The Butcher's Son and the King's Medal

A City of Fog and Lace

Begin with the city, because the club is unimaginable without it. Milan at the close of the nineteenth century was a place where the fog came off the plain and settled among the tram-wires like a lodger who pays no rent, where the Navigli still carried barges and the smell of wet stone, and where, in the cafés around the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele, an English commercial colony — merchants of textiles and lace, consuls and clerks — conducted its business in the mornings and its nostalgia in the evenings. Football arrived in Italy the way most English exports arrived: in the luggage of men who had come for cotton and stayed for the risotto. It is one of history's better jokes that the most Milanese of institutions was founded by men who took tea at five.

On a December evening in 1899 — the club's official history fixes it as the 16th — a group of these men and their Italian friends gathered at the Hôtel du Nord et des Anglais and founded the Milan Foot-Ball and Cricket Club. The assembly, according to the sporting press of the day, opened at nine in the evening and ran until close to midnight, ending with a cheerful toast, which tells you everything about the seriousness and the unseriousness of the enterprise in perfect proportion. Eleven charter members signed the statute — six English, five Italian, a ratio the club would spend the century reversing — each pledging twenty-five lire to a common fund, and each subscribing to an object of magnificent modesty: to spread the game of football, and to practice cricket. Alfred Ormond Edwards, formerly Britain's vice-consul in the city, took the presidency; Edward Nathan Berra, captain of the cricketers, the vice-presidency; Samuel Richard Davies the secretary's pen; and the football section passed to a Nottingham man of whom more, much more, presently.

The precise date of the founding is a quarrel the record books have never settled, because the original charter is lost: the club says the 16th of December, one archive argues for the 13th, another for the 18th, and the contemporary newspaper account describes an assembly on a Monday the 18th. I decline to adjudicate. What matters is what the Nottingham man is recorded as declaring, in the club's own telling: that they would be a team of devils, their colours red like fire and black to put fear into opponents. Clubs have been founded on sounder finances and far worse poetry.

The Trotter, Where the Trains Now Run

The infant club took rooms, or rather a table, at the Fiaschetteria Toscana at via Berchet 1, on the corner of via Foscolo beside the Galleria — a Tuscan wine shop for a headquarters, which the sociologists may make of what they will, and which the club kept until 1909. For a ground it had the Campo Trotter in Piazza Doria, a trotting track on the city's edge whose turf now lies somewhere beneath the marble acreage of Milano Centrale: the site where Milan first played is today the place from which Milan departs, and there is a metaphor in that which I refuse, on principle, to complete. The Arena Civica, the city's great Napoleonic oval, served when a grander stage was wanted. On the 15th of January 1900 the club affiliated itself to the Federazione Italiana del Football, itself barely two years old, and was thereby admitted to the third championship of Italy — as Lombardy's only entrant, which spared it the indignity of qualifying.

Its first recorded match came on the 11th of March 1900, at the Trotter, against the city rivals Mediolanum: 2–0, the referee one Carlo Nardi. The first goal in the history of the club — a history that now weighs as much as the cathedral — was scored by the captain, David Allison; the second by the Nottingham man. Two Englishmen, one afternoon on a converted trotting track, and a ledger opened that has never since been closed.

Though even here the archivists quarrel, as archivists must. The encyclopaedic registers count that March afternoon as the semi-final of the Medaglia del Re and thus the club's first competitive fixture; the sterner ledger kept at magliarossonera admits only championship football to the canon and enters the club's official match number one a month later, in Turin. I give you both traditions, as a good innkeeper serves both the white and the red, and I note only that whichever door you enter by, the same two facts wait inside: Allison scored first, and Milan won.

Homecoming at the Velodrome

Now the Nottingham man, properly. Herbert Kilpin was born on the 24th of January 1870 at 129 Mansfield Road, Nottingham, a butcher's son, and there is something fitting in the trade, for he would spend his football life carving. In 1891 he sailed for Turin to work for Edoardo Bosio, an Italian-Swiss textile merchant whose business threaded back to a Nottingham lace house — lace, always lace, the fabric on which Italian football was first embroidered — and in Turin he played for the pioneer clubs, Internazionale Torino and the Torino Foot-Ball and Cricket Club, losing two championship finals to Genoa and acquiring the particular wisdom of the twice-beaten. By 1898 he had settled in Milan; by December 1899 he had willed a club into being; and in 1900, aged thirty, he served as its player-manager while handing the captain's armband, with a courtesy the modern game has misplaced, to Allison.

On Sunday the 15th of April 1900, at three in the afternoon, at the Velodromo Umberto I in Turin, Milan contested the championship semi-final against Football Club Torinese — heirs of the very clubs Kilpin had played for and lost with — and the afternoon arranged itself into the kind of irony no novelist would dare submit. The man who destroyed Milan was Edoardo Bosio himself: the employer who had brought Kilpin to Italy scored all three goals, in the 15th minute, the 18th and the 70th, while a Turinese official named De Rote presided over the lesson. Torinese 3, Milan 0 — and this, remember, is the fixture the stern ledger calls official match number one. Milan's history opens, officially, with the boss thrashing the apprentice.

