The Silver Ball and the Road to Florence

A City of Smoke, a Cellar of Chianti

Consider the city before you consider the club, because in 1904 the two were tangled together like threads on a Lombard loom. Milan was Italy's industrial capital in full boom — the Milan of Pirelli rubber, of textile mills, of the new electric tram rattling where the horse had lately been — and it was already dreaming aloud of the great International Exposition of 1906, the fair that would celebrate the piercing of the Simplon tunnel, as though the Alps themselves, that white wall a Milanese can see beyond the Madonnina whenever the fog consents to lift, had at last agreed to step aside for Lombard commerce. Football in such a city was still a modest trade. The entire Italian championship of 1904 — the Prima Categoria, seventh of its name — mustered five clubs from three regions: Genoa and Andrea Doria from Liguria, Juventus and Torinese from Piedmont, and from Lombardy the Milan Foot-Ball and Cricket Club, whose registered heart beat not in a boardroom but in the Fiaschetteria Toscana, the Tuscan wine-shop at number 1, Via Berchet, where the flasks stood in ranks and the club's letters were addressed.

The club that gathered beneath those rafters still had the shape of a family firm. Alfred Ormonde Edwards, the Englishman, presided; Edward Nathan Berra served as his vice-president; Daniele Angeloni kept the minute-book as secretary and then, on Sunday afternoons, unbuttoned his collar and played in midfield, because the age of the specialist had not yet dawned and a man was expected to be useful in every room of the house. And beneath them all — beneath, note, not above, for his empire was the mud of the Campo Acquabella — stood Herbert Kilpin: captain, coach and, when the occasion demanded, goalscorer; thirty-four years old in 1904 and entering the sixth season of the club he had founded on 16 December 1899 with the declaration the official histories repeat like a creed, that his men would wear red like fire and black to invoke fear.

Edwards had spent the season performing a quiet surgery on this little body. Where foreigners had once filled more than half the team, he cut them to four — Kilpin, plus the Swiss trio of Paul Arnold Walty, Alfred Haberlin and Hans Heinrich Suter — so that nine of the thirteen players used in 1903-04 were Italian. It was policy, not accident: the Englishman's club was being made Milanese on purpose. They wore a long-sleeved shirt in thin, equal stripes of red and black, the red cross of the city on a white shield at the breast; as for the shorts, the record books quarrel — white, says one tradition; black, insists another — and I confess I prefer the quarrel to any possible answer, for a club whose chroniclers still dispute the colour of its knees is a club born before the camera could settle such arguments, which is to say born in the heroic age.

The Silver Ball That Stayed by the Sea

Understand first what the Palla Dapples was, because without it the winter of 1904 makes no sense. Henri Dapples, a director of Genoa and once a forward himself, had donated a full-size football made of silver, and around this glittering object the pioneers built the strangest of competitions: a single challenge match, winner takes the ball, with the delicious rule that the holder kept it in the event of a draw, and the still more delicious rule that a fresh challenge had to be delivered within minutes of the final whistle — in person, if you had the nerve, or by telegram, if you had a fast boy and the price of the wire. Contemporaries, the chroniclers tell us, rated this silver ball perhaps more important than the championship itself, and one understands them perfectly: a championship is an argument, but a ball of silver is a fact.

On 17 January 1904 Milan went down to Genoa to challenge for it and came home empty-handed, beaten 2–1, and the ledger closes the season with Milan as runners-up in the competition. Genoa, in truth, spent that whole winter swatting away the peninsula: Andrea Doria dispatched 6–2 on 3 January, Torinese 2–0 on the 10th, Juventus 2–0 on 21 February. Not one Palla Dapples travelled to Milan in all of 1904 — a detail worth savouring precisely because of what followed, for from 1905 the rossoneri would begin to hoard that silver ball with such appetite that they ended with twenty-three career wins, more than any club in Italy. Every feast, the Lombard cooks will tell you, begins with a lean year.

