The Honest Net and the Empty Ground

A City in Its Sunday Best

There are years when a city sits for its own portrait, and 1906 was Milan's. From the twenty-eighth of April to the eleventh of November the Esposizione Internazionale spread its pavilions across the Parco Sempione and the Piazza d'Armi, dedicated — with the sublime self-confidence of a town that had just watched the Simplon Tunnel bore a hole through the Alps toward Paris — to the theme of transport, and somewhere between five and ten million visitors, depending on which turnstile-keeper you choose to believe, arrived from some forty nations to admire an industrial capital in the full flush of its boom. The fog still rolled in off the plain in the old way; the Navigli still carried their slow barges; but above the rooftops the city had begun to talk of tunnels and turbines, and it wanted the world to listen.

Football, in that Italy, was still a parish affair of the north. The ninth championship of the Federazione Italiana Football was open, in practice, to three regions only — Piedmont, Liguria, Lombardy — and Piedmont sent a single entrant, Juventus, who therefore qualified for the final round without kicking a ball in anger. Twelve matches were played in the whole competition; thirty-one goals were scored in them; and yet out of that pocket-sized tournament came a quarrel that has outlived every pavilion of the great Exposition. It is the oldest law of the game: the smaller the stage, the longer the grudge.

The Ghost of December

To understand 1906 you must first stand in December 1905, in the din of a Palla Dapples challenge against Juventus, at the moment when referee Recalcati awarded Milan a disputed 3-2 winner on the signal of his goal-line judge. La Stampa reported that, according to the Turinese players and their public, the ball had never gone in at all. And who could prove otherwise? A goal, in the Italy of those winters, was an act of faith: two posts, a crossbar, and behind them an infinite, unhelpful space into which the ball vanished like an opinion. The record books even quarrel over the date of the offence — the tenth of December in one ledger, the eleventh in another — which is somehow perfect, for a controversy about whether a thing happened deserves a little uncertainty about when.

Alfred Ormond Edwards, the English president who ran the club as a Victorian ran a railway, knew that his homeland had settled the question back in 1891 by the simple expedient of the net. So he imported nets. On Sunday the seventh of January 1906, for the championship qualifier against US Milanese, a mesh of cords appeared behind each goal, and the crowd — the chronicles are precise on this — received it with surprise and admiration, as one receives any machine that promises to make honesty compulsory. The federation accepted the innovation and it spread through Italian football; the account most followed calls it the first net in Italy, though down on the coast the Genoese murmur about mesh of their own from an earlier winter, and we may leave the two ports of pride to argue it out. What matters is this: from that Sunday, in the championship of Italy, a goal ceased to be a rumour.

Porta Monforte, with Ticket Office

The honest net had a worthy stage, for that same seventh of January was the debut of the Campo Milan di Porta Monforte, out by via Fratelli Bronzetti — the club's first real stadium after the farewell to the Acquabella, with a wooden grandstand for about six hundred spectators, a ticket office, and around the pitch a border you could not invent: the washerwomen's canal along one side, the wall of an abandoned cemetery along another, a wooden fence to finish. Between the roggia and the dead, Milan would play its football until March 1914. There is a whole philosophy of Lombard life in that geometry — commerce at the gate, water at the touchline, eternity behind the stand — and no ground since has ever explained the club so economically.

The match itself honoured the furniture. Milan beat US Milanese 4-3, the goals coming from Pedroni, Giger, Malvano and Widmer, and every one of them beyond dispute, for the accounts remember Guido Pedroni as the first rossonero to put the ball into the new net — the first honest goal, so to speak, in the club's history — while Ernst Widmer, the Swiss forward, won the thriller in the ninetieth minute with the punctuality of his nation's timetables. A week later, on the fourteenth of January at the Campo di via Comasina, Milan won the return 2-1 to go through 6-4 on aggregate; Widmer scored again after a quarter of an hour, and as for the other goal the ledgers quarrel politely — one gives it to Malvano, another to Rizzi — a small domestic dispute we may leave on the sideboard, like the last slice of panettone.

Three Cities, Five Points

The final round was a three-cornered affair — Milan, Juventus, Genoa — and it opened without Milan at all: Genoa and Juventus had drawn 1-1 on the twenty-first of January. Milan's own campaign began on the fourth of March at Ponte Carrega, where Pedroni scored both goals in a 2-2 draw with Genoa, and stumbled on the eleventh at the Velodromo Umberto I in Turin, where Juventus won 2-1 and only Attilio Trerè's strike in the forty-second minute kept the ledger respectable. Then the season showed its strange sense of humour: on the eighth of April Genoa simply failed to arrive at Porta Monforte, and Milan were awarded the points 2-0 by forfeit — a rehearsal, though nobody could know it, for the grander absence to come.

The twenty-second of April brought Juventus to Porta Monforte with the arithmetic already sharpened, and Milan won 1-0 through Giuseppe Rizzi on the half-hour — a goal into the honest net, witnessed, meshed, incontestable. It left the two of them level on five points apiece, two wins, a draw and a defeat each, with Genoa third on two, and the rules demanded a playoff. On the twenty-ninth of April, at the Velodromo Umberto I — in Juventus's own city, a detail worth filing away for what came next — the two sides ground out 0-0 through ninety minutes and extra time, proof that the net, which can certify a goal, cannot conjure one.

