The Café Republic and a Boy Called Pin

Two Winters and the Fog Between

There are years that arrive with trumpets and years that come in like fog off the Navigli — under the doors, along the tram-lines, turning every streetlamp into an act of faith — and 1923, for the club that still called itself, in the English fashion of its founders, Milan Football Club, was fog from January to December. A calendar year is a strange jug: it holds the ends of two different wines. This one caught the run-in of the 1922-23 Prima Divisione, played from the frosts of January to the first warmth of May, and then, after a summer of café tables and conjecture, the opening half of 1923-24, from October to the ninth of December. The championship itself had just been rebaptised — Prima Categoria was now Prima Divisione, as though a new name could make a new game — and the northern tournament, the Lega Nord, had been carved into three groups of twelve clubs apiece. Milan lived in Girone B, which is to say in a room shared with Genoa, Bologna and Juventus: the ravenous and the arriving.

Beyond the touchline, Italy was learning a harsher vocabulary. This was Mussolini's first full year as prime minister after the October 1922 March on Rome; in January the Blackshirt militia was given formal shape, in the late summer the Corfu incident flared and guttered, and in November the Acerbo Law redrew the arithmetic of elections. Football does not pause for history, and history does not ask football's permission; the two simply share the same tram into town. In Milan the game went on — kick-off at the Campo di Viale Lombardia, the modest home ground of those years, with San Siro not yet even a rumour of concrete — and the rossoneri went on with it, neither heroic nor disgraced, an amateur club of Lombard habits in a country, and a sport, that were both being remade at speed.

A Spring of Small Virtues

The spring began with a small act of impudence: on the seventh of January, away to Juventus, Milan came home with a 2-2 draw. A week later Esperia Como were beaten 4-1 on their own field; a week after that Legnano fell 1-0 in Milan, and for a moment the table looked climbable. Then Genoa arrived, on the fourth of February, and left with a 3-1 win, which was the season explained in ninety minutes: the champions-in-waiting did not merely beat you, they informed you, politely and completely, of the distance between you. Milan answered in the only dignified way available, by taking the train to Udine and winning 6-1 on the eleventh of February — the widest margin of any Milan match in the whole calendar year — and then adding a 1-0 at Cremonese for good measure.

After that the season settled into draws the way risotto settles into its stirring — patient, wristy, and never quite brought to the boil. Derthona came and went at 1-1; Rivarolese, hosted over in Genova, 1-1; a slender 1-0 over Modena; a 2-1 defeat by Spezia, the tie transplanted to Viareggio; a goalless afternoon against Juventus; 1-1 with Como; 1-1 at Legnano to close the books on the sixth of May. Ten draws in twenty-two matches is not a statistic, it is a temperament. This was a team that could hold almost anyone and beat almost no one who mattered, a team of half-loaves — and half a loaf, as every Lombard kitchen knows, keeps you alive without ever making you strong.

The final reckoning read: fourth place in Girone B, twenty-six points from eight wins, ten draws and four defeats, thirty-two goals scored against twenty-eight conceded. Above, out of reach and very nearly out of sight, sat Genoa — thirty-nine points, seventeen wins and five draws, not one defeat all season — on their way to the scudetto, the eighth of their storied collection. Legnano took second with thirty-two points, Bologna third with twenty-seven; below Milan, by a single point, Juventus. Fourth of twelve is respectability. It is also, as any honest accountant of football will tell you, nothing at all.

Sixty-One Minutes in Bologna

One afternoon that spring refuses to sit quietly in the ledger. On the eleventh of March Milan were in Bologna, and the match never reached its natural end: amid disturbances in the crowd, the referee deemed the contest closed at the sixty-first minute, and the league authority resolved the affair in Milan's favour. The record books write it, with bureaucratic serenity, as a 2-0 away win. Honesty obliges the chronicler to say that those ninety minutes were never completed — and to say more: when the referee stopped play, Bologna were leading 3-1 on the field. The result was delivered not by feet but by tribunal.

And yet the old men at the beer-hall would have told you it was justice of a kind. Four months earlier, on the fifth of November 1922, Bologna had come to Milan and won 8-0 — eight! — a humiliation of the sort a club carries in its stomach for a generation. It is tempting to read the March decision as revenge for that afternoon, and perhaps some read it so at the time; but revenge by committee is a thin wine, and every Milanist who lived through both dates knew perfectly well which of the scorelines had been earned by feet. Football keeps two sets of books, the official and the remembered, and they do not always agree.

The First Trainer and the Café Republic

Institutionally, 1923 contains one genuine revolution, easy to miss because it wears a waistcoat. For the first time in its history, the club engaged a trainer: the Austrian Ferdi Oppenheim, a professional appointed to do what, until then, had been done by directors gathered around a table — pick the team, shape the play, carry the blame. The club's own annals record the novelty with something close to wonder: for the first time in its history, the society could call upon a trainer. Above him stood Piero Pirelli, the president whose patience and whose purse underwrote Milan through the whole of this lean era, with Giuseppe Parravicini as secretary; on the field the armband had passed, after Lovati's departure, to Francesco Soldera, the anchor of the midfield and the conscience of the side.

