Two Italies, One Touchline

Two Championships in One Fog

There are winters in Milan when the fog rises off the Navigli so thick that a man standing on one bank may honestly deny the existence of the other, and 1922 opened as such a winter for Italian football, which had contrived, out of a quarrel over arithmetic, to become two games at once. The argument was nominally technical — a reform project associated with the name of Pozzo proposed reducing the number of clubs cluttering the top flight — but its consequence was theological: the great and the middling clubs walked out of the federation altogether and founded a rival church, the Confederazione Calcistica Italiana, which ran its own championship against the federal one. Milan, a club of engineers and industrialists that has always preferred the company of the big battalions, went where the big clubs went, and so passed the 1921-22 season in the CCI's Prima Divisione, in Girone A of the Lega Nord, contesting a title that half of Italy declined to recognise.

To understand why the split mattered, one must understand what Milan the city was in 1922: the counting-house and the printing-press of Italy, the place where the nation's opinions were typeset before the rest of the country woke to read them. La Gazzetta dello Sport was edited there, pink as a Lombard dawn, and it is one of the finer ironies of this story that when football's civil war finally required a peacemaker, it would find one not in a courtroom or a ministry but at the editor's desk of a sporting newspaper. The city fed its people risotto and ambition in roughly equal measure; beyond the rooftops, on the rare clear day, the Alps stood in the north like an unpaid bill. Nothing in Milan stayed small for long — neither fortunes, nor grievances, nor, as the year would prove in October, political movements.

The club that carried the city's colours into this divided championship was itself a curious construction: it had a president, it had a captain, and it had no coach at all. Piero Pirelli, midway through a presidency that would stretch from 1909 to 1928, provided the money and the patience; Iro Bronzi served as his vice-president; and on the field the side belonged to Cesare Lovati, captain and, with twenty-two appearances, the most-used man in the squad. But between the boardroom and the captain's armband there was nobody — no professional mind engaged to choose, to drill, to correct. The team was run, in effect, on habit and honour, which are admirable materials for a regiment and unreliable ones for a forward line.

Ninth of Twelve

The season had announced its character early, on 2 October 1921, when Novara came to Milan and won 5-0 — a scoreline administered at home, before the club's own people, which is the footballing equivalent of being slapped in one's own dining room. What followed was a campaign of moods rather than a campaign of method: seven wins, four draws, eleven defeats, eighteen points, twenty-nine goals scored against thirty-six conceded, and a final position of ninth among the twelve clubs of Girone A. Pro Vercelli, that stern provincial academy of the Italian game, won the CCI championship; Milan finished nearer the trapdoor than the throne.

And yet within the mediocrity there were afternoons when the old red-and-black arrogance returned like colour to a convalescent's cheeks. On 22 January 1922 Vicenza were beaten 7-0 at home — Papa three times, Zacchi twice, Poggia and Loiacono once each — and for ninety minutes the ledger of the season read like a clerical error. Venerino Papa, brought in from Alessandria and entered in the registers as Papa III, finished the year as the side's leading marksman with some ten goals, Giuseppe Santagostino the other forward of consequence. There were victories of genuine substance too: Pro Vercelli themselves, the eventual champions, were beaten 1-0 in Milan on 30 October 1921, and Bologna were turned back 2-1 on 20 November, Santagostino scoring both.

But a team without a coach is a team at the mercy of the weather, and the season closed as it had opened, in humiliation: on 30 April 1922, in a rescheduled fixture, Milan travelled to Pro Vercelli and lost 0-5 to the new champions. Between the 7-0 and the two 0-5s lies the whole moral of 1921-22 — a squad capable of feast and of famine in the same winter, because nobody had been engaged to plan the menu. Lovati could lead them; he could not also think for them; captaincy is a voice on the field, not a mind above it.

A Newspaperman's Peace

Football's schism was ended, as Italian quarrels of that era so often were, over a table in the country. In a villa near Biella the divided parties submitted themselves to arbitration, and on 22 June 1922 the award was issued that history calls the Compromesso Colombo — named for Emilio Colombo, director of La Gazzetta dello Sport, the newspaperman who brokered the peace. It says something about the Italy of 1922 that the game's constitutional crisis was resolved neither by its federation nor by its government but by an editor, a man whose daily business was circulation and who understood better than either warring side that a sport split in two sells fewer newspapers than a sport made whole.

The terms were, in every way that mattered, a victory for the rebels. For 1922-23 there would again be a single Prima Divisione, administered by a Lega Nord of thirty-six clubs arranged in three groups, and the federation swallowed its pride sufficiently to recognise Pro Vercelli's CCI title as legitimate. The big clubs had walked out, run their own championship, and been welcomed back on terms agreeable to the big clubs — a sequence of events that students of power, in football or anywhere else, will find wearily familiar. Milan returned to the reunified fold with its mediocrity intact and its ambitions unresolved.

October: The March and the Ledger

The new, reunified season opened on 8 October 1922 in Genoa, and Milan lost 4-1, the consolation arriving from the penalty spot through Bronzini in the seventy-third minute. Twenty days later the century turned on its hinge: on 28 October the Fascists marched on Rome, and within days Benito Mussolini held the Prime Minister's office; Italian democracy, which had been unwell for some time, took to its deathbed. That the movement had been founded in Milan itself, in Piazza San Sepolcro in 1919, is a fact this chronicle records without relish; the city that printed the nation's newspapers and stitched its football back together had also incubated its catastrophe. A chronicle of sport cannot look away from the year it lives in, and 1922 was that year.

