The Spring of the Founder, the Autumn of the Schism

The City Beneath the Madonnina

There are years in which a football club merely plays, and years in which it becomes the mirror of its city; 1907 was the second kind, and to read it properly you must begin not at the touchline but in the streets, where Milan — the city of trams and mills, of Po-valley fog that settles over the Navigli like the steam off a good risotto — was still warm from the great International Exposition of 1906, that festival of the Simplon Tunnel which, between the 28th of April and the 11th of November, had drawn some five million visitors and twenty-five nations to marvel at an elevated electric railway running from the Parco Sempione to the Piazza d'Armi. The Alps had been pierced; the future now arrived by rail; and a Milanese with one lira in his pocket could choose between the leftover wonders of modernity and an afternoon at the Campo Milan di Porta Monforte, out by via Fratelli Bronzetti, where a few hundred of the converted gathered to watch eleven men in narrow red-and-black stripes chase a ball through the Lombard air.

The club those few hundred came to see was still, institutionally speaking, the creature of its president, Alfred Ormond Edwards, with Edward Nathan Berra as his vice-president beside him — a club founded in the December of 1899, on the 16th or the 18th of that month, the record books quarrel, and modern scholarship has even proposed the 13th — by a Nottingham textile man named Herbert Kilpin, of whom more, much more, presently. La Gazzetta dello Sport, surveying the entries for the tenth Italian championship, tipped Milan as favourites; and for once the prophets of the printed page would be embarrassed by nothing at all.

Snow on the Derby

The championship of 1907 was a small and severe thing, and all the better for it: from the 13th of January to the 27th of April, two clubs apiece from Liguria, Lombardy and Piedmont met in regional eliminations, and the three survivors sat down to a round-robin for the title, a format with the compact logic of a three-course lunch. On that opening day, at the derby against the Unione Sportiva Milanese, a quiet revolution took its seat on the bench: Daniele Angeloni, born in Bergamo in 1875, a founding member who had played five seasons in the stripes, made his debut as the club's first designated technical chief, the reins having passed to him from Kilpin himself shortly before the season. Milan won 6–0, and it was Kilpin — relieved of the burden of command, restored to the pure condition of footballer — who opened the scoring with a brace, as if to demonstrate that a man unloaded of an office runs a yard quicker.

Then winter did what Lombard winters have always done, and buried the return leg in snow. The match was recovered on the 3rd of March and decided by a single goal, and the goal, naturally, was Kilpin's: 1–0, aggregate 7–0, Lombardy settled. Meanwhile, down on the coast, an era ended almost without ceremony: Genoa — present at every final stage the championship had ever staged — were eliminated in the regional round for the first time in their existence, put out by Andrea Doria, who held them 1–1 in the first leg and then beat them 3–1 in the return. The old order was quietly folding its napkin and rising from the table.

Six Points, and Not One Defeat

The final group brought a new adversary, and a serious one. Torino had existed barely a month when the year began — assembled in December 1906 from the remnants of FC Torinese and a company of Juventus dissidents, for schism, the reader will notice, is the recurring weather of this era — and in their debut championship they pushed Milan hardest of all, armed with Hans Kämpfer, whose seven goals would make him the tournament's leading scorer. On the 10th of March, in Turin, the two sides drew 1–1, Trerè answering for Milan; a point taken from the new power in its own house, which is the sort of point a title is later found to have been built on.

A week later, at Porta Monforte, the rossoneri played their fullest ninety minutes of the spring. Andrea Doria were dismantled 5–0 — Mädler twice, Imhoff twice, and Kilpin, in the 86th minute, adding the fifth, though no one on that ground could have weighed what that late goal would come to mean. On the 24th of March Torino came to Milan and the match finished 2–2, both of Milan's goals falling to Sandro Trerè from the penalty spot, which is a cold way of earning a warm point; and so everything travelled to Genoa on the 7th of April, where Milan beat Andrea Doria 2–0 — Trerè again, and Mädler — and the championship was won before the calendar was finished, the closing fixture of the 14th of April proceeding without them like a banquet continued after the guest of honour has gone home.

