The First Derby and the Son of God

A City in Driving Goggles

Every football story worth telling needs a city before it needs a ball, and in 1909 Milan was the most impatient city in Europe — a capital of trams, turbines and ledgers, where the fog rolled down the Navigli like a landlord collecting rent and the Alps stood beyond the Madonnina pretending not to watch. That January there appeared in Milan, as the preface to something larger, the manifesto of a man named Marinetti, who proposed to worship speed, machines and the beautiful roar of the new; it ran again that February in Bologna's Gazzetta dell'Emilia and then, fifteen days later, in Le Figaro of Paris, and so the century's first tantrum was thrown with a Milanese accent. Futurism was born here for the same reason the derby was born here: this is a city that has never been able to share a room with its own past.

In May the same city invented a new form of organized suffering. On the 13th, one hundred and twenty-seven riders rolled out of Piazzale Loreto, beneath the offices of the Gazzetta dello Sport, to contest the first Giro d'Italia ever raced; on the 30th Luigi Ganna won it back in Milan, and Italy learned that heroism could be printed, scheduled and sold at the kiosk with the morning paper. Even the game itself was rebaptized that year, and the baptism carried a Milanese accent all the same: the federation had kept its seat in Milan since 1905, and at its assembly of August 1909 the Federazione Italiana Football voted itself into the Federazione Italiana Giuoco Calcio, urged on by its new president Luigi Bosisio — an ex-gymnast and one-time Mediolanum player who had floated the old word calcio in the Gazzetta dello Sport as far back as October 1907. English lost the vote.

More consequentially for our purposes, the championship of 1909 was the first after the lifting of the ban on foreign players — the very quarrel that had cleaved Internazionale out of Milan's ribs in 1908 and driven the rossoneri, together with Torino and Genoa, to boycott that year's championship entirely. The resident foreigners were readmitted; the ban died; the wound it had left did not, and in January the wound was given a fixture list.

Two Sundays in January

The first official derby della Madonnina was played on 10 January 1909, in the Lombard eliminatory of the Prima Categoria, at the Campo Milan di Porta Monforte, whose entrance opened off via Fratelli Bronzetti and whose crowd that afternoon numbered perhaps one hundred and fifty souls — a congregation rather than a public, gathered in the depths of a Lombard winter to watch a family argument conducted with a ball. The referee was a man from Turin bearing the impeccably English surname of Goodley, which seems only proper: an English name to preside over the divorce proceedings of a club the English had founded.

Milan struck first through Attilio Trerè II at the 25th minute, and the shape of the afternoon declared itself at once: the rossoneri ahead, the nerazzurri clawing back. Inter lost Hernst Marktl to injury on the half hour and equalized through Gama in the 69th; Pietro Lana restored the lead in the 74th; Max Laich made it three in the 86th; Schuler's reply in the 88th arrived like an apology delivered after the plates were cleared. Three-two, with Gerolamo Radice — who had inherited the captaincy when Herbert Kilpin, the founder, departed — leading an eleven that counted Marco Sala and Scarioni II among its regulars. And the ledger could henceforth record what it still records today: the first official derby in history is rossonero.

Seven days later the championship was over. On 17 January, at the Cascina Mojetta, the Unione Sportiva Milanese beat Milan 3-1 — the referee this time a certain Knoote of Milan — and the one rossonero goal came not from a forward but from Marco Sala, the first-choice full-back, as though the defence had decided that if humiliation must come, it would at least not come unanswered. US Milanese won the three-team Lombard group; Milan finished second; Inter finished last with nothing at all, beaten 2-0 by the same USM a week later — a consolation the palate registers even while the moralist pretends not to notice. Milan's entire official championship for 1909 had lasted two Sundays: one for immortality, one for the door.

The title went elsewhere. Pro Vercelli beat US Milanese in the April final — 2-0 in the first leg on the 4th, while over the second leg the record books quarrel about both the date and the score, which is the era in miniature: everyone agrees who won, nobody quite agrees how — and carried off that season's trophy, the Coppa Oberti. Milan, who had gone to war over the foreigners' cause, watched the first championship of the reopened doors from the pavement.

The Englishman Rises from the Table

Between those two Sundays and their aftermath, the club changed civilizations. On 21 January 1909 — four days after the elimination, though only a surveyor would insist the line between the two events runs perfectly straight — Alfred Edwards left the presidency he had held since the founding, and with him went the age of the English ex-vice-consul, of cricket in the club's very name, of football as a gentleman's imported vice. For roughly a week the club rested in the hands of Giannino Camperio, its direttore, a bridge across which the chroniclers still argue — some count him a president in his own right, others a caretaker holding the door — and then, from 30 January, the chair belonged to Piero Pirelli.

Pirelli was twenty-eight, born in Milan on 27 January 1881, son of Giovanni Battista Pirelli, whose name already circled the world on rubber; he had been a member of the club since its early days, and he would keep the presidency until 1928 — nineteen years, long enough to build, in 1926 and at his own expense, the stadium at San Siro. Consider the symmetry the year offered without being asked for it: the federation Italianized its name, the championship readmitted its foreigners, and the club founded by an Englishman passed into the keeping of an industrialist of the purest Milanese vintage. The old world did not so much leave as hand over the shirt.

Not every handover was graceful. The Palla Dapples, the itinerant silver ball that Milan would win a record twenty-three times across the trophy's life, turned unkind in 1909: a 0-5 to Torino on 3 January, a 1-2 to Torino on 28 March, and on 4 April no match at all — Milan forfeiting, which for a club of Milan's pride is the bitterest scoreline in existence. A team may lose five-nil and blame the fog, the referee, an ill-advised risotto; a team that does not appear has run out of arguments.

