1903 — The Empty Cabinet and the Prodigal Founder | Le Cronache

A City Waiting for Its Century

There are years that announce themselves with trumpets, and there are years that arrive the way the Lombard fog arrives, sliding up from the Navigli at dusk and settling over everything without asking permission, so that a man walking home past the Fiaschetteria Toscana on via Berchet — where, behind the wine flasks and the smell of somebody else's dinner, a football club kept its headquarters — could not have told you that anything of consequence was happening at all. For the Milan Foot-Ball and Cricket Club, 1903 was such a year. Nothing was won that history bothered to engrave; almost everything that mattered was decided.

The world beyond the fog was turning on great hinges. On 20 July, Pope Leo XIII died; on 4 August the cardinals gave the Church Giuseppe Sarto, who took the name Pius X. On 3 November, Giovanni Giolitti formed his second government, and with it opened the era that bears his name — industrial expansion, rising wages, labour learning to organise itself — the very engine that would swell Milan from provincial capital into the furnace of the Italian twentieth century. Football, meanwhile, lived entirely inside the industrial triangle, that iron kettle with its three feet in Turin, Milan and Genoa; the game had not yet dared to travel beyond it, and would not for another year. To play football in Italy in 1903 was to play it within sight, so to speak, of a factory chimney.

And the club? The city still saw it as la squadra inglese — the English team of Mister Kilpin — and only a small congregation of the faithful followed it. Alfred Ormond Edwards presided, Edward Nathan Berra served as his vice-president, Daniele Angeloni kept the minutes as secretary, and around them the city's football was crowding like passengers on a tram: Mediolanum and Sempione Milano already in the streets, and the Unione Sportiva Milanese, founded the previous January at the Caffè Verdi by Porta Nuova, quietly preparing the football section that would make it the city's third force. Milan was no longer alone in Milan. This detail, small as a fly in the risotto, would flavour everything to come.

The Milan Foot-Ball and Cricket Club squad of the 1903-04 season, photographed in 1903.
Unknown author, via magliarossonera.it — Public domain (PD-Italy / PD-1996)

Farewell to the Trotter, Hello to the Beautiful Water

In 1903 the club left the Campo Trotter at Piazza Doria for good — the trotting ground where its infancy had been spent — and moved east, out past Corso Indipendenza, to the Campo Acquabella. The name means beautiful water, and there is something fitting in a club born beside a racetrack for horses going to settle in the eastern suburbs, where the city thinned toward the countryside and, on the clear days the fog occasionally permits, the Alps stand behind the Madonnina like a jury that has not yet reached its verdict.

The new ground was inaugurated on 15 March 1903 with a match against Genoa — a 2–2 draw played for charity, the proceeds going to the veterans' home at Turate, the Ricovero Veterani, with Recalcati holding the whistle. Here the record books quarrel, as record books of that era love to do: the club history says the ground was christened by the reserve squads, while the match sheet lists first-teamers on both sides — Ermolli, Meschia, Kilpin, Cartier, Walty, Suter and Davies for Milan; Spensley, the Pasteur brothers and Dapples for Genoa. Most likely both reserves and first teams played that day, and history, as usual, kept only half its receipts. What is certain is that one week later the same grass hosted the only championship football Milan would play all year.

The homelier entries in the ledger tell you more about the age than any final could. Twice in March — on the 8th and the 28th — the club repaired to the Caserma Montebello barracks and played itself, Milan A against Milan B, results unrecorded, soldiers presumably watching men in long-sleeved shirts of thin red and black vertical stripes, the club's cross on the chest, white shorts, black socks, chasing a ball across an army yard. A football club in 1903 was this: borrowed fields, charity gates, a wardrobe, and an idea.

Ninety Minutes of Championship

The Campionato Italiano of 1903 was built like a duelling code from the previous century: the holders waited at the top of the mountain and everyone else climbed toward them. Genoa, champions four times over, passed directly to the final; six clubs from three northern regions made up the entire national game — Genoa, Andrea Doria, Juventus, Torinese, Audace of Turin, and Milan. As Lombardy's representative, Milan entered at the semi-final, fresh and rested. Juventus, by contrast, had to slog through Piedmont the hard way: 5–0 over Torinese on the first of March, 2–1 over Audace on the eighth, 7–1 over Andrea Doria on the fifteenth, all of it at the Velodromo Umberto I. One team arrived at the semi-final having played nothing; the other arrived having scored fourteen goals in three Sundays. The reader may draw his own conclusions about which condition better prepares a man for a fight.

