A Desk at Pirelli, a Bench at Milan

Written in the Margin

Eighth of twelve in the spring; eighth of thirteen in the autumn. The calendar year of 1924 straddled two championships the way a farmhouse straddles a provincial border, paying taxes to both and belonging wholly to neither: in the spring Milan closed out the campaign of 1923-24, in the autumn it opened the campaign of 1924-25, and in each of them, with a symmetry that would be comic were it not so quietly sad, the club finished eighth in Girone B of the Lega Nord. Two eighths, the schoolboy will tell you brightly, make a quarter. In football they make nothing at all. History prints such years in the margin — though the margin, as every reader of old missals knows, is where the most human annotations are found.

The championship of those years was not yet the single, merciless table we now know. It was a northern tournament of regional groups, feeding its finalists upward toward a national crown the way the Alpine streams feed the Po, and Milan in 1924 fed nothing upward and reached neither final. The 1923-24 title went to Genoa; the 1924-25 title — the first in that city's history — went to Bologna. Milan, meanwhile, held fast to its amateur convictions and its old habit of recruiting from the Lombard plain while the rest of Italian football drifted, hungrily and without apology, toward professionalism. The club watched that drift with the disdain of a nobleman watching the neighbours sell the family silver, and it paid for its fine feelings the only way the table permits: in eighth places.

Spring on Viale Lombardia

The season sheet of 1923-24 reads like a doctor's chart for a patient who is neither dying nor well: seven wins, five draws, ten defeats from twenty-two matches; thirty-eight goals scored and forty-four conceded; nineteen points and a goal difference of minus six. The club's own historians have called the campaign mediocre and disappointing, and they are right on both counts. But a chart, like a chest X-ray, shows everything except the soul, and the soul of that spring deserves a slower reading.

It wore, first of all, the armband of Francesco Soldera, captain in his tenth season at the club — a decade of service in an age when service was the whole wage, when a man gave his Sundays to these colours and asked in return only the Sundays themselves. Around him the goals were shared between the established and the improbable: Giuseppe Santagostino finished the season with sixteen, an honest harvest, while beside him a boy of eighteen named Alessandro Savelli scored ten and was spoken of as a revelation, which is what we always call the young before we have had time to disappoint them or they us.

The matches themselves were the kind an old supporter recounts by the stove, out of order and out of proportion, which is the correct way to recount them. Torino came to the Campo Milan on Viale Lombardia and won 3-0 — the kind of home defeat a crowd takes personally; Torino and Milan also shared a lively 3-3, six goals flung about like coins at a wedding. At Pisa the team went two goals down and hauled itself back to 2-2, and I ask you to sit a moment with that result, because a 2-2 rescued from the dead fills no cabinet and warms no committee room, and yet it is precisely the sort of afternoon that keeps a supporter's faith alive through a decade of eighth places — the proof, renewed at intervals like a sacrament, that the team will not simply lie down.

And the campaign at least knew how to leave the stage: on the thirteenth of April, at the Campo Milan on Viale Lombardia, Novese were sent home 5-0 — two goals apiece for Santagostino and the boy Savelli, one for Cevenini. The five-one belongs to another afternoon altogether, Pisa on the same grass six weeks earlier, Soldera opening after four minutes and Sbrana answering seven minutes later. Two five-goal Sundays in a single spring, from a side that lost ten of its twenty-two: the ledger of that season never did agree with its temperament.

The Man Who Came Home from Paris

In June 1924 Vittorio Pozzo stood on a touchline in Paris as commissioner of the Italian national team and watched Switzerland beat his Italy 2-1 in the quarter-final of the Olympic tournament. He resigned — men resigned in those days, it was considered part of the job, like the overcoat — and he came home to Milan, where the Austrian Ferdi Oppenheim had just overseen the spring's mediocrity and was on his way out of the story.

What Pozzo came home to was this: a desk at the Pirelli tyre company — the firm, it will not have escaped you, of Piero Pirelli, who happened also to be the president of the Milan Football Club — a sideline in journalism, and the Milan bench, taken up for the new season — his first match a 2-0 over Andrea Doria on the 5th of October 1924 — and kept until the January of 1926. Consider, then, the tableau: the man who would one day become the only manager in the history of the game to win the World Cup twice — 1934 and 1938, with Olympic gold in 1936 set between them like a jewel between two crowns — beginning his Milan chapter as an employee coaching his employer's football team toward the middle of a regional table.

And he did it as a private darkness closed around him, for the wife to whom he had hurried home from Paris was gravely ill, and would shortly be taken from him. Football's history books love their marble men, their destiny-laden portraits; the truth of 1924 wants no marble at all — a man carrying his grief between home and the Campo Milan, inheriting a squad whose limited technical calibre the Italian chroniclers recorded without mercy, and finding, in the space between grief and mediocrity, the discipline simply to continue. If you want to know where the iron of the 1930s was forged, do not look first at the triumphs. Look here.

