The Refusal, the Schism and the Silver Ball

The Champions Who Refused

There are years that open with a fixture list and years that open with a refusal, and for the Milan Foot-Ball and Cricket Club — three times champion of Italy, holder of the Coppa Spensley, a dressing room where Lombard vowels rubbed shoulders with Swiss German and the flat consonants of Nottingham — 1908 opened on the first day of January with a letter of withdrawal. The federation had decided to carve the season in two: a Campionato Italiano reserved for Italian players, and beside it a Campionato Federale, open to foreigners resident in Italy, a kind of servants' entrance for clubs that persisted in the old cosmopolitan habit. Milan's squad carried what the chronicles drily called 'un ragguardevole numero di stranieri' — a considerable number of foreigners — the Swiss Bosshard, Hopf and Imhoff and the German Mädler lining up beside Radice, Bianchi, Meschia, Lana, Forlano and Trerè; and rather than choose between amputating itself and accepting the anteroom, the reigning champion entered neither competition. Genoa and Torino followed it out of the door.

So the title of Italy was contested by a field of four drawn, as ever, from Piedmont, Liguria and Lombardy — the championship's map and the map of the industrial triangle being then, as they would long remain, the same map — and it went to Pro Vercelli, eleven Italians from the rice country, their first championship, the Coppa Buni carried home across the paddy fields. The Campionato Federale, meanwhile, dwindled to a rump: Juventus beat Andrea Doria 5-1 in a playoff on 10 May and were declared federal champions of a tournament the great clubs had boycotted and the federation itself would later annul — a title conceived in an office and dissolved in an office, which is the natural life-cycle of titles conceived in offices.

And here the year produced its first masterpiece of irony. The Coppa Spensley, the champions' cup Milan had won in 1906 and 1907, should by the logic of regulation have passed to the new federal champions; Milan simply declined to hand it to Juventus, and delivered it instead to Spensley and to Genoa — a gesture of protest addressed less to Turin than to the federation itself. The federation, presumably weary of the whole affair, then assigned the cup to Milan permanently. Read that twice: a trophy won outright not on the field but by the sheer obstinacy of refusing to surrender it — surely one of the strangest honours in any cabinet, and one of the most Milanese.

Half Past Eleven at the Orologio

The protest cost more than a season. Inside the club the quarrel over foreigners had two factions and only one committee, and on the night of Monday 9 March 1908, at the Ristorante Orologio in Milan, at around half past eleven — the hour when a Lombard restaurant smells of extinguished candles and the last of the risotto — forty-four dissident members walked out of the Milan Foot-Ball and Cricket Club and founded a new one. Or forty-three: the record books quarrel over the headcount, as record books do, and we shall not settle here what the men themselves never bothered to minute precisely.

They called it Football Club Internazionale, and the name was a manifesto: foreigners would be welcome without limit, alongside Italians, forever. Giovanni Paramithiotti became its first president. The painter Giorgio Muggiani — a Milan member who became the newborn club's first secretary, a man who therefore knew exactly what he was leaving — designed the newborn's identity and chose black and blue; the founding act was set down on the back of letterhead belonging to his father Umberto, 'Foot-Ball Club Internazionale - Milano' inked over a businessman's stationery, which is as Milanese a birth certificate as one could wish. And whether the men who stayed behind had bowed toward the federation's ban or had merely won a vote and lost a family, the sources dispute to this day; what is certain is that a club born English and cosmopolitan watched forty-odd of its sons leave to found a rival on the accusation of insufficient cosmopolitanism. The city that had woken with one great football club had, by midnight, two — three, counting US Milanese, of whom more later — and the Madonnina, gilded above the fog, acquired the derby that would divide her congregation for the next century.

The Silver Ball

A champion with no championship must still eat, and Milan's spring was nourished by the strangest and most beautiful trophy of the pioneer age: the Palla Dapples, a life-size football cast in silver, donated by Genoa's Henri Dapples and contested as a pure challenge trophy — you held it until somebody took it from you, and challenges were issued by letter or telegram immediately after each match, so that the thing lived in a permanent state of siege, like a border fortress.

The 1908 campaign for the silver ball reads like a serial novel. On 16 February Milan beat Genoa 1-0; on 1 March Genoa took their revenge and the trophy, 3-2 in Milan; one week later, on 8 March — the very week of the schism, football's calendar being sublimely indifferent to boardroom grief — Milan went down to Genoa and won it back, 3-1 on enemy ground. Torino were seen off 2-1 on 15 March; on 29 March, at the Arena Civica, a 1-1 draw with Racing Libertas sufficed, the holder retaining on a draw as a champion boxer retains on points; and on 26 April, again at the Arena, Genoa were dismissed 3-0. Milan would end by winning the Dapples twenty-three times in all, more than any other club — though the ball itself, with the taste for irony that silver objects seem to acquire, rests today in Genoa's museum.

Nor was that the season's only silverware. Back on 17 November 1907, at Casteggio, Milan had beaten US Milanese 3-2 and Torino 1-0 in a single deciding day, finishing on four points to Torino's two and US Milanese's none, and thereby taken the Coppa Lombardia outright after a fourth consecutive win; the season's itinerary also ran through the tournament cups of Lugano, Chiasso, Lodi and Venezia, that circuit of provincial and Swiss-border trophies which was the true daily bread of the era, the championship being only its Sunday roast.

Mister Kilpin Walks Away

In April 1908 Herbert Kilpin was thirty-eight years old, a lace-trade technician from Nottingham who had spent his Milanese years serving the textile business by day and teaching a city to play football on Sundays. He had founded the club in December 1899; he had chosen the red and the black; he had captained it to three championships. And now the federation of the country to which he had given the game had ruled that men like him could no longer play for its title. Milan's withdrawal was Kilpin's protest made institutional; but institutions can re-enter championships, and old men cannot re-enter their thirties.

