The Devils Are Born in the Fog

A City Waiting for Its Game

Milan at the close of 1899 was a city that had taught itself to make almost everything — rubber at the Pirelli works, machines in the engineering shops, reputations in the counting-houses — and had somehow not yet managed to make itself a football club. The fog came up from the Navigli in the last weeks of the year as it always does, slow and proprietary, taking possession of the streets the way a good risotto takes on its broth, and under that fog lived a colony of English merchants who had brought with them their ledgers, their consuls, their cricket bats and, inevitably, their ball. Above the rooftops stood the Madonnina; beyond her, on the rare days the fog relented, the Alps; and between the two an industrial city of the most modern kind, punctual in everything except this one appointment.

For football in Italy was, in that year, a small and jealously provincial affair. The Federazione Italiana del Football had been formed in Turin only the year before, in 1898, and its championship was a springtime tournament settled in a fortnight among a handful of clubs from Piedmont and Liguria. The second edition, played between the 2nd and the 16th of April 1899, gathered four clubs and not one of them was Milanese; Genoa beat Internazionale Torino 3-1 in the final and kept the title they had taken in 1898 and would take again in 1900 — a dynasty of the seaport which the great city of the plain had not yet found the means, or perhaps the appetite, to answer. In Milan, sport lived respectably indoors, inside the gymnastics societies — Mediolanum the most notable — where the body was cultivated with civic earnestness and parallel bars; while La Gazzetta dello Sport, itself barely three years old, watched the horizon and waited for something worth a headline.

The Butcher's Son

The man who would answer for the plain was not Milanese at all but a clerk from Nottingham, and there is a lesson in that which Milan has never quite stopped teaching. Herbert Kilpin was born on the 24th of January 1870 above his father's butcher's shop on Mansfield Road — number 129 then, number 191 after the street was renumbered in 1895, as if even his birthplace declined to hold a fixed address — the youngest of a household with nine older siblings, a boy who left school for a lace warehouse and might have spent his life among bobbins and invoices had the lace trade not been, in its quiet way, a shipping line for destinies.

In 1891 that trade carried him to Turin, into the employ of Edoardo Bosio, an Italian-Swiss textile merchant with Nottingham connections, and there the clerk became something else entirely: the English chroniclers call him the first Englishman ever to play football abroad, a superlative one repeats carefully, like news of buried treasure. With Bosio's Internazionale Torino, and later with FC Torinese, he reached the first two finals in the history of the Italian Championship and lost them both to Genoa — an education in defeat administered by the sea to a man of the inland, and he took the lesson as strong men do, which is to say personally. By 1898 work had moved him on to Milan, alongside his compatriot Samuel Richard Davies, and so the butcher's son, twenty-nine years old and twice a beaten finalist, walked the fogged streets of a football-less metropolis with the patience of a man who has watched someone else lift the prize once too often.

Nine in the Evening, Piazza della Repubblica

The founding, when it came, came in the manner of the class that made it: in a hotel. In mid-December 1899, in a room of the Hôtel du Nord et des Anglais on Piazza della Repubblica — the building that today calls itself the Principe di Savoia — the English colony gathered, and the chair was taken by Alfred Ormond Edwards: businessman, former British vice-consul in the city, born at Skyborry in 1850, a figure of Milanese high society whose whole profession, one might say, had been the joining of England to Lombardy. The meeting opened at nine in the evening and dissolved toward midnight — the contemporary report says con un'allegra bicchierata, with a cheerful round of drinks, and there is the whole club in a phrase: business concluded, glasses raised. Each man present pledged twenty-five lire to the common fund; the membership was counted at around fifty; and the newspaper that recorded the birth of the Milan Foot-Ball and Cricket Club contrived to misspell its animating spirit as 'Gilping', so that the founder entered history, like many founders, under the wrong name.

La Gazzetta dello Sport had already blessed the enterprise on Friday the 15th of December — 'Finalmente!', it began: finally, after so many fruitless attempts, sporting Milan too would have a society for the game of football — announcing a membership already touching fifty, applications arriving in heaps, a noble purpose — a Milanese squad to contest the Italian championship the coming spring — and a training ground secured at the Trotter. And here the record books begin to quarrel, as they will go on quarrelling about this club for a century. The society itself celebrates the 16th of December; the one contemporary account of the assembly, in the Corriere dello Sport – La Bicicletta of the 21st, places the meeting on Monday the 18th; older literature has proposed the 13th; and the original charter, which alone could arbitrate, is lost. A club born of Englishmen and mislaid paperwork: the Milanese, who know that the best stories improve in the absence of documents, have never much minded.

Red as Fire, Black as Fear

Tradition — and it is tradition, handed down and polished by a hundred retellings, not a stenographer's minute — gives Kilpin the declaration that dressed the club: we will be a team of devils; our colours red like fire, and black to strike fear into our opponents. The wording shifts from teller to teller, as reported sayings do; the shirts themselves do not. Red and black in vertical stripes, an echo, the historians of the maglia observe, of the clubs of Kilpin's own Nottingham — and by one account cut from kit the butcher's son had carried with him from England, so that the very cloth of the Devil was contraband of the lace trade.