New Blood from Vanished Empires

The summer of 1924 rebuilt the attack with a thrift that was itself a Lombard signature: no extravagance, a little cunning, a faith that patience would bind it all together. From Budapest came József Bánás, thirty years old, a Hungarian playmaker raised at Ferencváros and arrived by way of Teplitz, engaged to run the midfield, which he duly did across twenty appearances — bred to the Danubian game that treated the ball as an instrument of thought rather than a projectile, one of those travelling Hungarians who moved between the cities of Europe like bandsmen between engagements, the whole craft of the game packed in a cardboard suitcase. From Pola came Rodolfo Ostromann, twenty-one, a striker born in a city that had been Austrian Istria when he arrived in the world — a child of a vanished empire, come to score goals for the industrial capital of a kingdom that was itself, that very year, ceasing to be what it had been. With them arrived a defender, Alessandro Schienoni, of whom more later, for he is the part of 1924 that the next decade would keep.

They joined an intake from the previous season — the forward Carlo Cevenini, arrived from Crema, and the goalkeeper Luigi Binda, from Novara — while the veteran midfielder Ernesto Morandi took his leave, as veterans do, quietly and mid-paragraph. And the armband changed arms: from Soldera it passed to Bronzini. Pietro, says the season record; yet the club's own register of players knows that same long-serving midfielder as Rinaldo, and the two accounts decline to tell us whether these were one man under two names, two brothers, or the small treason of a transcriber's pen. Most years leave the historian a dispute over decimals; this one leaves a dispute over a man. History at this distance is a photograph of a photograph, and we honour it best by admitting the blur.

Three Sundays and a Trophy

The new season opened at the Campo Milan on Viale Lombardia — San Siro existed then only in Piero Pirelli's imagination and, one presumes, in his accountants' cold sweats, for the great stadium he was financing would not open its gates until 1926. On the 19th of October Milan beat Derthona 3-2 at home, a win of the sweating, honest kind. A week later, on the 26th, Juventus scored five in Turin and Milan, admirably and uselessly, scored three — a 5-3 defeat being the kind of afternoon in which the beaten side provides half the spectacle and takes home none of it. On the 14th of December Livorno came north and went home beaten 4-2.

Where that campaign came to rest — the balance of it, the one miserly draw running through it like a hairline crack, the goals Ostromann took from it and the ones Santagostino somehow could not — is business for the spring, and the spring is business for the next chapter; a column that is not totted up until May has no right to be read out in December. Say only this much in advance, because it is a symmetry too neat to lose: when the accounts were finally closed, the goal difference stood at minus six, the identical minus six of the season before, as though the club had negotiated a fixed exchange rate with misfortune.

There was, at least, one consolation with a handle and a plinth: the first edition of the Trofeo Lombardi e Macchi, a challenge trophy the club had organised itself, was won at Inter's expense — the sole satisfaction of the season, the almanacs admit, and yet whatever else that lean year withheld, it did not withhold the oldest pleasure the city offers. And Pozzo left one mark that outlasted every result: Alessandro Schienoni, blooded across twenty matches in 1924-25, would go on to make some two hundred and eleven appearances for Milan across a decade. Trophies of the serious sort the maestro could not conjure from this squad; a defender who stayed ten years he could — the kind of bequest nobody applauds on the day and everybody lives off afterward.

The Shadow over the City

It would be indecent to write of 1924 in Italy and speak only of football. On the 10th of June the socialist deputy Giacomo Matteotti — who had stood up in parliament and denounced the fraud of the recent elections, knowing precisely what such standing up now cost — was abducted and murdered, and the crisis that followed did not topple Mussolini but hardened him, pushing the country toward open one-party rule by the first weeks of 1925. The parliamentary Italy into which the Milan Football Club had been born was ending in those very months, and every Sunday crowd on Viale Lombardia gathered inside that ending, whether it looked up from the pitch or not.

Milan was Italy's industrial capital, and the club sat squarely inside that world of chimneys and shift-whistles: bankrolled by the Pirelli dynasty, presided over by Piero Pirelli — fifteen years, in 1924, into a patronage that would stretch across nearly two decades — its new coach on the company payroll, its future stadium taking shape on the president's drawing boards. One may smile at the cosiness of it, the president employing his own manager as one employs a chauffeur; one should also note what the arrangement was quietly building, for out of that tyre fortune would rise, in 1926, the ground at San Siro. That name can wait its turn.

What the year left behind fits in one breath: two eighth places, one either side of the summer; a captain's name blurred between Pietro and Rinaldo; a boy from a vanished empire whose goals the following chapter must count; a Hungarian running the midfield out of a cardboard suitcase; a revelation of eighteen in the spring; a trophy lifted off Inter, because some consolations are eternal. And through it all a man crossing the industrial city from a desk at Pirelli to a touchline on Viale Lombardia, carrying a grief he could not put down, while beyond the gates the country finished becoming something else. The squad he coached came eighth. The habit he kept — of continuing, simply continuing — would one day hold up two World Cups. In 1924 it held up one man at the edge of a modest pitch. The rest of the iron came later.