A Medal for a Dead King

The Men Who Took Tea at Five

The club was a fortnight old when the century turned, and the making of it — the hotel salon, the twenty-five lire, the toast near midnight, the devils declared in red and black — is told in the pages just turned; what belongs here is what the thing so made went out and did with its first full year. Only remember who had made it. They were Milan's English commercial colony and its Italian friends: merchants of textiles and lace, consuls and clerks, who in the cafés around the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele conducted their business in the mornings and their 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; and so the most Milanese of institutions was founded by men who took tea at five. The city around them, at the close of the nineteenth century, was the peninsula's workshop — tram-wires and wet stone, the Navigli still carrying their barges — and it had not yet noticed what it had just been given.

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 Edwards affiliated the club to the Federazione Italiana del Football, itself barely two years old, and it was thereby admitted to the third championship of Italy — as Lombardy's only registered club, which spared it the indignity of qualifying.

It rehearsed first against itself. On the 18th of February, at the Trotter, Milan played Milan — the As against the Bs, 2–2 — so that the first documented outing in the club's history was an argument with itself, which has remained a house speciality; a week later, 2–2 again.

Its first match against the world outside 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 the goals began, and they have not stopped since. A week after that came reality, unsweetened, and a foretaste of April: a friendly against FC Torinese, the Nottingham man's old club, lost 0–4.

Though even here the accounts divide. 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 canon kept at magliarossonera admits only championship football and enters the club's official match number one a month later, in Turin. Whichever door you enter by, the same two facts wait inside: Allison scored first, and Milan won.

Homecoming at the Velodrome

On Sunday the 15th of April 1900, at three in the afternoon, Milan contested the championship semi-final at the Velodromo Umberto I in Turin, against Football Club Torinese — and the fixture was a homecoming, because Turin was where Herbert Kilpin's Italian life had begun, in the employ of the Italian-Swiss textile merchant Edoardo Bosio; the road that carried a Nottingham clerk out of the lace trade and into Italy is travelled in the chapter before this one. In Turin Kilpin had played for the pioneer club, Internazionale Torino, and lost two championship finals to Genoa, 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 now, aged thirty, its player-manager — the captain's armband handed, with a courtesy the modern game has misplaced, to Allison — he brought his creation to face the heirs of the very club he had played for and lost with.

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 sterner canon 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 wrote it both ways — 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, threaded together like the lace that had carried half of them south; and the newspapers of the day, unequal to the exoticism, went on misspelling the founder's name exactly as they had on the night of the founding, 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 for the sufficient reason that it had 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 final, in Turin on the 22nd of April, went as every final yet played had gone: to Genoa. One austere register scores it 1–0; the encyclopaedias say 3–1 after extra time; on the substance every account agrees — Genoa took a third consecutive title and with it, permanently, the Coppa Duca degli Abruzzi, as the sporting law of the age allowed. 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 — 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 pioneers wore every hat because there were not yet enough heads to go round.

The Rule of Three

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? The traditions disagree, and widely. One 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. That the confusion exists at all is no great mystery: Milan beat Juventus 2–0 twice that spring, on both of those days, and only one of the two afternoons carried the King's gold. The charter of the founding is lost, and the date of the first trophy has never been fastened to a single Sunday: the gold is certain, the calendar is not. 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 beginning, 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.

Monza, the 29th of July

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.

The season itself fits in one sentence: three competitive matches, two won, one lost, four goals scored, three conceded, Allison top scorer with two. Around that sentence stands everything else — a club founded over a toast, a ground lying in wait beneath a future railway station, a thrashing administered by the founder's own employer, gold at the first attempt, a patron king who did not live out the year. In its first twelve months the club had lost to its elders, beaten its neighbours, and outlived its patron. The century ahead would elaborate at magnificent length, but it would not fundamentally revise. And somewhere in Milan as the year closed — in a cabinet, a strongbox, a director's coat pocket — lay a small disc of gold carrying a dead man's name: the club's entire treasury, and already an heirloom.