The Price of the Son of God

Rubber, Fog and Eight Million Voters

Stand for a moment in the Milan of 1913, because you cannot understand the wound this year inflicted without first smelling the city that inflicted it: the industrial capital of Italy, a city of rubber and early trams, where the fog comes off the Navigli of a November evening with the patience of a creditor, and 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. The club was still, by its full and faintly absurd name, the Milan Foot-Ball and Cricket Club, and it played by Porta Monforte, at the Campo Milan on via Fratelli Bronzetti, its home since January 1906 and a ground with one genuine claim on posterity: it was the first 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. In 1913 Milan would learn that a net can keep a ball in; nothing yet invented could keep a footballer.

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 quarrel among the cities of the fog and became, in embryo, the argument of a peninsula. Milan's part of the argument began beautifully. They took the girone ligure-lombardo like a landlord collecting rents — 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 read like a tasting menu: Genoa beaten 4-0 at Porta Monforte on 19 January, Ferrario opening and Nys striking twice before Van Hege closed the account; 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 Solomonic bookkeeping 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 accounts 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 the missing ingredient — the defection, the year before, of Aldo Cevenini, the irresistible bomber who had crossed 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 the Porta Monforte crowd had renamed, 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 Price of the Son of God

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 by the crowd 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 record books quarrel over the sum the way heirs quarrel 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 fog can be swept from the Navigli 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, crossed the city to Inter and took Julio 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 — for fate has a Lombard sense of humour, and sent the club 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, who would miss only one match of the coming campaign and go on serving until 1920 — twelve seasons in all, 125 official appearances, three goals, a single cap for Italy won against France in March 1912. 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.

The Pale Thunderbolt and the Returning 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 its opening Sunday, 12 October, is one of those dates on which history writes its own irony without assistance. 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. The accounts of the summer closed in parallel: Milan opened their season without their Son of God, and their Son of God opened his without Milan.

For seven weeks the ledger 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 AC Milanese, 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. They called him il Pallido Saettante, the Pale Thunderbolt, and the nickname did the work of an entire match report; 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, and in this season of all seasons, captain now, he would strike twenty-one times in seventeen matches on his way to a Milan account of ninety-seven goals in eighty-eight league games. 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 who had left for Inter with his brothers in 1912 after twenty-six goals in forty-two league matches in red and black, 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 gone. Milan finished third on twenty-six points, eleven wins, four draws and three defeats, behind Juventus on twenty-eight and, twist of the same knife, Inter on thirty-one — powered by the other Cevenini, Luigi, who finished that championship its top scorer with thirty-seven goals. The title itself, in July 1914, went to Casale, 9-1 on aggregate over Lazio. Aldo, for the record, would cross back to Milan in 1915 and strike at better than a goal a match through the wartime cups, 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.

So weigh the year as its own ledger would. Won: a regional girone at a canter, long stretches of handsome football, a medal for aviation. Lost: a spring title to the invincibles of Vercelli, an autumn group to the cousins across the city, a captain, and the Son of God himself, sold for twenty-odd thousand decorously laundered lire and a clerk's desk in Genoa. Milan entered 1913 a club that believed its children were its own, and left it knowing they were assets; and that knowledge, once acquired, is never given back. The drought begun after 1907 would run another thirty-eight years. The ground at Porta Monforte, nets and all, had scarcely a year of Milan football left in it, for the club would abandon 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 was smaller and more precious — the illusion that some things were not for sale — and the fog on the Navigli, which does not judge but merely covers, settled that winter over a fourteen-year-old club which had just invented, at its own expense, the Italian transfer market.