The Club That Met in a Beer-Hall

Via Ugo Foscolo

The address to know, in the January of 1923, was via Ugo Foscolo: a beer-hall called the Birreria Colombo, on whose tables sat the whole apparatus of Milan Football Club — the minutes, the team-sheets, the arguments. The club that met there still called itself, in the English fashion of its founders, Milan Football Club, and from that furniture it governed a doubled year. 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 a tram settles into its rails — the same bell, the same stops, the same arrival that is never anywhere new. 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 end the campaign 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 — an eleven of stalemates, and a stalemate every Sunday keeps a club breathing without ever making it strong.

The final table 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 nothing at all, and nobody at Viale Lombardia confused the two.

Sixty-One Minutes in Bologna

One afternoon that spring refuses to sit quietly. 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 official record writes it, with bureaucratic serenity, as a 2-0 away win. Honesty requires the whole of it: those ninety minutes were never completed, and 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 Bologna had come to Milan and taken eight goals off them — the November humiliation the previous chapter sets down in full, the one that sent the club out to find itself a coach. 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.

A Waistcoat and Two Addresses

Institutionally, the year wore a waistcoat. On the bench — an office barely a season old, and one the club's own annals still record with something close to wonder — worked Ferdi Oppenheim, hired the previous November and now in his first full year of doing for Milan what directors gathered around a table had always done for themselves: pick the team, shape the play, carry the blame. 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 remained, in the most literal sense, a café. Its winter seat was the beer-hall on via Ugo Foscolo; for 1923-24 the minutes and the arguments moved to the Bar Vittorio Emanuele at via Orefici 7 — from beer to coffee, 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.

Dribbling Ubriacante

The lamp of this grey year 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 he had made his debut on the second of October 1921, a 0-5 at home to Novara, as though the era were announcing its terms in advance. His contemporaries, groping for the way he moved, 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, and a hat-trick against Rivarolese.

When the new season opened in October he simply carried on, Change "with twenty-three in 1928-29" to "with twenty-four 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 in some chronicles, Rinaldo in others, and ever-present through all twenty-two matches of the spring campaign, the metronome of the recovery — 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 — and Pin, in these grey seasons, was the reason to come and watch them do it.

There was to be a great deal more of him. He would give Milan eleven seasons, and on the nineteenth of September 1926 it was Pin who scored the very first goal at the new San Siro, so that the great arena's opening line belongs to him forever. Replace with: "The club's own records count 236 official appearances and 106 goals, of which 233 appearances and 103 goals came in the championship alone." Either way he retired among the greatest marksmen Milan has produced. He came back in time to coach the side, and he died where he was born, in Milan, on the first of April 1955. The rest of it belongs to years this book has yet to reach.

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 Furniture That Held

No trophy, then, and no tragedy; a fourth place fading toward an eighth; ten draws, an autumn slap, one revolution in a waistcoat and one boy whose dribble made grown defenders doubt their legs. 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 survives such years on its stubborn furniture: a president who pays, a captain who anchors, a secretary who keeps the minutes, a table where the conversation never quite dies.

It is worth remembering how small that world was. Milan in 1923 barely travelled beyond northern Italy — Udine was an expedition, Viareggio an adventure. And yet everything that followed is already seated at that table: a club too poor for glamour and too proud to die, watched by people who came anyway. That is the whole of football, and in 1923 it fitted, all of it, on one marble table-top at via Orefici 7.