Five Million Lire in the Mud

The Third of January

On the third of January 1925, Mussolini stood before parliament and delivered the speech from which historians date the dictatorship proper. From that morning the country's public life was conducted with the shutters drawn, and calcio — never as innocent as its poets pretend — breathed the same air as everything else. The championship of the day, the Prima Divisione with its Lega Nord and Lega Sud and its regional gironi feeding a national final, was already being leaned upon: the 1924-25 title, disputed to the end between Bologna and Genoa, would go to Bologna beneath a shadow of Fascist pressure that no table of results has ever quite laundered.

And Milan? Milan were lean. That is the honest word for the era and I will not gild it. The club of Piero Pirelli — president since 1909, his fortune vulcanised in tyres — sat in Girone B of the northern league with Pietro Bronzini wearing the armband, and on the bench, since October 1924, a serious Turinese of thirty-eight named Vittorio Pozzo, whom I shall call the Schoolmaster of Turin, because everything about him suggested method and the classroom, and because history, with her long memory, would one day hand him the whole of Italy for a class. In 1925 nobody suspected it. In 1925 he was merely a man losing football matches. A lean club is not for that reason an unloved one, but the distinction consoles nobody in February.

An Honest Mediocrity

The numbers of the 1924-25 season, which ran through to the tenth of May, are the numbers of an honest mediocrity, and honest mediocrity deserves to be read out in full rather than hidden: twenty-four matches, ten won, one drawn, thirteen lost; forty-five goals scored and fifty-one conceded; twenty-one points and eighth place. Above Milan the table told the story of other cities' pride — Bologna champions of the group with thirty-four points, Pro Vercelli and Juventus chasing on thirty-two apiece — while around them Padova and Livorno, Alessandria and Novara, Andrea Doria and Sampierdarenese, Mantova, SPAL and Derthona filled out a girone of thirteen in which Milan's eighth place was neither shipwreck nor shelter. A team that wins ten and loses thirteen is not a bad team; it is a team without a spine, which is worse, because a bad team knows what it is and a spineless one keeps hoping.

One afternoon stands apart. On the twenty-second of February 1925, Milan drew 0-0 at home with Juventus — the solitary draw of the entire campaign, a single armistice in a season of battles won or lost outright, and earned against one of the two sides chasing Bologna at that. One draw in twenty-four matches: this was a team that went out each Sunday and either took the afternoon or was taken by it, and a cannier side would have haggled a few of those thirteen defeats down to a point apiece. This one never learned how. There are worse failings in a football team than not knowing how to settle. The season closed on the tenth of May away at Padova, and spring turned to summer with nothing to show but the numbers, and numbers, unlike memories, do not keep you warm.

The Istrian and the Magyar

What light the side had that year came in from the east. Rodolfo Ostromann — Ostromann II on the team-sheets, the Istrian to this column — came to Milan out of the summer the previous chapter has already unpacked, and in his first season he scored eighteen goals in roughly twenty-one appearances, which is the sort of ratio that makes a striker beloved before he is even understood. Eighteen of the team's forty-five: better than a third of the whole harvest carried in from one man's field. Read those two figures together — a side that loses thirteen matches and still scores forty-five is a side with one true finisher and not much order behind him, and Ostromann was that finisher: young, quick, and, as the coming season would prove, tragically mortal in the way footballers are. What he carried in, the old hands could not: Giuseppe Santagostino, sixteen goals only a season earlier, faded to four in twenty-one appearances, and 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.

Behind him played the other import, József Bánás — the Magyar in my private taxonomy — whose Ferencváros schooling and Bohemian apprenticeship were set down in these pages a year ago. He ran the midfield with an elder's economy while a young defender named Alessandro Schienoni broke through behind him and Bronzini captained the whole modest enterprise. An Istrian to finish, a Hungarian to conceive, a Lombard to lead: it was a plausible skeleton for a team. What it lacked was fortune, and fortune, as we shall see, was preparing not merely to withhold herself but to turn actively cruel.