The final ledger read Milan 6 points, Torino 5, Andrea Doria 1, the arithmetic filled out at its margins by a goalless draw between the other two on the 10th of February and a 2–0 awarded to Torino at the table, that closing fixture of the 14th of April having never actually been played on grass. What no ledger anywhere disputes is this: a third championship, the second in succession, and not a single defeat in the whole of it.

The Swiss Milan, at One Lira the Gate

The eleven of that spring deserve to be read aloud, slowly, like a litany: Radice; Meschia, Moda; Bosshard, Attilio Trerè, Piazza; Sandro Trerè, Kilpin, Widmer, Imhoff, Mädler. The Milan inglese of 1901 had quietly become a Milan svizzero: Imhoff, Widmer and Bosshard, Swiss all, were decisive in this title as their countrymen had been in the last, arranged around the ageing Englishman and a growing Italian core. Hans Walter Imhoff, born in Basel in 1886, finished as the club's leading league scorer with five goals — twenty years old and already the sharpest knife in the drawer — while behind the forwards stood Gerolamo Radice, born 1883, who kept goal in every championship match and would in later life serve the club again in the boardroom, first as a director and then as its vice-president. Andrea Meschia and the elegant Guido Moda guarded him; Attilio Trerè anchored the middle; those three, like Radice, missed not one championship match. Gian Guido Piazza, born 1887 and himself ever-present through the six matches, would after the Great War serve the club as an executive for two full decades, and at the edge of the squad — among reserves named Attilio Colombo, Parisini and Pedroni — stood Gustav Hauser, fifteen years old, whose one and only appearance in red and black came in the snow-recovered derby of the 3rd of March: an apprentice granted a single afternoon in the workshop.

The strangest and most poignant of them all was Johann Ferdinand Mädler of Stuttgart, the first German ever to wear the shirt. He had first worn the shirt in the season of 1901–02, and work — a trade that kept him forever travelling the world — kept him so often from the field that his entire Milan career amounts to six appearances and three goals — and every one of those three goals was scored in this title run: two in the 5–0, one in the clincher at Genoa. He would play precisely one more match, in the January of 1909 — against the newborn Internazionale, of all opponents, a 3–2 victory — and then be gone for good from the playing rolls, a comet of Stuttgart whose whole light fell on a single spring, and fell, as it happened, exactly where it was needed.

And all of it — let the modern reader digest this slowly, like a heavy Sunday lunch — was self-financed. The crowds numbered a few hundred; the ticket cost one lira; the gate brought in perhaps two hundred to two hundred and fifty lire a match; and the players paid membership dues and bought their own shirts, which is why the width of the stripes varied from man to man while the red and the black were scrupulously respected: narrow vertical stripes, mid-length white shorts, black socks trimmed with red. Champions of Italy, unbeaten, dressed at their own expense.

The Silver Ball and the Gymnasts' Gold

Nor did the championship exhaust the season's silverware, for this was also the age of the Palla Dapples, the silver ball donated by Genoa's Henri Dapples and defended like a title of nobility under rules of splendid absurdity: a challenge had to be delivered by hand or by telegram within minutes of a match ending, and in case of a draw the ball remained with the holders. Milan had opened this cycle by crushing Ausonia 9–0 on the 30th of December 1906; on the 21st of April 1907 they beat Torino 2–0, and on the 28th they drew 3–3 with the same Torino, which under that gloriously partisan rule meant the ball stayed exactly where it was. Through the autumn they went on holding it, until on the 8th of December the Unione Sportiva Milanese at last carried the silver ball off, 3–1 — and kept it for precisely one week, Milan retrieving it 2–1 on the 15th, the way a man goes back for an umbrella left on a tram.