Look at the eleven who absorbed the beating and you see the club's whole future constitution in miniature: Hood, an Englishman, in goal; Cignaghi — or Ciminassi, the transcribers disagree — and Torretta, Italians, in front of him; Lies, a Swiss, alongside Kilpin and Valerio in the half-back line; Dubini, Davies, Neville — a Welshman, for completeness — Allison and Formenti in attack. Three nations, four if the Welsh are counted as the Welsh insist on being counted, bound together as a risotto binds its grains; and the newspapers of the day, unequal to the exoticism, printed the founder's name as 'Gilping', an insult to orthography he seems to have borne without recorded complaint.

Genoa, Always Genoa

It is worth pausing to measure how small the world was that had just defeated them. The entire third championship of Italy comprised six clubs from three regions: in Piedmont, a round-robin that Torinese won with eight points to Juventus's four and poor Ginnastica Torino's none; in Liguria, an eliminator in which Genoa put seven past Sampierdarenese without reply at Ponte Carrega on the 8th of April; and in Lombardy, Milan — alone, entire, admitted straight to the semi-final by the simple arithmetic of having no neighbour to beat. Inter did not exist and would not for another eight years. In 1900 Milan was Lombard football, all of it, the way the Madonnina is the skyline.

The final, in Turin on the 22nd of April, went as every final yet played had gone: to Genoa. The record books quarrel over the score — one austere register says 1–0, the encyclopaedias say 3–1 after extra time — but none quarrels over the substance, which is that Genoa took a third consecutive title and with it, permanently, the Coppa Duca degli Abruzzi, as the sporting law of the age allowed. And here history permits itself a smile: the referee of that final was David Allison, captain of Milan, scorer of Milan's first goal, whistling the coronation of the champions his own club would spend a decade learning to dethrone. The pioneers wore every hat because there were not yet enough heads to go round.

Gold for the Devils

But 1900 did not end for Milan in Turin. There existed in those years a tournament called the Medaglia del Re — the King's Medal, a gold medal in the name of Umberto I — governed by a rule of beautiful finality: the first club to win it three years running would keep it forever, and the competition would die with the achievement. Milan beat Mediolanum 2–0 in the semi-final and then, in the final, beat Juventus by the same score, the goals coming from Giannino Camperio and from Allison — one register gives the minutes as the 16th and the 23rd — and so, within months of existing, the club had silverware, or more precisely goldware: the first line of an honours list that would one day require pages.

When, exactly? Here the archives do not so much quarrel as brawl. One tradition stages the final on the 27th of May at the Arena Civica; another on the 22nd of April at the Trotter, before some five hundred spectators. The charter of the founding is lost and the date of the first trophy is fog — Lombard fog, appropriately, which hides the thing itself while leaving you quite certain the thing is there. What no source disputes: Milan 2, Juventus 0, Camperio and Allison, a gold medal, the first.

Camperio deserves his portrait. Giannino, born in Milan on the 15th of November 1875, son of the engineer Camillo Camperio, was a student of mechanical engineering at what would become the Politecnico — for this was a club braided from the first evening into the city's industrial nobility, with Piero Pirelli seated among the earliest directors and Alberto Pirelli running the midfield, rubber and football vulcanising together. A founder and an executive from the first ledger, Camperio scored in the club's first final and would later return to manage the club itself; he died in 1913, at thirty-seven, of scarlet fever, and I mention it now because the pioneers must be loved in full, their endings included. The medal he helped win, Milan would win again in 1901 and again in 1902, and by the rule of three it remains in the club's keeping to this day, the competition having honourably expired beneath it.

The King Is Dead; the Medal Remains

And the king whose name was on the gold? On the evening of the 29th of July 1900, at Monza, a short ride up the road from the Trotter, Umberto I was leaving a gymnastics meeting, where he had spent the evening handing out medals to athletes, when Gaetano Bresci, an Italian-American anarchist, stepped from the crowd with a revolver and killed him — a king shot dead in the act of going home from a prize-giving, his last public gesture the awarding of sporting medals. The nineteenth century, which had already ended on the calendar, now ended in fact. Every dated tradition places Milan's final in the spring, weeks before the shots at Monza: the king whose name was on the gold had that long left to live. So by the close of 1900 Milan possessed a winners' medal bearing the name of a dead king, which is as concise a summary of Italian history as sport has ever produced.

Add up the season and it is almost nothing: three competitive matches, two won, one lost, four goals scored, three conceded, Allison top scorer with two. Add it up differently and it is almost everything: a club founded over a toast, a ground beneath a future railway station, a thrashing administered by the founder's own employer, a gold medal won at the first attempt, a dead king, and a set of colours chosen expressly to frighten. The butcher's son from Mansfield Road had promised a team of devils; in its first year the team lost to its elders, beat its neighbours, and outlived its patron. The century ahead would elaborate at magnificent length, but it would not fundamentally revise. The verdict of 1900 is the verdict of Milan entire: defeat teaches, gold consoles, and the fog keeps the exact dates to itself.