Franco Baresi has died at the age of 66, after a long illness. Milan, the club where he played his entire career, confirmed what Italian football had been dreading for months.

Baresi was a captain, a defender and something that barely exists in football today - a man who played twenty-three years for one single club. 719 official matches. Six Serie A titles, three European Cups, the 1982 World Cup with Italy. Seven times nominated for the Ballon d'Or. Milan retired his number six shirt, the highest honour a club can give and the quietest.

What sets him apart is not the numbers but how he played. Baresi anchored the defence in an era when defending was still a craft, not a tactical line item in a spreadsheet. Diego Maradona, who faced him during his Napoli years, called him the best defender he ever met. After one match he asked for his shirt and said it was a keepsake he would treasure for life. When Maradona asks for your shirt, that is a review no trophy replaces.

Privately, Baresi was almost invisible. In 1984, while on a training camp with the squad in Tuscany, he met Maura Lari in a restaurant, then a waitress. They stayed together. They adopted two sons, Edoardo and Gianandrea - one works in finance, the other in the arts, neither went into football. That family was never sold to front pages.

His last public appearance was in February, at the opening of the Winter Olympics in Milan and Cortina, where he carried the Olympic flame alongside Beppe Bergomi. Many noticed then how frail he looked. Nobody wanted to say it out loud.

The funeral is set for 4 August at eleven o'clock at the Basilica of Sant'Ambrogio in Milan, with the mass open to the public as far as space allows. Condolences arrived from Real Madrid, Barcelona, Athletic Bilbao, from Sergio Ramos, Fabio Cannavaro and Fabio Capello.

On this side of the Adriatic, Baresi belongs to the generation the whole region watched through Italian television in the nineties, when Serie A was the most watched league in the Balkans and children argued over who got to be Milan in the yard. He was the number six nobody wanted to have to mark, because he was simply too hard to play against. Another chapter closes from the time when football is remembered through people, not through transfer fees.