On the field, the autumn brought its own small apocalypse. On 5 November, at home, the season's tables record a defeat by Bologna of 0-8 — a scoreline so far beyond the ordinary grammar of the game that the historian instinctively rereads the ledger, and though not every archive can be made to repeat the figure with equal clarity, it is the number history has generally kept. Eight goals conceded on one's own ground, by a club of Milan's pretensions, is not a result; it is a verdict on an institution — and the institution, to its lasting credit, chose to read it as such.

Around these disasters the side was already showing the other face of its coming season: the draw. A 1-1 with Udinese on 15 October, a 0-0 with Spezia on 17 December — stalemates that would accumulate, by the campaign's end, into ten of them, the signature of a team learning caution before it relearned conviction.

The Man the Papers Called Only Ferdi

It was in November 1922, in the space between the March on Rome and Christmas, that Milan did the most consequential thing in its institutional year, and perhaps in its institutional decade: it engaged a coach. Not an organiser, not a senior player doubling as schoolmaster in the manner of the sainted Kilpin, but a professional manager in the modern sense — the first in the club's history, and the first foreigner ever to sit on its bench. He was Austrian, Viennese, born on 31 May 1889 to a Jewish family, and his name was Heinrich Oppenheim; in Austria they had called him Harry, in Italy he became Ferdi, and so little was known of him in his adopted country that the Gazzetta never once printed his full name. He existed in the newspapers as a single word, like a music-hall act or a saint.

His debut came on 19 November 1922, at the Campo di viale Lombardia, exactly two weeks after the eight-goal shipwreck, and it read like an argument for the entire profession of coaching: Milan 4, Rivarolese 0, Santagostino scoring in the fifteenth, forty-sixth and eightieth minutes — a hat-trick — and Poggia adding the other in the fifty-third. One match proves nothing, as every coach who has won his first discovers by his third; but the symbolism was perfect. With Francesco Soldera wearing the new captain's armband, Pirelli enduring above, and now Ferdi on the touchline, the club had for the first time arranged itself in the shape modern football would recognise: money at the top, leadership within, and a mind at the side of the pitch.

The whole of Oppenheim's Milan career can be held in a sentence, and ought to be, because its brevity is part of its poignancy: two seasons, thirty-nine official matches, the last of them a 5-0 win over Novese on 13 April 1924, and one solitary appearance in the red and black shirt itself, in a friendly at Reggiana on 30 September 1923, won 2-0. He lifted no trophies. Most first coaches lift none; somebody must lay the floor before anybody can raise the roof.

Ten Draws and the Shape of Recovery

The season Ferdi shaped would close with Milan fourth in Girone B of the reunified Prima Divisione: eight wins, ten draws, four defeats, twenty-six points, thirty-two goals scored and twenty-eight allowed, behind the champions Genoa — collecting the eighth title of their imperious history — and behind Legnano and Bologna. Fourth place is not a triumph, but set against ninth of twelve it is a convalescence, and convalescence was precisely what the doctor had been hired for. Santagostino, the coach's first-night hero, finished as top scorer with eleven; Pietro Bronzini played every one of the twenty-two matches, the metronome of the recovery.

All of it — the shipwrecks and the hat-tricks alike — happened at the Campo di viale Lombardia, a ground of the old, improvised century, because in 1922 Milan possessed no stadium worthy of the word. San Siro, the cathedral in which every later chapter of this story would be sung, was still four years from consecration; its gates would not open until 1926. The reader should hold that in mind when weighing the era: this was a great club still living in rented rooms, its permanence an idea rather than an address.

The Verdict

Seen from a century's distance, 1922 is the year Milan stopped being merely a team and began, structurally, to become a club: it chose its side in a civil war, was welcomed back among the victors, absorbed an eight-goal defeat on its own ground, and answered it within a fortnight by hiring a professional whose job was to ensure such a thing would thereafter need explaining rather than expecting. None of this won anything. All of it mattered. The lean years teach a club what the proud years let it forget — that institutions are built in the seasons nobody frames on the wall.

And there is a debt to record. The man called only Ferdi, the Viennese who gave Milan its first coached seasons, was Jewish, and two decades after he stood on the touchline of viale Lombardia the century devoured him: the databases of Holocaust victims record that Heinrich Oppenheim was murdered in the Shoah, dying in 1942 in a concentration camp in Poland. Football's memory is careless with its servants and cruellest to its pioneers, and for decades his life survived in Italy only as a single word in yellowed newsprint. Let this chronicle, then, print the name in full, which his adopted country's press never did: Heinrich Oppenheim, first coach of Milan. Remembering him is not sentiment; it is bookkeeping of the only kind that finally matters.

No boat carried the Diavolo to Australia in 1922; the club's business that year was conducted entirely between Italian touchlines, and nearly six decades would pass before the rossoneri first sailed south — an end-of-season tour in May and June 1980 that reached Adelaide itself, where Milan beat a South Australian state side 3-1. But a story like Oppenheim's is precisely why a supporters' club on the far side of the world keeps these chronicles at all: the men who built the thing we rise before dawn to watch deserve to have their names carried further than their own era carried them. From Adelaide, a hundred and four years and half a planet away, the verdict of 1922 is easily given — a ninth place, a fourth place, no silver, and the single most important appointment the young club had yet made.