On 22 March 1903, at the week-old Acquabella, Milan lined up thus: Ermolli in goal; Meschia and Kilpin at the back; Cartier II, Walty and Angeloni I across the middle; Galli, Cederna, Suter, G. Colombo and Gregoletto in attack. Francesco Calì of Genoa refereed. Luigi Forlano scored for Juventus; Umberto Malvano scored for Juventus; nobody scored for Milan. Nought to two, and with it the club's entire championship account for the year, an entry of accountant's brutality: played one, won none, drawn none, lost one, goals for nought, goals against two. Whole seasons have been compressed into epitaphs before, but rarely into one this short.

The final came on 13 April, Easter Monday, at Ponte Carrega, and Genoa dismissed Juventus 3–0 — Dapples, then Agar on the hour, then an own goal from the unfortunate Armano — to take a fifth title. The era saved its finest joke for the officiating: the referee that afternoon was Hans Heinrich Suter, Milan's own Swiss, eliminated from the championship as a centre-forward in March and returned to it in April carrying the whistle. If Milan could not reach the final as a team, it would attend as the law. Add the February postscript — a friendly at that same Ponte Carrega on the 22nd, lost 2–1 — and the geometry of the season is complete: all roads led to Genoa, and Genoa was uphill.

The Night of the Thieves

Sometime during that season — no source records the date, and one suspects the club was in no hurry to have it remembered — thieves broke into the headquarters and carried off every cup and trophy Milan had won since its foundation. The display cases were emptied. Nothing was ever recovered. The chronicles pass over it with Lombard restraint, in the clipped language of men who have decided not to weep in public.

To measure the loss you must first measure the treasure. Chief among it sat the Medaglia del Re, the gold medal of Umberto I, a competition with a termination clause written into its heart: the first club to win it three years running would keep it forever, and the tournament itself would cease to exist. Milan had done precisely that — 2–0 against Juventus in 1900, the 1–1 with Genoa in 1901 when the title was awarded after Genoa declined a replay, and the 7–0 annihilation of Torinese in 1902 — so that in 1903 there was no King's Medal to contest at all. Milan had not merely won the thing; Milan had ended it. Forever, said the regulations. Forever, it transpired, meant until the burglars came.

There is a moral curled inside this like a cat, and it is worth stroking gently. The club that would one day require whole rooms for its silverware began by losing every piece it possessed — the medal won forever, the mementoes of the first scudetto, all of it walked out a door in the dark. And the club survived, because the trophies were never the point. Kilpin had vowed a team of devils back in December 1899, and devilry does not live in a cabinet. The silver was gone; the idea was not for sale and therefore not for stealing.

Via Libera agli Italiani

It was Edwards, the English president presiding from a Tuscan wine shop — the age had a sense of humour about nationality that we have since lost — who pronounced the words that turned the club's face toward its future: via libera agli italiani. Open the road to the Italians. And the phrase was policy, not sentiment: seven Italians stood in the semi-final eleven of March 1903, and Herbert Kilpin himself, captain, coach and conscience of the enterprise, withdrew from the attack into defence — the classic retreat of the ageing prophet, who moves to the back of the church the better to watch over the whole congregation.

Around him the founding generation was dissolving like sugar in grappa. Out, in the seasons either side of that year, went Hood and Samuel Richard Davies, Edward Wade and Carlo Ferrarese, Louis Wagner and Alberto Pirelli, Guido Valerio, Antonio Dubini, Attilio Formenti, Ettore Negretti; after the season the founding-era midfielder Giannino Camperio and Domenico Galli hung up their boots in turn. David Allison, the club's first captain, appears in neither of the year's squad lists — his Milan playing days, as far as the documents will testify, were over. In their place came Alfred Cartier on loan from Genoa, Antonio Sala from Mediolanum, and, as the new season gathered, the defender Guido Moda, beginning what would become one of the long careers of the early club, while Gerolamo Radice kept his patient vigil as reserve goalkeeper behind Ermolli, a profession requiring the temperament of a lighthouse keeper.

By the following spring's semi-final only four foreigners would remain in the eleven — Kilpin, Walty, Haberlin, Suter. The English club of Mister Kilpin was becoming a Milanese one, which is to say it was becoming permanent. Empires planted by foreigners either learn the local language or become ruins; Edwards, to his lasting credit, chose the language.

The Prodigal Founder

Now look again, and closely, at the Juventus side that eliminated Milan at the Acquabella on 22 March, and find the name the era's austere convention renders only as Canfari II. This was Enrico Canfari, who in 1897, with his brother Eugenio and a handful of lyceum students in Turin, had founded Juventus itself — founded it, benches and statutes and all — and served as its second president from 1898. On that March afternoon he helped his own creation put Milan out of the championship.

