The Frost Above the Treeline

The Oversubscribed Peace

Sixty-six clubs. In the autumn of 1919 the first full national championship since the wartime suspension gathered sixty-six of them at the top level, and the number was an act less of sporting logic than of hunger: the federation filled its competition the way a crowded tram fills in the winter dark, taking on one passenger more, and then another, because nobody waiting at the stop could decently be left behind. The Prima Categoria of 1919-20 was oversized and everyone knew it, but nobody had the heart to trim the list; you do not ration joy in the first winter of peace.

The route through this crowd was a pilgrim's route in three stages: a regional qualifying phase of ten matchdays, then national semifinals of another ten, then a final round of three clubs to crown the north, whose champion would meet the best of the centre-south for the title itself. Ten steps, ten more, then the summit — a structure with the shape of an Alpine ascent, and like most Alpine ascents it was designed to flatter the climber in the foothills and to break him above the treeline. Milan would learn both halves of that lesson by heart.

And the city itself was climbing something steeper. 1920 was the peak of the Biennio Rosso, the Red Biennium, when strikes rolled through industrial Italy in waves and, in September, the metalworkers occupied the factories outright, seizing plants across Milan and Turin. This was no distant rumour for the club: its president, Piero Pirelli, helped steer the family tyre firm whose Bicocca works stood as a centrepiece of Milanese industry, and the team had lately been playing on a ground that bore the family name. In Rome, Giolitti's government would sign the Treaty of Rapallo in November, settling the Adriatic border and dooming D'Annunzio's occupation of Fiume. Football resumed, in other words, not in a becalmed country but in a feverish one, and the crowds that came to watch came partly to forget.

A House with Concrete Bones

The club spent the season doing what half of Milan was doing: moving house. Milan left the Velodromo Sempione, lodged temporarily at the Campo Pirelli out in Bicocca — a footballing guest of its own president's industry — and then settled into the new Campo di Viale Lombardia, whose grandstand was reinforced with concrete and could hold some twenty thousand souls. Concrete: the honest, unromantic material of the century that was arriving. The Velodromo had belonged to the age of moustaches and bicycles; Viale Lombardia belonged to the age of reinforced things, built to bear weight and to last, and there is something touching in a club still finding its post-war feet building itself a stand for twenty thousand as an act of pure faith.

Pirelli had held the presidency since 1909, and would hold it until 1928, nearly twenty years in all; his was the patient kind of stewardship that builds grandstands rather than legends and trusts that the legends will follow. Within six years he would pour an entire stadium out of the same material at San Siro, and this neighbourhood stand on Viale Lombardia was where he practised first, the way a painter sketches on the back of a letter before he goes near the canvas. On the touchline he installed Guido Moda, a former Milan defender of the years 1903 to 1912 with two championships won in the shirt, and the chroniclers call Moda the club's first coach proper — the first former player asked not merely to pick eleven names but to think about what the eleven should do. Every club keeps such a figure somewhere in its sediment: the man who turns up on the site with a drawing in his hand, where the walls had always been raised by eye.

The squad he inherited had been hollowed and refilled the autumn before — the brothers gone back across the city, the replacements carried in from factory sides and the provinces — and that reckoning is set down where it happened, in the chapter before this one. What it handed Moda was a captain: Alessandro Scarioni, Scarioni II, who would miss almost nothing all season and lead the side through everything that followed.

What the Foothills Bought

The foothills, as promised, flattered: ten matchdays in Group B of Lombardy, October to December 1919, ten Milan wins — but that autumn has been counted already, Sunday by Sunday, in the chapter that owns it, and a chronicle which tells the same ten twice is only admiring itself. What belongs to this year is the arithmetic that closed over them. The full championship line would eventually read twenty matches, fourteen won, one drawn, five lost, fifty-six goals scored against twenty-four conceded — which is to say that on New Year's Day every one of those defeats, and the solitary draw, still lay ahead of Milan, unplayed, waiting in the new year like weather. Amedeo Varese, the ex-Casale forward, had made himself the revelation of the attack; around him Romolo Ferrario would finish the season with eight goals and Mario Roghi with five, while Cesare Lovati stood alongside Scarioni at nineteen appearances apiece, the two most constant men in a season that would prove anything but constant.

The ten wins of autumn, though, bought nothing but the right to climb higher in the new year — the national semifinal, Group A, where the opposition would no longer be Lombard neighbours but the aristocracy of the peninsula. The foothills were done. Above the treeline the air was about to thin, and the frost was waiting in it.

The Old Soldier of Settimo Rottaro

Varese deserves to be walked around slowly, the way one walks around a statue. Born on the second of July 1890 in Settimo Rottaro, he arrived at Milan already a decorated man: with little Casale — the small Piedmontese club that had stunned the peninsula — he won the championship of 1913-14, and in those same seasons he earned five caps for Italy, the first of them on the twelfth of January 1913 against France. Then the war took the middle out of his career, as it took the middle out of everything, and when football resumed he was twenty-nine, a veteran of the pre-war game obliged to reinvent himself in a rebuilt team in a rebuilt country.

