The Year the Table Split

A Year Torn Down the Middle

There are years that arrive whole, like a wheel of grana lowered unbroken onto the counter, and there are years that come to the table already divided, and 1921 came to Milan in two halves that never once agreed with each other. The spring wore the old clothes of the Prima Categoria, the northern championship of the Lega Nord, and asked the rossoneri to finish what an earlier autumn had begun; the new autumn arrived dressed in something nobody had seen before, a breakaway league called the Prima Divisione, conjured into being in July by the richest clubs in the land, and asked Milan to begin again from nothing. Between the two halves lay a summer in which Italian football tore itself deliberately in two — and Italy, it must be said, was busy doing much the same.

For Milan the city, 1921 was a convalescence that kept threatening to become a relapse. The biennio rosso — those two red years of strikes and occupied factories — had barely cooled, and already the black shirts were multiplying in the very streets where their movement had been born; by November Mussolini would harden his movement into a party, the Partito Nazionale Fascista, and the squadristi were abroad across the industrial north like an early frost. Against all this the football club of Piero Pirelli — the tyre magnate whose patience and whose money kept the red and black upright, and who was still five years from raising his great stadium out at San Siro — went on playing its football at a modest ground on the Viale Lombardia, a mid-table club in an immodest city, dreaming with its eyes open in the fog.

Kings of the Neighbourhood, Guests at the Feast

The spring's business was to finish the 1920-21 Prima Categoria, and in its first act Milan had played like a side remembering, dish by dish, what it once was. In Group B of Lombardy the figures read like a menu written with appetite: six played, five won, one drawn, none lost, twenty-one goals scored and five conceded, eleven points, first of four, clear of Pro Patria on eight, Cremonese on five and poor Monza on none at all. Cremonese held out for a 2-2 that stood as the solitary smudge on the page, then lost the return 2-1 in their own city; Monza were dismissed 4-1 and then 5-0; Pro Patria came to the Viale Lombardia and left on the wrong end of a 7-1. In the neighbourhood, at least, Milan still ate first.

Then came the final rounds, and the feast became a fast. First the Lombard final group, six clubs at one table: Milan finished fourth, with three wins, two draws and five defeats, fourteen scored and eleven conceded for eight points — enough, sul filo del rasoio, on the razor's edge, to squeeze into the semifinal rounds of the north. And there the season was cut down: five defeats in six, the solitary point a 2-2 salvaged against Genoa. Milan went out, the trophy cabinet stayed shut for another year, and the title travelled once more to Pro Vercelli, whose sixth championship confirmed what everyone in Lombardy already suspected: that the provinces had learned to cook, and the great city was living on its memories.

Concrete and Farewells on the Viale Lombardia

The men of that spring deserve their roll-call, because mid-table years are kept honest by their men. Guido Moda sat where a coach sits; Piero Pirelli presided; and the captain's band belonged to Alessandro Scarioni, in his twelfth season of red and black — twelve seasons, a whole youth surrendered to one shirt, the kind of fidelity that makes a captain less a player than a load-bearing wall. The Campo Milan itself was improved that year with a new grandstand of concrete, and there is something touching in the detail: Pirelli, who within five years would pour a cathedral of a stadium out of the same material, practising first on a neighbourhood ground, the way a painter sketches on the back of a bill.

The season's goals were mostly the property of Armando Bellolio, twelve of them in twenty matches, and here the moralist must pause, because this was Bellolio's only Milan season — a man who arrived, led the scoring, and vanished from the story like a comet that had mistaken the Madonnina for its sun. Amedeo Varese added six in fifteen. And there was a farewell of an altogether heavier kind: Romolo Ferrario closed his rossonero career after nine seasons, seventy appearances and forty goals — better than a goal every second game, sustained across nearly a decade — the sort of servant a club forgets at its peril and remembers, usually, too late.

The Summer the Table Split

On 24 July 1921 Italian football performed its own small secession. The federation had before it a plan — Vittorio Pozzo's name was attached to it — to shrink the top flight, and the great clubs wanted it; the smaller clubs, who stood to be shrunk, did not, and since votes are counted rather than weighed, the smaller clubs won. Whereupon the twenty-four leading clubs of Italy did what rich men have always done when the table's arithmetic goes against them: they stood up, thanked no one, and built a table of their own. The Confederazione Calcistica Italiana — the CCI — was born that day, complete with a rival championship called the Prima Divisione, and the season of 1921-22 would be played twice over, in parallel, by two leagues each calling itself the truth. Both winners, in the end, would be recognised as champions of Italy, which is the bureaucratic way of admitting that nobody had won the argument at all.

It would be tidy to say the game was merely infected by its age, and untidy things are usually truer, but consider the calendar all the same: in the very months the clubs were seceding from their federation, the country's politics were hardening into uniform, and November brought the fascist movement into formal party dress at a congress in Rome, far from the Milanese piazza where it had first drawn breath. A nation practising division found its favourite game practising it too. The schism, mercifully, lasted a single season; nations take longer to mend than leagues, and pay far more for the delay.

