The Price of the Son of God

Rubber, Trams and Eight Million Voters

The Campo Milan on via Fratelli Bronzetti, out by Porta Monforte, Milan's home since January 1906, owned one genuine claim on posterity: it was, by the account most followed, the first ground in Italy to hang nets in its goals, so that a goal, once scored, could no longer be argued out of existence. Hold on to that detail, because in 1913 Milan would learn that a net can keep a ball in; nothing yet invented could keep a footballer. And stand a moment in the city around the ground, because you cannot understand the wound this year inflicted without first smelling the town that inflicted it: the industrial capital of Italy, a city of rubber and early trams, where the factories of the Pirelli family — whose Piero had presided over the football club since 1909 — turned out the tyres on which the new century proposed to travel, and where the club itself was still, by its full and faintly absurd name, the Milan Foot-Ball and Cricket Club.

The country was changing under the club's feet. On 26 October and 2 November Italians went to the polls in the first general election held under something close to universal male suffrage, the electorate tripled at a stroke from fewer than three million men to more than eight million, and though Giolitti's Liberals clung to 270 of the 508 seats — held upright by the Gentiloni Pact the way a tired man grips a railing he pretends not to need — socialism was swelling in the Lombard factories and the long liberal afternoon had begun, almost imperceptibly, to tilt toward evening. War stood nine months beyond those ballots, though nobody counting them knew it. And football, in this last full year of peace, was still officially an amateur pastime — a fiction maintained with the ceremony a good family reserves for its mad aunt, and about to be priced, in Milan of all places, to the exact lira.

There was not even a manager, in the modern sense, to blame for what followed. The team answered to a technical commission — for the season that opened that autumn, Cesare Stabilini, Mario Beltrami and Piero Peverelli — football by committee, prudent as a board meeting and roughly as dangerous. The club was fourteen years old. It had not won a championship since 1907, and though nobody on via Fratelli Bronzetti could know it, the drought already under way would not break until 1951.

Spring Among the Invincibles

The spring's championship, 1912-13, was the first stretched beyond the north to take in the clubs of the centre and south, so that the game ceased to be a private affair of the industrial north and became, in embryo, the argument of a peninsula. Milan's part of the argument began beautifully. They took the girone ligure-lombardo the way a brass band takes a march it knows by heart — nine wins and a single defeat in ten matches, not one point conceded to the prudence of a draw, thirty goals scored against eight, eighteen points to Genoa's sixteen and Inter's twelve — and the new year's Sundays went by like tram stops: Genoa beaten 4-0 at Porta Monforte on 19 January, Ferrario opening and Nys striking twice before Van Hege finished it; US Milanese beaten 2-0 away a week later; the derby of 9 February won 1-0 by a goal from Trerè; Andrea Doria run down 3-2 away on 16 February, Van Hege twice and Ferrario once. Genoa took their revenge on their own field on 23 February, 4-1, Van Hege's goal carried home like small change — the single stain — and on 2 March the match against Racing Libertas was settled not on the grass but at the table, a 2-0 awarded by decree after the opponents fielded a player they had no right to field, the sort of paper justice in which the era specialised.

Then came the final group of the north, March to May, and the final group belonged, as it nearly always did in those years, to Pro Vercelli — white-shirted provincials from the rice country who played the way their landowners drained paddies, methodically, collectively, without a wasted gesture, and who crossed those ten matches unbeaten, eighteen points, one solitary goal conceded. Milan went to Vercelli on 9 March and lost 2-0; everything for a month afterwards was handsome — Casale beaten 4-0 on 16 March with Van Hege twice, Rizzi and Croom; Hellas dismantled 5-1 on 30 March by Lana, Ferrario, Nys and two Croom penalties; Vicenza beaten 3-0 on their own ground on 6 April by a Van Hege hat-trick — and on 13 April Milan wrestled a 0-0 from the invincibles themselves, a point taken off a side that would concede exactly once in the entire group. The self-betrayal came a week later: 2-0 at Casale on 20 April, points handed to a team Milan had beaten by four. A 3-0 at Hellas through Rizzi and Van Hege, a 1-1 with Vicenza on 4 May with Croom scoring, and the season closed: third, twelve points, behind Vercelli's eighteen and Genoa's thirteen. On 1 June, in Genoa, Pro Vercelli met Lazio, the best the new national formula could send up from Rome, and beat them 6-0 — a fifth title in six seasons, and a measure of exactly how long the peninsula's apprenticeship was going to be.