The Match That Never Was

The federation ordered the replay for the sixth of May at the Campo di via Comasina in Milan — the ground of US Milanese, a third club, and therefore neutral in every sense the regulations recognised. Juventus recognised another sense. A Milanese pitch, they argued, familiar to Milan's players, could not be morally neutral; they protested, they threatened withdrawal, and when the appointed hour came they were not there. The match was awarded 2-0 to Milan, who were declared Champions of Italy — the second title of the club's short life — in the silence of an empty ground, without the decisive game ever being played. Juventus had themselves hosted the first playoff in Turin, a detail the moralist files away without comment, because the detail comments on itself.

So the club took the Coppa Spensley, the physical prize assigned to the champions of 1906 and 1907 — both, as it turned out, Milan — and took with it a rivalry that has never since cooled. And here is the poetry of the year, if poetry is the word for something so wry: the season that began with a device imported expressly to end arguments — the net, the machine of proof — ended with an argument no net could settle, because the ball that decides a forfeit is never kicked, and the space behind that goal is as infinite as it was in the days of faith. Milan had built a ground with a ticket office and strung mesh behind the posts to make truth visible, and won its title on a truth that existed only in the minutes of a federation meeting.

The Last Englishman and His Foreign Legion

Who were they, these champions by presence and by absence? At the top, the English spine of the founding years, now worn thin: Edwards in the president's chair, Edward Nathan Berra beside him as vice-president, Cesare Stabilini keeping the books as secretary, and on the pitch Herbert Kilpin, captain and player-coach in his seventh season, by now the only Englishman left in a squad rebuilt around Italians and Swiss. Around him stood the Trerè brothers, Attilio and Alessandro; the defender Guido Moda; Rizzi of the title-winning goal; Pedroni of the first net; and Umberto Malvano, once a star of Juventus, who faced his old club at the Velodromo in March and took the insults of his old public for his trouble — and who, when the April playoff called Milan back to Turin, preferred not to present himself at all, a soreness of the former shirt that belongs to an age when a man's old colours were still a kind of kinship.

The foreign colony deserves its own paragraph, and shall have one. Swiss, mostly — Oscar Giger, Alfred Bosshard, Ernst Widmer — with the German Hans Heuberger and, most operatic of all, the Dutchman François Knoote, a lyric tenor and a dandy who avoided playing in bad weather to protect his singing voice — and Kilpin, a man who treated the Lombard fog as a playing surface, reckoned that a player like that was the same as having no player at all. By the year's end Knoote was gone, and so was Malvano, back to Turin, and Giuseppe Camperio too, while Hugo Rietmann arrived from FC Bergamo; and in that same 1906, before the new season, Daniele Angeloni took over from Kilpin as head of the team, though the Englishman kept the captain's armband. Quietly, in the middle of all this, the cricket section ceased its activity — the club founded on the sixteenth of December 1899 at the Fiaschetteria Toscana in via Berchet would keep the words 'and Cricket' in its name like a wedding ring worn after the marriage has ended — and the founding Anglo era closed, over by over, while everyone at Porta Monforte pretended not to notice.

One should not read the departures as decline. A club sheds its founders the way the risotto sheds the grain's hardness in the pot: slowly, necessarily, and in the service of something richer. The Italians and the Swiss who now carried the red and black had learned the game from Englishmen and would shortly teach it back to them; Kilpin, the last of the originals still in boots, had become less a player than a standard, planted in the mud of the new ground where everyone could see it.

Silver in the Autumn, a Verdict in Winter

And still they played, because the pioneers' calendar abhorred a Sunday without football. All through 1906 Milan held the Palla Dapples, that silver ball donated by Henri Dapples, a figure of Genoa, and contested under rules of magnificent absurdity: the first club to deliver a letter of challenge — by hand or by telegram — earned the match, and a draw left the trophy with the holder, so that possession was defended like a title deed. The autumn defenses at Porta Monforte read like a drumroll: 3-1 against US Milanese on the eleventh of November, 3-1 again on the eighteenth, 4-0 against Ausonia on the twenty-fifth, 5-0 against Ausonia on the second of December with Kilpin and Hauser among the scorers, and finally, on the thirtieth of December, a 9-0 against the same poor Ausonia that closed the year like a door slamming. Milan would finish as the trophy's all-time record holder with twenty-three wins; the silver ball itself now sits, with the irony history reserves for its best jokes, in the museum of Genoa.

There was more silver that year, of mixed carat. On the ninth of September in Vicenza, Milan beat the Associazione del Calcio in Vicenza 5-0 in the final of the Torneo FGNI, under referee Luigi Bosisio of Milano — a tournament of the Gymnastics Federation, recognised by the gymnasts and never by the football federation's later historians, which makes it no less won. The honours list records, too, a medal of the great Exposition itself, the Medaglia Esposizione Internazionale di Milano, and the Coppa Chiasso, an unofficial international prize Milan would take again in 1907 and in 1908. Add the sums as you please: the official season shows thirteen matches, fifty goals scored and ten conceded, with Pedroni top scorer on four; count the friendlies and the fuller ledger swells to some forty-one matches, twenty-nine wins, a hundred and thirty goals for and thirty-four against. Either way the arithmetic says the same thing — this was a side that scored as Milan eats, abundantly and with conviction.

The verdict, then. In the year its city built pavilions to show the world how far a tunnel could carry a train, Milan Foot-Ball and Cricket Club — cricket now surviving only in the name — hung a net to show its country what a goal actually was, moved in between a canal and a cemetery, and became champion of Italy for the second time without playing the match that decided it. History may call the title diminished; the moralist calls it instructive. For the net teaches that truth in football can be made visible, and the empty ground at via Comasina teaches that it cannot be made compulsory; and a club that learned both lessons in the same four months, before its seventh birthday, had already been handed the entire curriculum of the Italian game. Everything that followed — the glories, the grudges, the arguments that outlive the men who start them — was revision.