In May, at the great gymnastics gathering in Venice, came the Torneo FGNI, the football tournament of the gymnasts' federation, a parallel prize the pioneers chased with complete seriousness: Vicenza were beaten 3–1, Andrea Doria 2–1, and another title went onto the shelf. Add the Coppa Lombardia, acquired definitively; the Coppa Chiasso, won over the border in Switzerland; the Coppa d'Onore 'Città di Venezia'; the Coppa Reyer San Marco; a scattering of minor medals — and you have that rarest of seasons, the essentially all-winning kind, after which a club's directors permit themselves a second glass at dinner and hold the pose of modesty with visible effort.

Four Goals for a Goodbye

And now the heart of the matter, which is a man of thirty-seven. Herbert Kilpin had come out from Nottingham to Italy in 1891, a textile man following the thread of his trade; he had founded this club in 1899; in 1905 he had married Maria Capua of Lodi; and in the winter before this season the club had taken the technical reins from his hands and given them to Angeloni. So 1907 was the season of Kilpin the player, pure and simple — and it was, by a paradox that will surprise nobody who has watched an old champion unburdened of office, among his finest. He announced it with the brace in the 6–0 derby of the 13th of January. When the snow buried the return leg and the match was recovered on the 3rd of March, its only goal was his. And on the 17th of March, in the 86th minute of the 5–0 against Andrea Doria, the old textile man scored what would prove the last goal of his life in red and black — a farewell delivered without announcement, the way the best farewells always are.

On the 7th of April, in Genoa, he played his final championship match, the 2–0 that sealed the third title; and he had played, at thirty-seven, every one of the six championship matches to the last minute, which is its own kind of monument. President Edwards pressed him to carry on — he wanted his founder in the squad for at least another couple of seasons — but Kilpin resisted, and stepped away from official play, though the absolute goodbye came a year later, on the 12th of April 1908 at via Fratelli Bronzetti, a 4–3 friendly win over Montreux, the founder aged thirty-eight taking his leave in a match that mattered to nobody and therefore, in the way of such things, to everyone. The ledgers give him twenty-three league appearances and seven goals — figures over whose precise bookkeeping the record books quarrel, as the record books of that era always do — but a founder is not summed by his columns. He left as champions leave: with the title clinched, on an away ground, the work done.

The Ill Wind of Autumn

It would be pleasant to end there, with the risotto steaming and the silverware gleaming, but 1907 has a final act, and it is played not on grass but around a federation table. At the assembly of the 20th of October, Andrea Doria's president Oberti proposed splitting the following year's competition in two; on the 11th of November the federation approved it: a 'Campionato Italiano' reserved for Italian players alone and carrying the champion-of-Italy title, and beside it a 'Campionato Federale' open to resident foreigners — which the federation insisted, with a perfectly straight face, was the greater competition of the two. The young federation had turned nationalist, and the reigning champions — a club founded by an Englishman and carried that very spring by four Swiss and a German — understood perfectly what was meant, and for whom the bell was being rung.

Milan, together with Genoa and Torino, withdrew from both tournaments of 1908 in protest; Juventus took part and discovered its principles only after elimination, a species of principle we shall meet again in this story; and the boycott handed Pro Vercelli their first title. Worse — far worse — the dispute over foreigners opened a rift inside Milan's own leadership, a fracture that brewed all through the winter and broke on the 9th of March 1908, when forty-four dissident members walked out and founded Football Club Internazionale. Judge the year, then, in its entirety: unbeaten champions of Italy, holders of the silver ball, winners of the gymnasts' tournament and half the cups of the peninsula — and, by the first fog of autumn, a club whose crown could be taken from it only by decree, and whose one true wound, in the end, was the wound it dealt itself. The greatest season of the pioneer years carried, folded inside it like a letter in a coat pocket, the birth notice of the eternal rival. That is 1907: the spring belonged to Kilpin, and the autumn to history.