AC Milan set to bring the glory days back to the San Siro two decades after Fabio Capello's empire crumbled

Perhaps it’s just because the world seems so mystical in early childhood, or maybe because nostalgia tends to warm memories with a soft-focus lens, but the AC Milan team of the mid-1990s has always seemed magical. Watching George Weah, Roberto Baggio, and Paulo Maldini in those beautiful red and black stripes on Football Italia was the high point of the weekend, thanks in part to the brevity of the highlights reel – which graciously bleached out the tediousness of Fabio Capello’s football.

His AC Milan side were the symbol of Italian football’s golden age, and those days are remembered yet more wistfully as a result of the contrast between the 1990s and the past decade. Serie A has become a dreary hegemony, first for Inter Milan and then Juventus, and Italian football has sunk beneath the pantomime glamour of the Premier League’s billions and the galactico building projects at Real Madrid and Barcelona. Juve’s recent Champions League form has been thrilling, but it exists in a vacuum – and thus accentuates the country’s decline like a ticking clock accentuates silence.

Except Serie A is about to make a comeback. Luciano Spalletti has revived AS Roma with 18 months of exciting football and now resides at Inter Milan, a club desperate to erase the catastrophe that followed last summer’s £100 million spree. Spalletti’s piercing tactical monologues ought to glue the fragments back together.

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Meanwhile, we continue to swoon over Maurizio Sarri’s razor-edged Napoli, where Marek Hamsik and Lorenzo Insigne sprint manically towards Juventus – closing the gap to just five points last season. That three clubs can reasonably challenge Max Allegri’s side this year is exciting, but more significant is the variety of playing styles being cultivated; a rich tapestry was the hallmark of that golden era two decades ago.

And then there’s AC Milan, whose recent sale to billionaire Chinese investors neatly mirrors Silvio Berlusconi’s acquisition of the club in the late 1980s, which triggered back-to-back European Cups under Arrigo Sacchi and Capello’s four Scudettos. Like Berlusconi before them, Milan’s new owners are hastily flashing their cash around Europe, approaching all of the summer’s most gossiped-about stars – but so early in the project, it’s more a case of expanding the brand than a genuine ambition to buy. As Manchester City learnt in the 12 months after Arabian oil first spilled into the Etihad, being granted super-club status is a gradual process; it takes attaching oneself to the right newspaper gossip, and elbowing a path to the right negotiation tables, before power and wealth are taken seriously.

Then again, Lenoardo Bonucci’s £37 million move from Juventus is the sort of preposterous coup that will stun world football into taking note, acting as a fast-track to success for a club that have already spent £160 million this window.

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A heroic, flash-bang surge to the Serie A title does seem possible, and timely. 2017 marks the 20th anniversary of Capello’s resignation and Milan’s breath-taking collapse, and so for those of us lamenting Italy’s demise it would be a fittingly romantic tribute. It would also signify the return of Italian football’s swaggering machismo mystique.

But comparing 2017 with the Capello years isn’t just misty-eyed romanticism; there is a technical similarity to the type of player being pursued by the Rossoneri. Andre Silva is a silky midfield distributor in the mould of the uber-Italian Demetrio Albertini; Hakan Calhanoglu has the meandering genius of Roberto Baggio; and Bonucci clearly evokes the authoritarianism of Maldini. A couple more high profile signings before the end of August – perhaps Renato Sanches and Diego Costa – and AC Milan would surely be ready to break Juve’s monopoly.

Or perhaps this is all giddy optimism borne of nostalgia, and instead Milan’s lavish spending will be just another chapter in the vapid world of football’s corporate mistakes, mimicking the great nothingness of Inter’s revolution last summer. But hopefully, it instead marks the return of Italian football, which 20 years from now will evoke, for today’s children, the same mystical joy that we associate with that thrillingly foreign land gifted to us in grainy images on Sunday mornings: of Baggio and Maldini, Albertini and Weah.