Beaten by the Calendar

The Workshop Votes, the Empire Sends Its Bill

Italy in 1912 lived between euphoria and foreboding, the way a man lives between the toast and the reckoning. The war with the Ottoman Empire, declared in the September of the old year, ended on 18 October with the Treaty of Ouchy, and the kingdom found itself in possession of Tripolitania, Cyrenaica and the Dodecanese — and in possession, too, of the bill: one billion three hundred million lire, nearly a billion beyond what Giolitti had promised, so that a decade of careful national housekeeping evaporated in the smoke of it. And yet the same summer enlarged the country from within: on 30 June, law number 666 threw open the vote to nearly every adult male in the kingdom, an electorate of seven in every hundred Italians becoming one of twenty-three, some three million voters becoming eight and a half million. Empire without, democracy within, and the trams of Milan running their appointed rails straight through both.

No city was wired into this new Italy more tightly than Milan, the workshop of the peninsula, and no club more tightly than the one that carried its name. The president was Piero Pirelli, of the tyre dynasty, three years into his tenancy of the chair; the captain, in both of the seasons that straddled the year, was Giuseppe Rizzi; the technical commission passed during 1912 from the hands of Ernesto Belloni to those of Piero Peverelli, with Giannino Camperio — who had ceded the technical reins to Belloni's commission only the year before — returning above them as director; and the whole enterprise was governed, with a candour later ages would envy, from the tables of the Birreria Spatenbräu in via Ugo Foscolo — a football club run from a beer hall, which is to say from the one parliament where Milan has never lacked a quorum. The ground was the Campo di Porta Monforte, with the Arena Civica borrowed for the grander occasions; and in the twelve months of 1912 this club played eleven championship matches and lost not one of them, won both derbies, and contrived nonetheless to finish the year with emptier hands than it began. That is the paradox this chapter must explain, and like most paradoxes of the era it is written in single points and family names.

A Winter of Sixes and Eights

The new year opened at a gallop and never once broke stride. On 7 January, US Milanese were beaten 5-1 on their own ground, Cevenini and Bavastro scoring, Van Hege twice, the teenage De Vecchi converting a penalty with the composure of a notary. On the 14th, Juventus came to Porta Monforte and left 8-1, five of the eight belonging to Louis Van Hege alone, two to Rizzi, one to Aldo Cevenini — a scoreline from the age when defending was still a regional custom rather than a science. A week later the derby: 3-0 on Internazionale's ground, Carrer once and Van Hege twice, the neighbours dismissed with the brevity of a telegram. Casale were dispatched 6-0 on 28 January, three of the goals Cevenini's, the others shared by Van Hege, Rizzi and Bavastro; and on 4 February, away to Torino, Aldo Cevenini scored five by himself in a 6-1 in which De Vecchi again did his duty from the spot. Andrea Doria fell 4-0 on the 18th. Six Sundays, thirty-two goals scored, three conceded: not a run of form but a sustained argument.

And the argument was already lost, in a book the previous chapter has closed and this one need not reopen. The point mislaid at home to the group's doormat on the opening afternoon of October could never be re-earned, however many goals the winter piled on top of it, because Pro Vercelli declined ever to stumble; second place was settled by one, and the figures of that reckoning are kept where they were incurred, in 1911. A title has rarely been lost by a better team, which is a sentence Milan would spend the coming decades learning by heart.

The Boy Who Beat Genoa

The last round of that beautiful, useless campaign fell on 28 April 1912, and it brought to Porta Monforte the one team that had beaten Milan all season: Genoa. Into the side came a Milanese boy of seventeen, born on 13 March 1895, third of the five footballing sons of the Cevenini house, younger brother of the Aldo who shared the top of the scoring list. His name was Luigi, and in the sixty-ninth minute he scored, and Milan won 1-0, and the season's single stain was avenged in front of its own witnesses while second place was sealed at one point's distance. The annals state that this was Luigi Cevenini's only official appearance in the red and black, and one must pause over what that means: one match, one goal, one victory, against the only opponent that had drawn Milanese blood. There has never been a more perfect Milan career. It lasted an afternoon, it lacked nothing, and — like most perfect things — it was already a farewell.

