Nought to Five, Then the Reply

A Year Torn Down the Middle

Milan played in two championships in 1921 — the tail of one, the head of another — and neither showed the club much kindness. 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 — tyre money, long patience, and a stadium at San Siro still five years off — went on playing at its modest ground on the Viale Lombardia, a mid-table club in an immodest city, keeping its Sundays while the street outside changed its shirt.

Kings of the Neighbourhood, Commoners of the North

The spring's business was to finish the 1920-21 Prima Categoria, and in its first act Milan played like a side remembering what it once was. In Group B of Lombardy the figures carry the swagger of a Sunday brass band: 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 its own neighbourhood, at least, Milan was still obeyed.

Then came the final rounds, and the music stopped. First the Lombard final group, six clubs together: 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 the trade, and the great city was living on its memories.

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 armband 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. They played it out at the Campo Milan, under the new concrete grandstand whose pouring — and whose meaning — is the business of the previous year's chapter, not this one's.

The season's goals were mostly the property of Armando Bellolio, twelve of them in twenty matches — and here the chronicle 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 city 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 Rich Clubs Walked Out

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 on losing a show of hands: 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 went with the rich men, 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. Above the side sat Piero Pirelli, midway through a presidency that would run from 1909 to 1928, with Iro Bonzi as his vice-president; between that boardroom and the field there was nobody at all. For the season was played, remarkably, without a conductor: the coaching post stood vacant, 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 — 119 of them the official record admits, the rest lent to the wartime cups. Twenty-two of those appearances came in this one season, more than any other man in the squad managed, and he made them playing out the last act of his Milan life while simultaneously directing the play — captain, selector and elder statesman all at once. No professional mind had been engaged to choose, to drill, to correct; the team was run on habit and honour, which are admirable materials for a regiment and unreliable ones for a forward line. 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, on the 20th, 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 campaign had opened with Novara and it closed with Novara, and both times the music was theirs.

Around this uneven music stood the season's fixed points: Luigi Binda kept goal twenty times; Bronzini — Rinaldo to the club's own register, Pietro to other chronicles — made twenty-one appearances; Venerino Papa — Papa III, in the numbering of footballing dynasties — arrived from Alessandria and finished as the side's leading marksman 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.

The Boy Who Took It Personally

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 closed at five goals in ten matches — a modest return with an immodest future folded inside it.

What the boy became, 1921 could not know, but we may glance ahead. 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 championship did not count. 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.

The Armband and the Boy

Little of 1921 asks to be framed. 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 armband to a captain who doubled as his own manager. And one debut, disguised as a disaster.

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 — but those afternoons are the property of chapters still to come. What belongs to this one will outlast most trophies: the discovery that a ninth place with a boy in it can matter more than a title without one.

The true object of the year is not a building but a strip of cloth. Twelve seasons of it on Scarioni's sleeve; then Lovati's last, worn by a man who also had to choose the eleven he wore it among. An armband means nothing while it sits on the arm; it means something only in the handing over — and 1921 handed things over all year, one captain to the next, one federation to a rival, one generation of the shirt to the generation that would outlive it. At the far end of that line stood a twenty-year-old out of the club's own nursery, beaten nought to five before his own people in October and answering within the week. Nobody in the ground that afternoon knew what they were being handed. That is usually the way of it: a club is given its future in the shape of a bad result, and recognises the gift much later, when the boy is on the roll of legends and the worst afternoon of his life has become the first page of the story.