Two Eighths and the Man from Paris

The Arithmetic of the Margin

There are years that history prints in capitals and years it consigns to the margin, and for the rossoneri 1924 belongs to the margin — though the margin, as every reader of old missals knows, is where the most human annotations are found. The calendar year 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, and 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. Eighth of twelve in the first; eighth of thirteen in the second. Two eighths, the schoolboy will tell you brightly, make a quarter. In football they make nothing at all.

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 in the only currency the table accepts: eighth places.

Spring on Viale Lombardia

The ledger 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 ledgers, like chest X-rays, show 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, a cold plate served at home; 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: the final day brought a 5-0 win over Pisa — two goals apiece for Santagostino and the boy Savelli, one for Cevenini — though the chroniclers confess in the same breath that the sources quarrel over the exact score, a clean five or a five with one answered, and there is something almost too fitting in that: a season of fog ending in a scoreline half-swallowed by the fog itself.

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 is smaller and infinitely more human — 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 reshaped the attack the way a prudent Lombard cook reshapes a risotto with whatever the market offers: no extravagance, a little cunning, a faith that patience will bind it all together. From Budapest came József Bánás, thirty years old, a Hungarian playmaker out of Ferencváros, engaged to run the midfield, which he duly did across twenty appearances — one of those itinerant Danubian professors of the game who carried football's grammar across borders 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, because he is the year's one true deposit in the bank of the future.

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, say the season ledgers, though 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. History at this distance is a photograph of a photograph; we honour it best by admitting the blur.

One Miserly Draw

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 football's version of a banquet at which you are also the roast. On the 14th of December Livorno came north and went home beaten 4-2.

The full accounting of 1924-25, when the spring had done its work, would read: ten wins, one draw, thirteen defeats; forty-five goals scored, fifty-one conceded; twenty-one points, eighth of thirteen, and a goal difference of minus six — the same minus six as the season before, as though the club had negotiated a fixed exchange rate with misfortune. But stop at the second figure. One draw in twenty-four matches. Here is a team constitutionally incapable of compromise, a team that went out each Sunday and either took the afternoon or was taken by it, and while the moralist in me deplores the waste — how many of those thirteen defeats might a wiser side have haggled down to a point? — the Lombard in me quietly approves. There are worse epitaphs for a season than: it refused to split the difference.

Ostromann repaid his transfer with eighteen goals in twenty-one appearances, which in a side conceding fifty-one is a striker's arithmetic of the highest order — the boy from Pola scoring almost alone against the tide. And Santagostino, sixteen goals only a season before, faded to four in twenty-one; the chronicle offers no reason and I will not invent one, for football needs no reason to giveth and taketh within the same eighteen months, and every supporter of every club has watched it happen to a favourite and looked away out of tenderness.

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 as for Pozzo's lasting gift, it wore the number of a defender: Alessandro Schienoni, blooded across twenty matches in 1924-25, who 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 foundation stone he could, and did, and foundation stones are the specialty of lean years — invisible at the time, indispensable ever after.

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 ledgers: 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, which is to say the cathedral in which everything afterward would be sung.

So this is 1924, entire: two eighth places and one miserly draw; a captain's name half-lost between Pietro and Rinaldo; a boy from a vanished empire scoring eighteen; a Hungarian professor conducting midfield; an eighteen-year-old revelation and a fading favourite; a trophy taken off Inter, because some consolations are eternal; and on the bench a man carrying a private grief along the touchline while the republic died outside the gates. Milan won nothing that year and lost nothing that mattered most, for it kept its stubborn, amateur, unfashionable self intact — and in a country learning, that exact year, how easily men could be made to stop being themselves, that was not nothing. The fat years count their trophies. The lean years count their character, and by that count 1924, eighth twice over, finishes rather higher up the table.