Later that same year, work brought him to Milan, and here the story performs the turn that makes it literature rather than statistics: instead of hanging up his boots, the founder of Juventus walked into the Milan Foot-Ball and Cricket Club and signed on as a centre-forward. By 22 November 1903 he was back at the Velodromo Umberto I in Turin for the Torneo Città di Torino — in red and black stripes, playing against the club he had built with his own hands. Milan that day: Firpi; Kilpin, Suter; Angeloni I, Walty, Meschia; Gregoletto, Young, Canfari II, Cederna, Pedroni I; Dobbie of Turin refereed, and Juventus won 1–0, because fate is a dramatist with a taste for the obvious. He would make three appearances for Milan in 1903–04, and among them taste the particular sting of watching Milan knocked out of the championship by his old club. The ledgers, it must be said, keep him only as Canfari II, the numbering convention of brothers; but the biographies are clear that it was Enrico, not Eugenio, who crossed.

The coda belongs to him, and it silences irony. He retired in 1904, took up the whistle, rose to preside over the Italian referees' association, and wrote the memoir that remains to this day the principal source on the founding of Juventus — the club's own Genesis, written by a man who ended his playing days in the shirt of Milan. Then the century collected its debts: Captain Enrico Canfari fell on 22 October 1915 at Monte San Michele, in the Third Battle of the Isonzo, and was given the Silver Medal for Military Valour he could no longer wear. Call him the Prodigal Founder, and note the difference from the parable: this prodigal did not return home. He found, as some men do, that home is not where you began but where you are honest — and he was honest, magnificently, in both shirts.

Small Silver and the Snow

Spring, at least, offered consolations of a minor key. At Alessandria on 19 April, in the tournament for the Coppa San Giorgio, Milan beat Audace of Turin 1–0 and then played out a 0–0 final with Andrea Doria, whereupon the organisers simply declined to assign the trophy — the era could be as stingy as a Piedmontese uncle. At Novara on 23 and 24 May the club took the Coppa Convegno in the manner of a man clearing his desk: 2–0 over Sampierdarenese, 3–0 over Sempione Milano, 2–0 over Audace. A week later, on 31 May in Venice, the Coppa Reyer San Marco was won with a 5–0 dismissal of Vicenza in the final. And then June supplied the season's bureaucratic masterpiece: at the Concorso Interprovinciale of 28 and 29 June, Milan beat Sempione 3–0 and then defeated Mediolanum on the field 3–1 — only for the ledger to record the tie as Mediolanum 3–0 Milan, by award, for reasons the chronicles do not condescend to explain. The record books quarrel; the era's officialdom could confiscate at the desk what you had won on the grass; a wise club learned to count only what could not be taken. Though, after the burglary, one wondered what that was.

Autumn belonged to the Acquabella and to appetite. Sempione were beaten 3–0 on 11 October and 6–0 on 8 November; Andrea Doria surrendered by forfeit on 15 November; and on 22 November came the Turin defeat already recounted, the Prodigal Founder facing his creation. Down in Liguria, meanwhile, a new object of desire had entered the world: the Palla Dapples, a full-size football in solid silver donated by Genoa's Swiss forward and financier Henri Dapples, instituted late in 1903 as a challenge trophy — single matches, the holder keeping the ball on a draw — and first contested among the Ligurian clubs in the last days of December, Genoa and Andrea Doria trading 1–1, 0–0 and 1–0 between the 20th and the 27th. Milan's first tilt at it would come on 17 January 1904 at Ponte Carrega and would be lost 2–1, Suter scoring; but hold the thought, reader, for Milan would in time own that silver ball as no one else owned it, twenty-three challenges won by 1909. The club had lost one cabinet of silver; it had already begun, without knowing it, the pursuit of the next.

The year closed in perfect character: a New Year's Day friendly against a side from Lyon — the Club Athlétique by one newspaper's account, the Lyon Olympique by another's — arranged for the Acquabella, was postponed under heavy snow — the season's last fixture cancelled by the sky itself. And so the verdict. On paper, 1903 is the poorest year in the young club's story: one championship match, no goals scored in it, no trophy won that anyone now remembers, and the cabinet itself emptied by thieves. But hold the paper up to the light. In twelve months the club found a home of its own at the beautiful water, gave itself an Italian spine that would carry it into the century, buried its English infancy with honour rather than regret, and added to its forward line a man who had founded its rival — proof that the shirt was already worth crossing a divide for. The fog lifts, eventually, even over the Navigli, and one counts what remains. What remained of Milan in 1903 was everything that could not be carried out a door in the dark: the ground, the shirt, the idea. The silver was stolen. The club, it turned out, was elsewhere.

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