Two Italies, One Touchline

The Rival Church

Italian football began 1922 as two games at once. The schism of the previous July — the walk-out, the founding of the rival church, all of it set down in the chapter before this one — had left the country with two championships and two truths, and Milan, a club of engineers and industrialists that has always preferred the company of the big battalions, had gone where the big clubs went. So the rossoneri 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. What this year had to settle was not how the quarrel began but how, and on whose terms, it would be made to end.

To understand why the split mattered, one must understand what Milan the city was in 1922: the bank 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's trams began before first light and its presses stopped after last; beyond the rooftops, on the rare clear day, the Alps stood in the north like a rumour of another country. 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, as the previous chapter recorded, a curious construction: a president, a captain, and no coach at all. Keep that absence in view, because it is the hinge on which the whole of 1922 turns.

Ninth of Twelve

The autumn had already announced the season's character, and its diary — the nought-to-five Novara administered at home on the opening day, the champions of Italy beaten by a single goal at the end of October, a debutant boy answering a catastrophe within the week — is the property of the year that saw it. What 1922 inherited was the account, and the account was that of 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 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 season read like a misprint. It was the last of that winter's small insurrections and much the largest: the autumn had furnished the club with its win over the eventual champions and its evening against Bologna, and the spring, for one Sunday, furnished this.

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 that could be brilliant and abject in the same winter, because nobody had been engaged whose business it was to know why. Lovati, captain and selector both, 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 disputes 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.

The Century on Its Hinge

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 page; not every archive repeats the figure with equal clarity, but 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 diagnosis — and the institution, to its lasting credit, chose to accept the diagnosis and send for a doctor.

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 — the first two of what would become, by the campaign's end, ten.

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 captain carrying the drill-book in his head in the manner of the sainted Kilpin, nor yet a former player set on the touchline as Guido Moda had been in 1920, but a professional manager in the modern sense — the first professional 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; theirs is the scaffolding, and scaffolding comes down before anyone admires the building.

A Ground of the Old Century

What Ferdi made of the rest of that season is not 1922's to tell. Those two autumn draws were the first of many, and the convalescence the doctor had been hired for ran on past the New Year, carrying the spring and the final table with it; the reckoning waits in the chapter that follows.

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 was still four years away, its concrete not yet poured, its gates not to 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 Name in Full

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 professionally 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.

It is for men like him that a supporters' club keeps chronicles at all: the men who built the thing deserve to have their names carried further than their own era carried them. So let the name stand here in full, as the press of his adopted country never once printed it: Heinrich Oppenheim, of Vienna, Milan's first professional coach.