defeat away to Piacenza (which included this spectacular match-winning overhead kick from one-season wonder Luiso) at the beginning of December. With Milan also perilously close to being eliminated from the Champions League, Silvio Berlusconi went back to the future in rehiring Sacchi, who had just been sacked as Italian national team coach. Three days later Milan, in one of the first major shocks of the Champions League era, lost at home to Rosenborg and, in a group that contained Porto and IFK Goteborg, finished third and became the first Italian side not to make it past the group stage. Things would get no better for Sacchi.
Milan and Juve had played out a dour 0-0 game at the Stadio delle Alpi in November, but by the time the two teams met again in April, Milan were 13 points behind Juve who were not just top of the table, but on top of the world. In between, Juve had won the Intercontinental Cup in Tokyo, beating River Plate, and demolished Paris Saint-Germain 9-2 on aggregate in the two-legged European Super Cup at the turn of the year.
Milan actually started the brighter of the two teams in the opening stages, with Berlusconi favourite Dejan Savicevic linking up well with Christophe Dugarry and Marco Simone. The good spell lasted all of 15 minutes, and then Juve began to up the tempo.
A sequence of passes involving Zidane, Vieri, Vladimir Jugovic and Sergio Porrini ended with the ball down the right with Angelo Di Livio. Di Livio returned the ball to Porrini, rampaging down Milan’s left. Porrini cut the ball across the periphery of the box to Vieri, who was faced by Franco Baresi. Vieri shifted the ball to his left and struck with his right. Sebastiano Rossi parried the ball straight into the path of Jugovic, who fired the ball into the net.
The avalanche of goals didn’t start immediately though: Dugarry forced a brilliant save from Angelo Peruzzi with a header from a full 20 yards out that left the Italian stopper scrambling. Peruzzi, who often gets overlooked in the pantheon of great Italian goalkeepers as he tends to fall in between the Gianluca Pagliuca and Gigi Buffon eras, was in the prime of his career here, and more than once in the game saved what looked almost certain goal. He tipped Dugarry’s header over the bar with the ball sailing into the top corner.
Just after the half-hour mark, Paolo Maldini was adjudged to have fouled Boksic inside the area after Jugovic’s fierce drive ricocheted into his path, and a penalty is awarded to Juve. In truth, Boksic tripped over himself, but Zidane took the spot kick and placed it into Rossi’s bottom left-hand corner, who in truth should’ve done better.
Six minutes into the second half, Jugovic got his second of the game. Zidane lofted a long ball into Vieri, who won the aerial battle with Vierchowod and headed the ball backwards to Nicola Amoruso, on as a replacement for the injured Boksic. The substitute turned and shifted the ball to his left to Jugovic, now with an ocean of space due to right-back Reiziger breaking the cardinal rule of following the ball and not the man. Jugovic steamed into the box from the left, cut on to his right and, rather than open his body up and curl the ball into the opposite corner, cut across the ball and placed it into the nearest one, tricking Rossi who had no chance.
Sacchi, no doubt begrudgingly, turned to the bench and brought on Roberto Baggio in order to salvage some pride. Relations between the two had nose-dived in the aftermath of USA’ 94 and Sacchi had left him at home for the disastrous Euro ’96 campaign. Fate now brought them together at club level, and Baggio’s introduction nearly paid off instantly, with his header from Boban’s cross down Juve’s right forcing the burly Peruzzi into another cat-like reflex save. There were three magicians on the pitch in the shape of Zidane, Savicevic and Baggio but it was Vieri and Jugovic who were causing the most damage.
Vieri got his first of the night when Jugovic, in an almost carbon-copy situation of his second, again had oceans of space down Milan’s right. This time he cut inside, ran across the periphery of the Milan box and passed the ball back to Alessio Tacchinardi, who floated a sumptuous through ball over the heads of the beleaguered Milan defenders into Vieri, who dispatched the ball under Rossi.
Vieri would finish the season on 14 goals in all competitions, and by his own admission 1996/97 was his breakout year: “That’s the year when I exploded,” he says. “The first half of the season I would play, and not play, but in the second half I played every game and I was getting better game after game. I was scoring and doing well with the team. That was the season that I became Vieri, all thanks to Juve because they brought me there and believed in me.”
Two minutes later, it was five.
Di Livio charged away from Maldini down the right-hand side and switched the play to Jugovic on the left. Jugovic took several touches before firing off a shot from the edge of the area that Rossi could only parry into the path of Amoruso five yards from goal. The striker prodded the ball home before Baresi could make a tackle.
Milan’s final Scudetto under Capello was built on a resolute defence that only conceded 24 goals in 34 games. They’d let in 20% of that total in just over 70 minutes against Juve less than a year later.
They did finish the game by scoring the best goal of the night. Three minutes after Amoruso had made it five, another powerful Dugarry header forced another fine save from Peruzzi. Baggio floated the resulting corner to the edge of the box for Savicevic, but before he could swing his left foot at the ball, Simone charged towards it and struck a first-time volley that rocketed into Peruzzi’s bottom left-hand corner.
The seal was put on Milan’s torment inside the final 10 minutes, as Jugovic sent a raking long diagonal pass into the feet of Vieri. Now in a foot race with an ageing Baresi outside the box, Vieri motored past one of game’s greatest defenders like he was a Sunday league player, leaving him for dust as he fired his shot past Rossi and into the corner. It was now Milan 1-6 Juventus, and Baresi, bedraggled and dominated, looked every inch a player of 36. Vieri had single handedly bullied and bounced Baresi and Vierchowod around the pitch for 90 minutes, with the two central defenders then a combined aged of 73. Baresi retired at the end of season, his legs unquestionably gone.
Vieri, together with Jugovic, Tacchinardi and Zidane, were singled out for praise by Lippi post-game. After a tough start to his time at Juve, Zidane was finding his groove. “Zidane was amazing from the first day in training. We all said ‘wow, who’s this’,” says Vieri. “French guy who didn’t speak Italian and was very shy, but from the first training session we could see what he had. It maybe took a couple of months for people to realise it, but we got it right away. In training you see how the real players are and what they are made of.”
The aura around Juventus and Lippi was arguably at its zenith in 1996/97. In the same month, Juve gave a similarly chastising lesson to Ajax in the Champions League semi finals. “We had very big players,” says Vieri. Lippi, reflecting on that team in 2020, believed this side played the best football in the club’s history, and certainly from his iterations. Gary Neville still waxes lyrical about the 96/97 team to this day: “Just standing in the tunnel next to them was intimidating,” Neville wrote in his autobiography Red, “big names, big players, in every respect.”
Sir Alex Ferguson held Juve up as the measuring stick in Europe in the late ‘90s, and almost possessed a school-like crush on Lippi. “I remember being in Turin and Signor Lippi was on the bench – wearing a leather coat and smoking a small cigar, smooth and calm, while I was a worker in a tracksuit being drowned in the pouring rain,” he said in a 2009 interview.
If Lippi’s reputation was going from strength to strength and at the forefront of modern tactics, the same couldn’t be said for Sacchi, who was increasingly yesterday’s man. His return was disastrous, still trying to implement his ‘system’ without the necessary players inevitably didn’t bring the required results. Milan finished 11th in Serie A, their worst finish since 1982. Sacchi was sacked at the end of the season for a returning Capello and never held a major position as coach again, a one-trick pony who was all worn out.