The club itself was still, in the most literal sense, a café. Through 1922-23 its social headquarters sat in the Birreria Colombo on via Ugo Foscolo; for 1923-24 it moved to the Bar Vittorio Emanuele at via Orefici 7 — from beer-hall to coffee counter, an upgrade in furniture if not in ambition. There is something tender in a great club governed from marble-topped tables, but tenderness is not a strategy. All around, Italian football was professionalising: the celebrated transfer of Virginio Rosetta from Pro Vercelli to Juventus dramatised, for the whole peninsula, the arrival of the paid player. Milan, amateur by conviction and Lombard by temperament, watched the change like a man watching the weather turn and declining, on principle, to buy an umbrella. The wetting would follow.

Pin, the Local Boy

Every grey year has its lamp, and Milan's in 1923 was a local boy of twenty-one with an apprentice's shoulders and an anarchist's feet. Giuseppe Santagostino — Pin to the terraces, and Pin he shall be here — was born in Milan on the eighteenth of March 1901 and had made his debut on the second of October 1921, a 5-0 over Novara, as though announcing his terms in advance. His contemporaries reached for the phrase dribbling ubriacante — an intoxicating dribble, a run that left defenders as unsteady as men leaving the Birreria at closing time. In the spring of 1923 he finished as the team's leading scorer for 1922-23 with eleven goals in twenty-one matches, among them a brace, one from the penalty spot, in that 2-2 at Juventus; the books also credit him a hat-trick against Rivarolese.

When the new season opened in October he simply carried on, on his way to his best return yet — sixteen goals in twenty-one matches in 1923-24, a mark he would better only years later, with twenty-three in 1928-29 — the outstanding attacker of an otherwise mediocre side — while beside him an eighteen-year-old named Savelli emerged with ten goals of his own, a green shoot in hard ground. Around them the regular eleven assembled itself with the stubbornness of habit: Bruno Midali in goal; Bronzini — Pietro to one chronicler, Rinaldo to another, the first name disputed to this day — and Umberto Soldati in defence; Soldera, Alfredo De Franceschini, Oreste Perfetti and Tiziano Ballarin across the middle; Pin and Venerino Papa in attack. Say the names slowly. They are not famous. They kept the club alive.

Pin's story runs far past this chapter, and it is worth running ahead for a moment, because 1923 is where his legend gathers weight. He would give Milan eleven seasons; on the nineteenth of September 1926 it was he who scored the very first goal at the new San Siro, so that the great arena's opening line belongs to him forever. The club's own records count 236 official appearances and 106 goals — Wikipedia, ever the trimmer of legends, prefers 233 and 103 — and either way he retired among the greatest marksmen Milan has produced. He later returned to coach the side, and he died where he was born, in Milan, on the first of April 1955. In the grey years, Pin was the reason to watch. That is a career.

Autumn at Viale Lombardia

The autumn began with a slap. On the seventh of October, at Viale Lombardia, Torino won three-nil, and the new season announced that it would be extending no credit. Milan drew 2-2 at Legnano, then beat Bologna 1-0 at home on the twenty-first of October — a win with last spring's ghost folded inside it — and drew 1-1 at Andrea Doria. November was a month without mercy: Pro Vercelli came to Milan and won 3-1; Milan went to Spezia and lost 2-1 at the Picco — the second time in the calendar year that scoreline had gone against them, Venerino Papa's reply not enough; Pisa held them 2-2; then Cremonese, on the twenty-fifth, carried a 1-0 away from Viale Lombardia itself. December offered a 1-1 with S.P.A.L. in Ferrara and, on the ninth, a 2-1 over Hellas Verona to close the calendar year on a small, warm note.

The full season, completed in 1924, would land Milan eighth of twelve: twenty-two matches, seven wins, five draws, ten defeats, thirty-eight goals scored and forty-four conceded, nineteen points. The split tells its own crooked story — at home six wins, five defeats and not a single draw, as though Viale Lombardia refused all half-measures; away a solitary win against five draws and five losses. A team that gambled at home and hid on the road is a team without a settled idea of itself, and nobody who watched the amateurs of via Orefici needed the final table to tell them so.

The Verdict of the Ledger

So what was 1923? No trophy and no tragedy; a fourth place fading toward an eighth; a season of ten draws and an autumn slap; one revolution in a waistcoat — the first trainer in the club's history — and one boy with an intoxicating dribble. The Lean Years earned their name honestly that season, while Genoa went unbeaten and the game itself turned professional around a club still voting on principle for the past. But leanness is not emptiness. A club is kept alive in such years by its stubborn furniture: a president who pays, a captain who anchors, a secretary who keeps the minutes, a café table where the conversation never quite dies.

It is worth remembering, from this far shore, how small that world was. Milan in 1923 barely travelled beyond northern Italy — Udine was an expedition, Viareggio an adventure — and the idea that the rossonero cause would one day be kept alive before dawn in a clubroom on the other side of the planet, in Adelaide, would have sounded like a fable told after too much Barbera. The club would not set foot in Australia for another fifty-seven years, not until an end-of-season tour in May 1980 that reached Adelaide itself, a South Australian XI beaten 3-1 on the twenty-eighth of May. And yet the seed of all that distance is here, in the grey of 1923: a club too poor for glamour and too proud to die, watched by people who came anyway. That is the whole of football, and it is the verdict on the year — nothing was won, and nothing was lost that mattered.