For in 1912 the brothers crossed the city. Aldo Cevenini, forty-two league appearances and twenty-six goals in the red and black since 1909, went to Internazionale, and the seventeen-year-old Luigi went with him, and the chronicles of the club record simply that the departure of the Cevenini significantly weakened the attack. As to why they went, the sources fall silent, and the honest historian must fall silent with them; and yet in a city with two clubs, a family with five footballing sons — Aldo, Mario, Luigi, Cesare, Carlo, the first great dynasty of the Italian game — is a border dispute waiting to happen. What followed belongs mostly to the other shirt: Aldo would score forty-two goals in fifty-one matches for Inter across the next three seasons, and Luigi — Zizì, they called him, for a tongue as quick and needling as his feet — would become the most celebrated of the whole line, a hundred and ninety league matches, a hundred and sixty-four goals, the darling of the other half of the city. Aldo, it is true, would come home to Milan in 1915, when the war years made all borders provisional, and would strike at better than a goal a match through the wartime cups; but the fact remains that the club's joint top scorer and the boy of the perfect afternoon left in the same year, and Milan, unbeaten, had lost twice.

Second Class to Stockholm

The national team, meanwhile, was learning to exist, and twice in 1912 it borrowed from Porta Monforte. On 17 March, in a 3-4 defeat to France, Milan's right-back Marco Sala won his only cap. Sala — Marchino to the faithful — born 19 August 1886, at the club since 1908 and destined to serve it until 1920 — twelve seasons in all — was a winger remade into a tenacious man-marking full-back, and remade thoroughly: small, lean, quick and, as the journalist Emilio Colombo insisted, very nervous, a man who attached himself to his opponent the way a tram holds to its wire, wherever the line ran and with no getting off. He had announced himself in the most Milanese way possible, a debut in a derby won 3-2 in January 1909, and the surviving counts of his service disagree — ninety matches by one reckoning, a hundred and twenty-five official appearances and three goals by the fuller one — the difference being only what one chooses to count.

The grander expedition came at midsummer. Italy entered the Olympic football tournament for the first time, at Stockholm, and among the fourteen chosen there was exactly one Milan player: Renzo De Vecchi, eighteen years old, il Figlio di Dio, the full-back who had made his debut for the club at fifteen and had just come through a league season without missing a single Sunday. The party was led by a twenty-six-year-old named Vittorio Pozzo, on his first assignment for the national side, who left his executive desk at Pirelli — the president's own firm, so that even Italy's football abroad travelled, in a manner of speaking, on Milanese rubber — and insisted on serving unpaid. The amateur poverty of the venture deserves its inventory: second-class rail fare with an allowance of six lire a day, third class authorised from the border with the difference pocketed, lodgings in a converted girls' boarding school, meals taken at the one Italian restaurant Stockholm possessed. Eight of the fourteen were new caps; several Pro Vercelli men were refused leave by the army; De Vecchi was among those who arranged their own military paperwork in order to travel, an eighteen-year-old negotiating with the state for the right to represent it at football.

The tournament itself was a lesson administered in three sittings, and De Vecchi sat through all of them. On 29 June at the Träneberg ground, Finland beat Italy 3-2 after extra time, Italy's goals coming from Bontadini on ten minutes and Sardi on twenty-five, with Hugo Meisl of Vienna holding the whistle. On 1 July at the Råsunda, Italy beat the host nation Sweden 1-0, Bontadini again inside the first half: the nation's first Olympic victory, bought with boarding-school beds and six lire a day. On 3 July Austria closed the account, 5-1, Berardo's goal on eighty-one minutes the consolation. Italy came home early, and yet something had begun on that journey — a certain priestly seriousness about the national game, embodied in the unpaid young man from the Pirelli offices — that would need years to ripen but had, unmistakably, been planted. The Son of God, for his part, had seen the world, and returned to Porta Monforte in time for a championship that was itself about to grow to the size of the country.