Nine Clubs, One Italy

Autumn brought the true revolution, quieter than Marinetti's and far more durable. The Prima Categoria of 1909-10 was the first Italian championship played as a single national round-robin — the girone unico — nine clubs from Liguria, Lombardy and Piedmont meeting home and away: a whole winter of football in place of a fortnight of eliminations. The club prepared for modernity after its own fashion, moving its headquarters for the new season from the Fiaschetteria Toscana to the Birreria Spatenbräu at via Ugo Foscolo 2 — from Tuscan flasks to Bavarian beer, a change of cellar if not of soul — while the home ground remained Porta Monforte and the odd city fixture was staged at the Arena Civica. Guido Moda, Moda I, now wore the captain's band; Camperio remained direttore, a coach in everything but the modern vocabulary.

The rounds of 1909 read like a man learning to walk on new legs. On 14 November, opening day at Porta Monforte, Ausonia led through Bontadini after a quarter of an hour before Pietro Lana replied twice, from the penalty spot at the 27th and again at the 43rd: 2-1. A week later Unione Sportiva Milanese won the city argument 2-1 at the Arena Civica, Brioschi scoring for Milan. On the 28th, at the Velodromo Umberto I in Turin, Torino administered a 6-2 lesson of which more, and better, in a moment. On 5 December, in Genoa, the match against Andrea Doria was abandoned at 4-4 amid a pitch invasion and crowd incidents, and later annulled; how the fixture was finally settled is a question the sources handle with tongs, and so shall we. Then December straightened its tie: on the 12th, Milan 1-0 US Milanese, Mariani at the 41st; on the 19th, away to Genoa, 1-0 again, Mariani again, at the 52nd. Three wins from six rounds, another afternoon wiped from the books — a convalescent team, on the evidence of December, learning to win.

El Fioeu de Dio

Now the boy. Renzo De Vecchi was born in Milan on 3 February 1894, which means that when he walked out at Porta Monforte on 14 November 1909, opening day of the first national championship, to play left-back against Ausonia, he was fifteen years old — an age for Latin declensions and stolen cigarettes, not for a men's league. Beside him that afternoon debuted a forward of twenty, Aldo Cevenini, first of the five brothers who would make the surname a dynasty, arrived that year from Libertas Milano and already glimpsed in a September friendly at the Brescia tournament, a 1-0 over the same Ausonia. Milan went behind and won on Lana's two goals, as we have seen; but the afternoon's true score was registered elsewhere, in the ledger of things beginning.

Two Sundays later, in Turin, the boy scored in the third minute — his first goal — and then stood for the rest of the afternoon in the wreckage of the 6-2, which is the fuller education: any child can be carried by a winning team, but to be fifteen and hold your post while the Velodromo counts to six requires a quality that has no name in the coaching manuals. He scored again in the annulled 4-4 at Genoa, at the 29th minute of a match history refuses to admit took place. In an injury-ravaged season that forced children into a men's championship, De Vecchi played fifteen of the sixteen matches, and he defended with a calm so unboyish that the Milanese dialect went looking for a name and came back with a blasphemy of pure tenderness: el fioeu de Dio — the son of God. Who said it first? The chroniclers quarrel, as they always do in the vicinity of miracles: one tradition gives the cry to the journalist Emilio Colombo, another to the crowd itself. It hardly matters. The name stuck, as only true names do.

He was a left-back who would go on to revolutionize the role — sixty-four league appearances and seven goals for Milan before Genoa took him in 1913 — and he was the one jewel of a season that had little else to glitter with. Note, too, the company the year gathered around him. Cevenini I would make thirteen championship appearances with a goal that season, and within months would lead Italy's attack in the national team's first match of all, against France on 15 May 1910; his full Milan account, across two spells, comes to roughly eighty-odd goals in some eighty-four official matches — the ledgers disagree on the decimals, as ledgers do around legends. And in that same squad, waiting for a debut that fell just outside our year, sat a student of the game named Vittorio Pozzo, who would one day win the World Cup twice as Italy's commissario tecnico. A team bound for sixth place, with three separate futures dressing in its room.

A Verdict, and an Annunciation

The season those debuts opened would end, in the spring of 1910, sixth of nine: thirteen points, six wins, a draw, nine defeats, the campaign wrecked by injuries. The scudetto — Inter's first — went to the cousins after a playoff in Vercelli on 24 April 1910 that history files under farce: Pro Vercelli, protesting the scheduling, fielded its fourth team, boys of fifteen, and lost 10-3. Savour that irony slowly, as one savours a bitter digestivo: in the very same season, Milan's own fifteen-year-old had been not a protest but a foundation. One club used children to make an argument; the other had discovered in a child its future.

And let the chronicle be honest about what 1909 did not yet contain. Louis Van Hege, the Belgian whom Pirelli would fetch from Union St. Gilloise in 1910 and who would announce himself at Genoa in the November of that year with two goals, was not yet a rossonero; resist any account that dresses him in red and black too early. What 1909 actually possessed was more modest and more permanent. It possessed the first official derby, won 3-2 before one hundred and fifty witnesses, a result no century can amend. It possessed the passage from Edwards to Pirelli, from the founder's romance to the industrialist's patience — a patience that would last nineteen years and end in a cathedral at San Siro. It possessed a federation that finally spoke Italian, and a championship that finally spanned a nation, or at least the three regions then pretending, correctly, to be one. And it possessed a boy of fifteen with the composure of an old abbot, whom his city — dialect being the only language equal to certain emotions — had already declared divine. The fog would lift and descend a hundred more times over the Navigli, and leaner Sundays than these were coming. But a club that in a single year wins the first derby ever played for keeps and finds the son of God at left-back has not had a small year. It has had an annunciation.