An Autumn Without a Conductor

Milan took its seat at the rich men's table, as its president's balance sheet perhaps obliged it to, and entered the CCI's Prima Divisione in the northern Girone A, twelve clubs strong. The campaign that followed was, in the words the club's own chroniclers would settle on, un deludente nono posto — a disappointing ninth. And it was played, remarkably, without a conductor: the coaching post stood vacant that season, its duties falling to the captain, Cesare Lovati, a man with a decade of service and some hundred and forty-seven appearances in his legs, playing out the last act of his Milan life while simultaneously directing the play — captain, selector and elder statesman all at once. However the eleven was chosen, it finished ninth.

The autumn's diary is worth reading in full, because it contains the whole club in miniature. It opened on 2 October at home with a humiliation: Novara, 0-5, the last two goals falling in the 87th and 89th minutes of an afternoon that had long since stopped pretending. It answered a week later at Vicenza, 3-0, with the impudence of youth. Juventus came to Milan on 16 October and left with a 3-1 win; Livorno edged the rossoneri 3-2 down by the sea. And then, on 30 October, the loveliest irony of the year: Pro Vercelli, champions of Italy only months before, beaten 1-0 at the Viale Lombardia by a single goal in the 75th minute — Milan could not live with the champions across a season, but for one afternoon it looked them squarely in the eye. November gave two goalless draws, against U.S. Milanese and Andrea Doria, and a 2-1 defeat of Bologna; Verona took a 2-1 off Milan at their place; December offered a 2-2 with Mantova, a 2-1 won away at Spezia, and, on the 18th, the year's closing couplet — Novara again, 3-2 to them, Lovati himself and Migliavacca scoring in the defeat. The year had opened with Novara and it closed with Novara, and both times Novara ate first.

Around this uneven music stood the season's fixed points: Luigi Binda kept goal twenty times; Rinaldo Bronzini made twenty-one appearances; Venerino Papa — Papa III, in the numbering of footballing dynasties — finished with ten goals in twenty games, including both in that win at Spezia. From outside came a defender named Umberto Soldati, born in Madrid in 1900, and up from the club's own youth ranks came a boy to whom we shall come presently, because he is the reason this year is remembered at all. There was one bauble for the sideboard: the Scarpa d'Argento 'Gerolamo Radice', a silver shoe won in a secondary competition — the kind of trophy a great club accepts with a small smile, the way a man who ordered the ossobuco accepts, with thanks, a plate of bread.

Pin

Giuseppe Santagostino was born in Milan on 18 March 1901 and came up through the club's own nursery, and the city, which abbreviates everything it loves, called him Pin — sometimes Pinogia, but mostly, and forever, Pin. He first pulled on the rossonero shirt in a friendly on 18 September 1921, a 6-0 rout of Sport Club Italia, the kind of afternoon that teaches a young forward nothing except how sweet the shirt feels. His real education came a fortnight later. His official debut, on 2 October 1921, was that opening-day catastrophe against Novara — nought to five, at home, in front of his own people. There are two kinds of debutant: the kind who is broken by such a baptism, and the kind who takes it personally. Seven days later, at Vicenza, Pin scored in the 18th minute and again in the 21st, his first two goals for Milan, in a 3-0 win. He had waited exactly one week to file his reply. Before the winter was out he had also felled the champions Pro Vercelli with the game's only goal and taken a brace off Bologna, and his first season's account closed at five goals in ten matches — a modest ledger with an immodest future folded inside it.

What the boy became, 1921 could not know, but we may. Across eleven seasons, from that grim October afternoon to 1931-32, Pin would play 236 matches and score 106 goals — 233 and 103 of them in the championship alone, the other three struck in matches the league's ledger never counted, as though they had slipped free of the record and wandered home along the Navigli. He stands eighth among the scorers in the entire history of the club, and his name is kept to this day on the club's official roll of legends. And destiny, which had introduced him with a 0-5, saved him its best line: on 19 September 1926, when Pirelli's new stadium at San Siro opened its gates for the first time, it was Pin who scored the first goal ever seen there, in the inaugural derby against Inter — a derby Milan lost 3-6, because this club has always known how to gild even its defeats. He would later coach the first team through the war years of 1943-45, pass the name to a son, Ezio, who would wear the rossonero shirt in his own turn, and die on 1 April 1955, a fortnight past his fifty-fourth birthday. Every long story starts somewhere. This one starts in the autumn of 1921, five goals down.

What the Fog Kept

So what was 1921, weighed on the honest scale? No championship — the spring squandered in the final rounds, the autumn surrendered by the first Sunday of October. A silver shoe on the sideboard where a title should have stood. A schism joined and, within a single season, mended. A captain of twelve years' service handing the band to a captain who doubled as his own manager. A grandstand of new concrete on the Viale Lombardia, poured by a president quietly rehearsing a much larger pour. And one debut, disguised as a disaster.

Judged by the table, a small year; judged by what it set in motion, anything but. The rebellion of the twenty-four would be folded back into the common game within the season, as secessions of the comfortable usually are. Pirelli would get his stadium, and Pin would christen it with its first goal. And a century on, in another hemisphere, the supporters who give up Adelaide's small hours to follow the same red and black may read this year and recognise the essential inheritance: that loving Milan has never depended on the table; that a ninth place with a boy called Pin in it can matter more than a title without one; and that the fog over the Viale Lombardia was hiding, as Lombard fog generally does, the shape of everything still to come.