Eighteen official matches, thirteen won, two drawn, three lost, forty-six goals scored against fourteen: a season to be proud of anywhere except in the trophy room. The rossonera archive is blunt about what was missing — the defection, the year before, of Aldo Cevenini, the irresistible bomber who had gone over to Inter with his brothers, leaving a hole beside Van Hege that the imported Nys, Roberts and Croom never quite filled. Van Hege himself finished with seventeen goals in eighteen matches, young Ferrario with ten in fourteen; behind them Barbieri kept the goal, Lovati, Scarioni and Trerè worked the halfway line, captain Rizzi led, and the defence rested on Marco Sala and on a bank clerk of nineteen whom all of Porta Monforte called, without a flicker of irony, il Figlio di Dio. Remember both names in that last pairing. Only one of them would still be a Milan player by October.

The Sum and the Alibi

Renzo De Vecchi had been Milan's since before his voice broke, in every sense that matters. He made his debut on 14 November 1909, a 2-1 over Ausonia, at fifteen years and 284 days; by the summer of 1913 he was nineteen, had sixty-four appearances and seven goals in red and black, and had been christened il Figlio di Dio — the Son of God — which in a city at once anticlerical and devout was blasphemy, theology and plain reporting in a single phrase. That spring he was Italy's as well as Milan's: capped against Belgium on 1 May 1913, a 1-0 win, and again in Vienna against Austria on 15 June, still carrying, in the federation's ledgers, the address of via Fratelli Bronzetti.

Genoa wanted him, and Genoa answered to Geo Davidson, a Scottish-born president who understood before most men of his generation that sentiment is a currency like any other, and that every currency has an exchange rate. The archives haggle over the sum the way heirs haggle over a will — twenty-four thousand lire by most accounts, a record for a footballer; twenty thousand by the rossonera archive — but they agree on everything that matters: that the figure towered over the hundred or so lire Milan reimbursed the boy, that the federation's rules forbade a player to change cities except for reasons of work, and that the alibi was completed by a post arranged for him at Genoa's Banca Commerciale, salary handsomely improved, so that a nominally amateur footballer could be filed, with a straight face, as a young man relocating for work — and when the federation examined the sudden career move, it found, naturally, nothing irregular at all. Milan's own historians would come to call it il primo vero atto di compravendita del calcio italiano — the first true act of buying and selling in Italian football. The club's official record allows him this much tenderness: he resisted, at first, leaving.

Understand what actually changed hands that summer, because it was not a full-back. Amateurism had been the era's polite fiction; the De Vecchi affair priced the fiction, itemised it, and posted the invoice to the whole of Italian football, and once money has entered a game it can no more be legislated back out than the Navigli can be swept dry with a broom. De Vecchi went on to win three championships in Genoa's colours. He never came home. The nets of Porta Monforte, first in Italy, could hold a ball; they could not hold the Son of God.

The Summer the House Emptied

He did not leave alone; 1913 was an exodus with a figurehead. Giuseppe Rizzi, the captain, went over to Inter and took Giulio Bavastro with him; Camille Nys went home to Belgium and Standard Liège; Roberts left for Modena, the keeper Malerba for Racing Libertas. Against that bleeding, the arrivals read like a grocer's apologies: Carlo De Vecchi from Unitas — a De Vecchi, that summer, merely not the one that mattered — the keeper Lorenzo Gaslini from Lazio, Angelo Pellacani from Pavia and the Englishman Andrew Williams from the Stade Helvétique. The armband passed to Louis Van Hege, the Belgian centre-forward, beginning his fourth Milan season and about to give the club the finest of them.

And the defence, stripped of its deity, passed into the keeping of a man nobody ever thought to compare with God: Marco Sala, the quiet Milanese full-back, at the club since 1908-09, whose one cap for Italy and whose long record of service the previous year's chapter has already counted out. What he is worth here is a single unglamorous figure: through the whole of the coming campaign he would miss exactly one match. He is the kind of player every great decline leans upon, precisely because he does not know how to leave. Clubs that sell their genius discover their journeymen; it is one of football's few reliable mercies.