The registries call him a midfielder, and the registries are not exactly wrong; but at Milan he functioned as the striker, the point of the lance, and finished as the season's top scorer with twenty-four goals — twenty-three in eighteen matches, by the stubborn count of one old chronicle. Whichever figure you keep, the truth beneath it is the same: a rebuilding Rossoneri attack was carried, week after week, on the shoulders of a man past his supposed prime, a scudetto-winner and an Azzurro who might have considered his work already done and who instead did the best scoring of his life.

Across his whole Milan spell, from 1918 to 1921, he scored thirty-two goals in thirty-five official appearances — twenty-nine in thirty-three, by the encyclopaedias' trimmer count — and then he went home, back to Casale, the way men of his generation went home — without ceremony, the job finished. He died in Saluzzo on the fourth of January 1969; and it was on a fourth of January, forty-nine years earlier, that his Milan had walked out at Marassi to begin the semifinal that broke the season's heart. I do not say the dates mean anything. I say only that a chronicler notices, and having noticed, cannot unnotice.

Anatomy of a Fall

The semifinal group read like a muster-roll of everything Milan was not yet: Genoa, the old maritime power; Pro Vercelli, the iron dynasty of the pre-war game; Alessandria; Legnano; Venezia. It began on the fourth of January 1920 at Marassi, and Genoa won it 2-1 — a narrow thing, an away defeat by the odd goal to the group's strongest side, nothing yet to mourn. But mountains announce themselves with small stones first.

February was a month of one step forward, one step back, danced to no music. On the first, Milan beat Legnano 3-1 at the new Viale Lombardia ground; on the eighth, Pro Vercelli came to the same ground and left with a 2-1 win; on the fifteenth, Milan crossed to the island field of Sant'Elena and beat Venezia 1-0; on the twenty-ninth — for 1920 was a leap year, and even its extra day was unkind — Alessandria won 2-0 at the Campo degli Orti. Two wins, two defeats, and the sensation, familiar to anyone who has watched a good team fail, of a side that could beat everyone below it and no one above it.

March made the sentence legible. Genoa arrived at Viale Lombardia on the seventh and won 2-0, completing the double over Milan and, in effect, closing the door; the wins that followed — 2-1 over Venezia on the fourteenth, a handsome 3-0 over Alessandria on the twenty-first — read like dispatches from a front already given up. Then April supplied the humiliation the season had been withholding: on the eighteenth, at Vercelli, Pro Vercelli won 5-1, the heaviest defeat of the year, the old dynasty measuring out for the rebuilt club exactly how much rebuilding remained. The last act, on the second of May, was a 1-1 draw away at Legnano — the season's only draw, and a ghost of a match besides, being the replay of a fixture from the eleventh of April that had been annulled. A season that began with ten straight wins ended in a replayed shadow, sharing points in the province.

The table read Genoa 19, Pro Vercelli 14, Alessandria 11, Milan 9, with Legnano and Venezia below. Only the top club advanced, and it was Genoa who climbed on toward the final stages. Fourth of six, then, below even Alessandria — and a league table has no kindness in it; it says what it says.

Inter's June

The championship went on without Milan and found its way, on the twentieth of June 1920, to Bologna, where Internazionale beat Livorno 3-2 in the final to take the second national title of their history. Among the champions was Aldo Cevenini, who had worn Milan's armband and had left for Inter that very season. There is no wound in football quite like watching your departed captain lift the prize you were rebuilding toward, in the other Milanese shirt, in the first summer of peace.

Beyond the touchline, the year kept its fever to the end: in September the metalworkers were inside the plants of Milan and Turin, red flags over the gates of the industry on which the club president's own fortune stood; in November came Rapallo, which sealed the fate of the Fiume adventure. Against such a backdrop, a fourth place in a semifinal group is a small sorrow, and the men of 1920 surely knew it; but small sorrows are the ones a club is built from, the way a riverbed is built from small stones.

Everything in 1920, in short, was done in the wrong order. Milan built a concrete grandstand for twenty thousand before it had a team worth twenty thousand's while; it appointed a coach of its own before it had a squad ready for coaching theory; it was carried by a twenty-nine-year-old lance borrowed from little Casale, who scored two dozen goals in a losing cause. Faith first, reward nowhere — and that is precisely the order in which enduring clubs are made. When it was all over, the points shared at Legnano and the title lifted in Bologna, the new stand on Viale Lombardia still held its twenty thousand places, the concrete curing quietly into hardness, built for crowds that had not yet been given a reason to come. Concrete is patient. So, in the Lean Years, was this club.