Pozzo Before Pozzo

Vittorio Pozzo had a Milan past so slender it barely cast a shadow — a single match played for the club back in 1910 — and how he came to the bench in the autumn of 1924, from the Paris touchline to the desk at Pirelli, the previous chapter has told at its proper length. Only the sequel concerns me here. The opening October afternoon let the city dream for a week; the dream did not survive the winter. The season collapsed under those thirteen defeats to eighth place, and the Schoolmaster discovered what every teacher eventually learns — that method without material is a lecture delivered to an empty room. His whole Milan tenure would come to thirty-three matches and few good memories, a footnote set in the smallest type the era could find. Set that beside the conquests the last chapter has already promised him, and leave the two accounts open on the same table: greatness and failure are not opposites; they are, quite often, neighbours who share a landing and pretend not to know each other.

An Autumn of Sixes and Snow

The 1925-26 campaign opened in October like a door opening onto a stairwell with no stairs. On the fourth, at home, Milan lost 1-4 to Cremonese; on the eleventh they went down 2-1 at Genoa; on the eighteenth came a breath of relief, 3-1 over Mantova; and then, on the twenty-fifth of October 1925, at Corso Marsiglia in Turin, the season found its true face. Juventus six, Milan nil. I shall call it the six of Corso Marsiglia and repeat the phrase as one repeats the name of a battle, because that is what it was — not an upset, not an accident, but a public demonstration of the distance between a side assembling an empire and a side losing its bones.

November kept the mood. Alessandria won a wild one, 4-3; and on the twenty-second the fog rolled over the pitch and forced the suspension of Milan-Padova after seven minutes — seven minutes! — ninety promised and seven delivered, the briefest football of the whole grey winter. Pro Vercelli beat them 3-1 on the twenty-ninth. December offered small consolations, a 4-2 over Parma and a 1-0 carried home from Reggiana, before the snow cancelled the Livorno match on the twentieth and closed the calendar year the way November's weather had punctuated it: with the weather as co-author of the fixture list.

Beneath the results ran the true cruelty of the season. Ostromann, the eighteen-goal Istrian of the previous spring, managed only a couple of appearances before an injury so serious it compromised the rest of his career; and the Magyar Bánás wrecked a knee against Alessandria late in the campaign and never played again. Two foreign stars, the finisher and the brain, both broken within months of each other — a team's east wind cut off at the border. When Milan later in the season beat Pro Vercelli 4-0, the win was reportedly dedicated to the injured Bánás, and the gesture tells you what the dressing room understood: that the campaign's real scoreline was not any single result but the sight of two careers being carried off the field.

Scaffolding by the Racecourse

And now the paradox that makes 1925 worth a chapter rather than a footnote. In this very year — the year of the six of Corso Marsiglia, the autumn a match lasted seven minutes — ground was broken beside the San Siro racecourse for the Nuovo Stadio Calcistico San Siro, conceived and financed by the president himself. Piero Pirelli, watching his team labour in the middle of the table, reached into the tyre fortune and put down five million lire to raise, in thirteen months, a football ground for the future. Surveyors' pegs in a wet meadow; then footings; then the first grey courses climbing inside their timber scaffolding: it was the kind of wager that separates a president from a proprietor, for proprietors invest in what is, and presidents — the real ones — invest in what they insist will be.

When the house was finally opened, the housewarming would be bitter — but that party, and the guests who spoiled it, are laid out at their proper length in the chapter that follows this one, and it would be discourteous to eat the meal in the kitchen. Hold instead the two pictures side by side, as a Milanese of that winter was obliged to: a first team sliding through a grey season, and, rising out of the same mud west of the city, behind its scaffolding, the concrete skeleton of what would become the most famous football house in Italy. One of the pictures sank slowly towards spring; the other went up with the scaffolding.

What the Snow Left Standing

And there, at the snow, this chapter stops — not because the season did, but because a year is an arbitrary knife and the calendar happens to be holding the handle. What the spring eventually made of that ruined autumn, the tally it set down, the men who stepped into the holes left by the Istrian and the Magyar, and the Schoolmaster's own quiet departure: all of it falls the far side of the new year, and all of it is told where it happened, under 1926. Let it wait there. A farewell told in haste only has to be told again, and the reader deserves better than an echo.

Thirteen defeats in a single season; a six-goal lesson in Turin; two imported talents broken like carnival crockery; seven minutes of football lost to the November fog; a Sunday lost to snow. And still the year refuses to stay grey, because through every one of those Sundays the work beside the racecourse went on, hod by hod, course by course, indifferent to the table. The team of 1925 has been forgotten by everyone but the archivists. The decision of 1925 — Pirelli's five million lire of stubbornness — is standing there still, west of the city. The scaffolding of that winter came down long ago. The concrete never has.