Van Hege's Autumn, Cevenini's Knife

The autumn championship placed Milan in a group of ten run by the Lombard committee, though it pastured Piedmontese beasts as well, Juventus and Novara among them, and it opened on Sunday 12 October. In Novara, Milan won 4-0, two goals from Van Hege and two from Lana. In Genoa, that same afternoon, Renzo De Vecchi made his debut in red and blue, a 3-3 with Torino. Milan opened their season without their Son of God, and their Son of God opened his without Milan.

For seven weeks the autumn was a march. Como were beaten 4-0 on 19 October, Van Hege twice with Williams and Trerè; Juventus came to Porta Monforte on 1 November and left beaten 3-1, Van Hege twice again and Lovati adding the third; and on 9 November, away to the Associazione Milanese del Calcio — AMC Milanese, no relation to the checkerboard US Milanese of the old derbies — came the afternoon that belongs in the Belgian's testament — six goals to one, and five of the six from Van Hege alone, Ferrario supplying the courtesy. Il Pallido Saettante — the Pale Thunderbolt — they called him, and he had announced himself in 1910 with two goals on debut against Genoa; the press of the day found his game varied and brilliant, his shooting powerful off either foot; in this season of all seasons, captain now, he was on his way to ninety-seven goals in eighty-eight league games for Milan. A club that had sold its full-back for a record sum was being carried, Sunday by Sunday, by a Belgian amateur who cost it nothing.

Then came 30 November, Porta Monforte, the derby, Scamoni of Milan holding the whistle. It ended 0-1, and the goal, on twenty minutes, was scored — of course, of course — by Aldo Cevenini, the bomber whose going had left the hole beside Van Hege, and who that January had worn the shirt of Italy against France. There is no crueller geometry in football than the circle: sell your sons, or let them walk, and they will come back punctual, and they will not miss. Around the derby the season's flaw showed like damp through paint — draws conceded to Racing Libertas on 16 November and US Milanese on 7 December, afternoons the archive diagnoses, with Lombard dryness, as an atteggiamento di sufficienza, a lordliness toward the small — and though the big wins kept coming, 6-0 at Juventus Italia on 23 November, 5-1 at Nazionale Lombardia on 14 December, the group was slipping — not on the great afternoons but on the drowsy ones — and it would go on slipping into the new year. Aldo, for the record, would come home again soon enough, as though nothing had ever happened. In Milanese football everything is eventually forgiven, and nothing is ever forgotten.

Aeroplanes Over Lugano

Around the championships the year kept a diary of curiosities that smell of 1913 like nothing else. On 5 January Milan beat Inter 2-0 in a friendly, which counted for nothing and was enjoyed accordingly. On 23 March they beat Viktoria Berlin 3-1; on 1 May they won 3-1 in Modena; and on 12 May the touring professionals of Reading Football Club came to Milan and won 5-0 — an English lesson administered without malice and received without illusion, the precise measure of the gulf between the peninsula's earnest amateurs and men who did this for wages. Six days later, as if to prove that football obeys no syllogism, Milan beat Pro Vercelli 1-0 — the untouchables finally touched, on the one afternoon it could not matter. And on 1 June, in Lugano, while Pro Vercelli were dismantling Lazio in Genoa, Milan beat the local club 4-3 to carry home the Medaglia del Comitato Pro Aviazione Nazionale — a medal for the National Pro-Aviation Committee, football passing the hat for aeroplanes, the whole of 1913 compressed into one line of minor silverware: the games of peace, cheerfully fundraising for the instruments of the war nobody saw coming.

The year ended as it had run, giving with one hand and taking with the other. Milan kept a regional girone won at a canter, long stretches of handsome football, a small medal for aviation; Milan lost a spring title to the invincibles of Vercelli, an autumn group frittered away on the drowsy Sundays, a captain, and the Son of God himself, gone for twenty-odd thousand decorously laundered lire and a clerk's desk in Genoa. The club had entered 1913 believing its children were its own; it left the year knowing they were assets, and that knowledge, once acquired, is never given back. The drought begun after 1907 would run another thirty-eight years. Porta Monforte, nets and all, had scarcely a year of Milan football left in it, for the club would leave it in 1914 for the Velodromo Sempione; the peace itself had barely more. But droughts end, grounds are replaced, even peaces are eventually rebuilt. What 1913 took could not be counted at all — the illusion that some things were not for sale — and it took that from a club fourteen years old, which had just invented, at its own expense, the Italian transfer market.