The offices were distributed with mercantile tidiness. Edwards president — he would hold the chair until 1909, delegating the daily grind, as presidents of his stamp do, to his deputy; Edward Nathan Berra vice-president and captain of the cricket section, for this was a Foot-Ball and Cricket Club and meant both halves of its name; Samuel Richard Davies secretary; Barnett, Saint John and Piero Pirelli councillors — a Pirelli on the first board, the rubber dynasty present at the creation, as it would be again when Piero himself took the presidency years later. The football went to the professionals of passion: David Allison captain of the playing eleven, Herbert Kilpin head of football and player-manager — and note the order, for it was Allison, not Kilpin, who wore the armband in that first season — the chronicles say the founder ceded him the captaincy on grounds of seniority, keeping for himself, like all true founders, the engine room rather than the bridge. Around them the roll of charter members reads Anglo-Italian from its first breath: Daniele Angeloni, Antonio Dubini, Guido Valerio, and Giannino Camperio, a Milanese of twenty-three still finishing his mechanical-engineering degree at the Politecnico — proof that this was no English lodge with local servants but a marriage, from the start, of two footballing temperaments.

The addresses tell the same story of a club living between worlds: headquarters at the Fiaschetteria Toscana in via Berchet, at the corner of via Foscolo in the shadow of the Galleria — a wine shop, naturally, for a club baptised with a bicchierata — and a playing ground out at the Trotter in Piazza Doria. Legend, it is true, prefers to move the founding itself to the Fiaschetteria, on a foggy evening, as legend requires; the documents keep the assembly at the hotel and grant the wine shop the consolation of being the first registered home. Even the name would not sit still. The world has always said Milan Foot-Ball and Cricket Club, but the only printed statute known to survive — from Pizzi's press in 1900, surfacing at auction in 2016 — reads Milan Cricket and Football Club, cricket first, as though the founders themselves were unsure which England they were importing. What nobody disputed was the first word: Milan, written English-fashion, not Milano — a badge of origin the club would surrender only decades later, and briefly, when a regime forced the Italian form upon it.

A Club Without a Match

And then — nothing. It is the most Milanese of ironies that the club which would one day fill the world's small hours was founded with barely a fortnight of the year, and of the century, left to spend, and played no match at all in 1899: not a friendly, not a trial, not a kickabout that any newspaper thought worth its ink. For those two weeks the devils existed purely as an idea, a subscription list and a set of striped shirts — which is to say, in the only form in which a football club is ever truly immortal.

The flesh came with the new year, and the record of it reads like a child learning to walk on cobbles. On the 15th of January 1900 Edwards affiliated the club to the Federazione Italiana del Football — the only registered club in all Lombardy, admitted for that reason directly to the championship semi-final. On the 18th of February, at the Trotter, Milan played Milan: the As against the Bs, 2-2, the first documented outing in the club's history being a quarrel with itself, which the moralist will note has remained a house speciality. A week later, 2-2 again. On the 11th of March came the first known match against the world outside: Milan 2-0 Mediolanum, the gymnasts of the city beaten at the Trotter, the goals scored by Allison — the first goalscorer in the club's history — and by Kilpin himself; and the eleven that took the field that season was already a small Europe, with Hood of England in goal, the Swiss Lies and the Welshman Neville in the ranks, and Italians — Cignaghi, Torretta, Formenti, Dubini — alongside the men of Nottingham and the counting-house. A week later came reality, unsweetened: a friendly against FC Torinese, Kilpin's old club, lost 0-4.

Official match number one in the history of Milan followed on Sunday the 15th of April 1900, a championship semi-final at the Velodromo Umberto I in Turin, and it was a lesson administered without anaesthetic: FBC Torinese 3, Milan 0, all three goals scored by one Bosio — the very surname under which Kilpin had first come to Italy, and fate has seldom signed its work more legibly — at the 15th minute, the 18th and the 70th. Torinese went on to lose the final to Genoa, 3-1 after extra time, on the 22nd of April: a third consecutive title for the seaport, in a championship of six clubs from three regions, in which Milan's mere presence was itself the novelty.

Yet the founding season did not close empty-handed. Within it Milan won its first silverware, the Medaglia del Re — the King's Medal — beating Juventus 2-0 in the final, the goals from Camperio, the engineer-student, and Allison, the captain, with the 11 March defeat of Mediolanum serving as semi-final. On the question of when, exactly, that final was played, the record books quarrel once more — and with some excuse, for Milan beat Juventus 2-0 twice that spring: once in a friendly at the Trotter on the 22nd of April, and once on the 27th of May at the Arena Civica, in the match that carried the King's gold. The scorers, at least, do not quarrel; and Allison, with his two goals across the season, finished as the infant club's first top scorer — an Englishman born at Menton, in France, in 1873, which is precisely the sort of biographical wrinkle this club has been collecting ever since.

The Verdict of the Fortnight

The medal was in the gift of King Umberto I, who had months to live — the assassin found him at Monza in July 1900 — so that Milan's first trophy carries, like so much of this early story, the smell of one era ending inside another's beginning. The old century died with the club a fortnight old; the king who named its first prize died before the club's first birthday; and Genoa's dynasty, though nobody at the Trotter yet knew it, had a single year left to run.

For that is the verdict of 1899, and it is a verdict about seed rather than harvest. On the 5th of May 1901, seventeen months after the bicchierata, the butcher's son who had lost the first two championship finals in Italian history to Genoa took a Milan team to Ponte Carrega and beat Genoa 3-0 for the title — but that triumph belongs to another chapter, and Brera's trade, like the historian's, is to leave each vintage in its own cellar. What belongs to 1899 is smaller and greater: some fifty names, twenty-five lire apiece, a hotel room emptied toward midnight, a misspelled Englishman, a colour scheme chosen expressly to frighten, and no football whatsoever. Everything the club later built — and it built empires — stands upon that fortnight in the fog in which nothing happened, except that a vice-consul, some merchants and a clerk from Nottingham decided that something should. History, which loves goals, began this club instead with a round of drinks; and the drinks, on the evidence of the century that followed, were the soundest investment ever made in Milan for twenty-five lire a head.