March, and the Same Old Mountain

The championship, being five clubs, was less a league than a duel with preliminaries, and its format had the elegance of an old duelling code: the three-time holders, Genoa, sat apart and waited while the rest of Italy eliminated itself for the honour of facing them. Milan's part began on 6 March at the Acquabella, the interregional eliminator against Andrea Doria, and it was settled the old way — by the old man himself. On seventy-five minutes Kilpin scored the only goal of the afternoon, 1–0, and Milan advanced; the same Sunday, on the Piazza d'Armi in Turin, Juventus beat Torinese 3–2, and so the semi-final was made: Milan against Juventus, at the Acquabella, on 13 March.

They could not be separated. One goal apiece — Umberto Scotti for Milan, Streule for Juventus — then extra time, and still nothing, and so the whole apparatus was wound up again for a replay on the same ground the following Sunday. Here the story turns cruel with the suddenness these pioneer springs specialised in: 20 March 1904, Milan 0, Juventus 3 — Streule, Ferraris I, Gibezzi — and the season's great ambition dissolved inside ninety minutes. The chronicler of magliarossonera, a man after my own heart, needed eight words where I have needed a paragraph: '0-3 and everyone went home.' It was the second year running that Milan's championship had died at the semi-final stage, and there is no lonelier way to lose than at home, in March, to a team you had held only a week before.

The rest belonged, as the whole era belonged, to Genoa. On 27 March, at the Campo di Ponte Carrega, they beat Juventus 1–0 — Bugnion, on sixty-five minutes — and were champions of Italy for the sixth time in seven editions, their third in a row. Against that mountain the rest of the peninsula measured itself and despaired; only once had anyone planted a different flag on the summit, and that flag was Milan's, in 1901. By 1904 it was a memory — and memories, like risotto, do not reheat well.

The Expedition to Tuscany

But 1904 refuses to be read as an elegy, because in May the season produced its most romantic chapter. The Italian Gymnastics Federation — the FGNI, that older, sterner body which regarded football as one gymnastic exercise among many — held its tournament in Florence, and Milan resolved to go. First came the Lombard eliminations of 22 May, which tell you how crowded the city's football had already grown: Milan 2–0 against Mediolanum, Milan 2–1 against Sempione, rivals sprouting in the home streets like mushrooms after autumn rain. Then the journey itself — and here the historians reach for their superlatives, one calling it the club's first outing beyond the industrial triangle, another the first match Milan ever played outside the regions of northern Italy. Choose whichever formula you prefer; the substance is identical. For a club whose entire competitive universe had been Milan, Turin and Genoa, the trip to Tuscany was a genuine expedition — and there is a private joke in it that I cannot resist: the club headquartered in a Fiaschetteria Toscana finally went to see Tuscany for itself.

In Florence, where only three clubs — Milan, Andrea Doria and Vicenza — had answered the federation's roll, waited Andrea Doria, who had thrashed Vicenza 5–0 in the semi-final while Milan passed straight to the decider. The final — 3 June 1904, by the season pages' reckoning, inside the tournament's window of mid-May to early June — was the second meeting of the year between the two clubs and comfortably the better of them: Milan 3, Andrea Doria 2, and the cup came home over the Apennines. The footballers' own federation, the FIGC, never recognised the gymnasts' tournaments as official titles, and the purists are welcome to their asterisk; I merely observe that medals do not know which federation minted them, and that a young club learns more from one long journey won than from ten short ones lost.