A Championship the Size of the Country

For the autumn of 1912 nationalised football as June had nationalised the vote. The new Prima Categoria was the first truly expanded edition: more than thirty clubs marshalled into regional groups, the Veneto admitted to full membership, an experimental Southern section grafted on — the shape of the modern Italian game arriving, with history's usual taste for irony, two years before the war that would stop it. Milan prepared for the new world by importing some of the old one: the Belgian forward Camille Nys arrived, and with him the Englishmen John Robert Roberts and Emyl Croom, so that the eleven regained the polyglot flavour of the founding years. Barbieri and Malerba kept the goal, De Vecchi and Sala the ramparts; Lovati, Rizzi, Scarioni, Trerè, Roberts and Croom worked the middle of the field; Bavastro, Ferrario, Lana, Nys and Van Hege carried the attack. The chroniclers note that for all the foreign reinforcement the club's organisation was unstable and real championship cohesion never came — the beer-hall parliament, one gathers, was better at conviviality than at construction — but a young Milanese named Romolo Ferrario emerged from the instability with ten goals in fourteen appearances, which is one way of answering the departure of a dynasty.

The group was Liguria-Lombardy, and Milan began it as it had spent the whole year, refusing to lose. On 3 November, US Milanese were beaten 6-0 at Porta Monforte, Ferrario twice, Nys once, Van Hege helping himself to three. On the 10th, at the Campo di Via Bersaglio, Racing Libertas fell 2-1 — Roberts scoring, De Vecchi from the penalty spot, keeping time like a bandmaster. On the 17th came the derby, at the Arena Civica with Internazionale the hosts and the Cevenini now on the far side of the fixture; Rizzi and Van Hege scored, Milan won 2-1, and the calendar year's derby account closed at two played, two won — January's 3-0 and November's 2-1, the neighbours beaten twice in their own houses. On 24 November, Andrea Doria were overwhelmed 7-0, four from Ferrario, two from Van Hege, one from Nys, and with that the club's 1912 was complete: eleven championship Sundays, not one of them lost.

Through both halves of the year, through the exodus and the rebuilding, one presence never wavered: Louis Van Hege, il Pallido Saettante, the pale thunderbolt of Uccle, born 8 May 1889 and brought south from Union Saint-Gilloise in 1910. Eighteen goals in seventeen matches in the spring season, seventeen in eighteen in the one that followed — a symmetry so neat it looks like the work of a poet rather than a centre-forward. In 1912 alone the Belgian put five past Juventus on a single January afternoon and three past US Milanese on a single November one; by the end of his Milan years the account would read ninety-seven goals in eighty-eight matches, the club's record for hat-tricks would be his, and in 1920, at Antwerp, an Olympic gold medal with Belgium would confirm what the chroniclers had known when they called him a thoroughbred of a superior breed. Milan lost a dynasty that year and kept its centre-forward; the era being what it was, the day would come when the World War called him north and Belgium required its soldiers, but that cloud still sat below the horizon.

Within Whistling Distance

One more goodbye, the quietest of all. Change "a Milan player since 1904" to "a Milan player since 1903". He did not so much leave the game as change rooms within it: he had already stood among the founders of the Italian Referees' Association at its birth on 27 August 1911, and the years ahead would see him back at Milan as coach of the reserves and, in time, of the first team. Some men leave a club the way a river leaves a lake — technically, and never really — and Moda's whole life was the proof: player, captain, midwife to the referees, coach, always within whistling distance of the red and black.

Weigh the year, then, with the strange tenderness it asks for. In 1912 Milan was, by every measure the field can offer, unbeatable: eleven championship matches without defeat, two derbies won in the enemy's own houses, sixty goals in one campaign and a torrent already loosed in the next, the best attack and the best defence in the group that mattered. And in 1912 Milan lost: the title, by the width of one point conceded before the year had even begun; the Cevenini brothers, to the neighbours; Moda, to the whistle; the crown, to Pro Vercelli. The lesson of 1911 had been that beauty is not enough; 1912 taught something crueller and more Milanese — that even perfection is not enough, that a club can go unbeaten for an entire calendar year and still be beaten by the calendar. A boy scored once and left, an empire sent its bill, eight and a half million men got the vote, and at the Spatenbräu they wiped the rings from the table and ordered another round. The proud years were lean, the lean years were proud; and Porta Monforte, unbeaten and unrewarded, set its jaw for the next Sunday.

History, which loves a footnote more than a headline, will remember the year less for any of this than for the sixty-ninth minute of 28 April: Luigi Cevenini, seventeen, one match, one goal, one win over the only team that had beaten his club — and then across the city. Milan has had careers a hundred times longer; it has never had one more complete. That is 1912 in a single afternoon: perfection, with the goodbye already folded inside it.