Somewhere in that bitter spring he played his last match — on 12 April at via Fratelli Bronzetti against Montreux-Sports, says one account; on 20 April against Old Boys Basel, a 2-1 win at the Easter Meeting, says another; the record books quarrel even over the founder's farewell, which is perhaps fitting for a man who never much cared for paperwork. What they agree on is the essential: the founder left the field that April, driven out not by his legs but by a statute.

The documented anecdotes cluster around him like smoke in a tavern. In 1905, on the evening of his wedding to Maria Beatrice Capua of Lodi, a call-up arrived, and the bridegroom took the train to Genoa to play the following day, his bride's protests notwithstanding; a man who could not leave the game on his wedding night was never going to leave it merely because a federation asked. And so he did not leave it: he went off to coach boys at little Enotria Goliardo, and in 1909 the same federation that had legislated against foreigners appointed him a referee. The whistle suited him: in his own memoir he recalls refereeing a Torino-Genoa match in the rain and halting play because his linesman, Canfari, had wandered off and come back sheltering under an umbrella — was the referee not getting wet? Then the linesman, Kilpin ruled, must suffer the weather as the referee suffers it; and the umbrella came down. He died in Milan on 22 October 1916, aged forty-six. Magliarossonera closes the chapter with the plainness that great chroniclers reserve for great losses: the epic era of Mister Kilpin, the golden age of the pioneers, was over.

A Derby Born in Exile

Autumn brought the harvest, as autumn will. On 20 September Milan took the Coppa Casteggio, dismissing Ausonia 6-1 and Casteggio 4-0 in a single day's work; on 27 September, in Lugano, Chiasso were beaten 2-1 and Juventus Bellinzona 3-0 — two from Lana, one from Forlano — and the Coppa Lugano followed the Casteggio into the luggage rack. But the date the historians would one day circle in red came three weeks later: 18 October 1908, at the Campo della Giovannina in Chiasso, just over the Swiss border.

The final of the third Coppa Chiasso, played over two twenty-minute halves at the end of a day in which Milan had already beaten Juventus Bellinzona 2-0 and Chiasso 2-0, matched Milan against Internazionale — the first meeting, anywhere, ever, between the club and the sons who had left it seven months earlier. Milan won 2-1, the goals by Lana and Forlano, and carried off the Coppa Chiasso for the third consecutive time. Consider the geometry of it: the first derby of Milan was played on neutral, foreign soil, in Switzerland, homeland of the very foreigners over whom the two clubs had divorced — history does not often write its own epigrams so neatly.

The autumn was not all garlands. On 25 October, at San Gottardo in Genoa, the Coppa Gotzloff final was lost 4-2 — three for Genoa's Herzog, the replies from Lana and Forlano. Back home at the Campo Milan di Porta Monforte, on via Fratelli Bronzetti, the Palla Dapples was defended twice more — Genoa beaten 3-1 on 1 November with two from Lana and one from Forlano, Juventus 2-1 on 8 November through Lana and Trerè — before Pro Vercelli, the new champions of Italy, arrived on 15 November and took the silver ball away, 2-0, as if to remind Milan which of the two now held the title the other had declined to contest. December restored the balance of pride: Zurigo were held 0-0 and beaten 2-1 on successive days, the 6th and the 7th; Piemonte were beaten 1-0 on the 27th; and on 20 December, in Milan, Internazionale were beaten again, 3-1 — two derbies played in the calendar year of the schism, two derbies won. The first official championship derby would follow on 10 January 1909, Milan winning 3-2 through Trerè, Lana and Laich; but that belongs to another chapter, and besides, the pattern was already set.

The Verdict of the Year

Who governed all this? Nominally Alfred Edwards, president since the founding, but Edwards spent 1908 largely absent, and the club was led in fact by Giannino Camperio II; the vice-president Edward Nathan Berra died during the season, so that the year of the schism was also a year of empty chairs. The resolution came just past the year's edge: Edwards stepped down on 21 January 1909, Camperio held the presidency for exactly eight days, and on 29 January the industrialist Piero Pirelli — a founding member, whose rubber works were the very emblem of the Anglo-Italian industrial exchange that had brought football to the city in the first place — took up an office he would keep for two decades. The captaincy, meanwhile, passed from Kilpin to the goalkeeper Gerolamo Radice: from the Englishman who had invented the club to the Italian who guarded its net, which is very nearly the whole of the year in a single sentence of handover.

And the federation? In the autumn of 1908 it abandoned the Italians-only policy — quietly, as bureaucracies abandon their fevers — and Milan re-entered the championship it had refused, joining a Lombard qualifying group with Internazionale and US Milanese when the 1909 qualifiers began in January. It would not go well: US Milanese put Milan out, and went all the way to the national final before losing it to Pro Vercelli. The protest, in other words, had been both right and ruinous, and entirely both at once, which is the usual arithmetic of principle.

The year ended in black borders far larger than football's. On 28 December 1908 the earthquake of Messina and Reggio killed tens of thousands — the deadliest earthquake in Europe's recorded history — and Italy went into mourning; against that darkness the quarrels of a football federation shrink to their true size. And yet a chronicle must render its verdict, so here it is. In 1908 Milan won no championship because it would not stoop to one; kept a champions' cup forever by refusing to give it back; lost its founder to a statute and forty-four of its sons to a restaurant table; and answered all of it in the only language that finally counts in this game — two derbies, two victories, Lana and Forlano and Trerè writing, in the space of one wounded year, the opening sentences of the longest argument in Italian football. The fog over the Navigli lifts every spring, as it always has; the argument never has.