The Man Who Founded the Enemy

And now the strangest shirt in the dressing-room, the one that belonged to Enrico Canfari. On the first of November 1897 this man had been one of the thirteen schoolboys of Turin's Liceo Massimo d'Azeglio who founded Juventus; he became that club's second president, succeeding his own brother Eugenio, which tells you the whole enterprise once fitted around a single family's dinner table. In 1903 he came to Milan, and — the age being innocent of contracts, agents and rancour — he simply pulled on the red and black of Milan Foot-Ball and Cricket Club and made three championship appearances in 1903-04. Then the draw, with the sense of humour draws have possessed ever since, sent Milan against Juventus in the March semi-final, and Canfari stood at the Acquabella and watched the club he had created eliminate the club he now served: 1–1 on the 13th, 0–3 on the 20th. What does a man feel on such an afternoon? The sources, mercifully, do not presume to tell us, and neither shall I.

He did not sulk and he did not leave. In the autumn he is there still — 'Canfari II' in the winning eleven at Casteggio in September, alongside Kilpin and Suter. Afterwards there was chemistry — the trade he had learned in Turin before Juventus was even born — work that carried him again and again to England, and a long devotion to refereeing that raised him in time to the presidency of the Italian referees' association; the accounts quarrel over lesser details, as they always do at this distance. Over the end they do not quarrel. Called to war as a captain in the 112th Infantry Regiment 'Piacenza', Enrico Canfari was killed on 22 October 1915, aged thirty-eight, on Monte San Michele in the Third Battle of the Isonzo, and was awarded a Silver Medal for Military Valour that he would never wear. He is the whole era compressed into a single man: a football still small enough that a founder of one great club could quietly play for another, and a generation that would shortly be swallowed by the trenches.

The Twentieth of September

The year kept one act in reserve, and history insisted on painting the scenery. In mid-September, after soldiers had shot down striking miners at Buggerru in Sardinia and carabinieri had fired on peasants at Castelluzzo in Sicily, the Milan Chamber of Labour proclaimed the first general strike in Italy's history: from 15 to 21 September the country stood still, and Milan — always Milan — was its organisational heart. It was in the last days of that strike, on 20 September, the patriotic feast of the XX Settembre of all dates, that the rossoneri travelled into the Oltrepò Pavese for a one-day tournament at Casteggio, filed by the season's record-keepers under the name of Coppa Lombardia. While the nation argued furiously about its future, eleven men in red and black went off to play football.

They played it rather well. In the semi-final Milan beat Pro Vercelli 2–1 — and mark that opponent, because the Vercelli histories record that it was for this very tournament that their players first adopted the white shirt which would soon become the most feared kit in Italy; dynasties, like rivers, begin as trickles nobody thinks to dam. In the final, Unione Sportiva Milanese were dismantled 3–0, the goals arriving with indecent promptness in the fifth, eighteenth and twentieth minutes, under the whistle of Luigi Bosisio of Milan. The eleven of that Casteggio day has come down to us entire: Ermolli; Pedroni I, G. Colombo, Scotti, Canfari II, Angeloni, Haberlin, Walty, Sala, Suter and Kilpin — the founder still there at the end of the line, in his sixth season, as he had been at the beginning of everything. And a caution for anyone tempted to gloat over that 3–0: the beaten Milanese would grow strong enough to knock Milan out of the championship a mere five months later. In the city of looms, rivals were woven quickly.

So what was 1904? No official title: the semi-final lost for the second spring running, the silver ball still down by the sea, the Florence cup invisible to the federation's ledgers. And yet I say it was the hinge on which the pioneer years turned. It was the year the club became Italian by design, the year it learned to travel and to come home with something, the year the wider world began organising itself around this game — FIFA itself was founded in Paris on 21 May 1904, with Italy's federation to join the year after. And it was the year the next Milan quietly walked in through the door, for the new season's roster carried the names of Alessandro Trerè, who would finish 1904-05 as the team's top scorer with three goals, of his brother Attilio, who began between the posts and whom the Gazzetta would soon be saluting as quick and mightily strong, and of the defender Guido Moda — the generation that would carry the red and black to the scudetti of 1906 and 1907. The winter fog over the Acquabella hid no treasure that year; it hid seed. And seed, in Lombardy, is the one crop that never fails.