The Fog, the Schoolmaster and the Mud at San Siro

The Year the Fog Refused to Lift

Every Milanese winter begins the same way: the fog comes up off the Navigli like broth off the stove, swallows the trams, muffles the bells, and teaches the city, for a few months, the difficult art of not seeing clearly. In 1925 the whole of Italy took up that art. On the third of January, 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 in a fog thicker than anything the Po valley could distil, 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. This is the honest word for the era and I will not dress it in saffron. The club of Piero Pirelli — president since 1909, a tyre magnate of the kind Lombardy produces as reliably as it produces rice — 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 in the fog.

The Arithmetic of a Lean Spring

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 have its accounts read aloud 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 deserves its own line in the ledger. 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. There is something almost comic in it: a side incapable of moderation, that either feasted or starved, that treated the drawn match the way a Milanese treats an empty plate — as an insult to be avoided at nearly any cost. Twenty-three times they left the field with a verdict; once, against one of the girone's chasing pair, they left with a shrug. The season closed on the tenth of May away at Padova, and spring turned to summer with nothing to show but the arithmetic.

The Istrian and the Magyar

If there was seasoning in the risotto that year, it came from the east. Rodolfo Ostromann — Ostromann II on the team-sheets, the Istrian to this column — had arrived from Pola at twenty-one, and in his first Milan 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 the arithmetic again — 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.

Behind him played the other import, Jozsef Banas — the Magyar in my private taxonomy — a thirty-year-old playmaker raised at Ferencvaros and arrived by way of Teplitz, schooled in the Danubian game that treated the ball as an instrument of thought rather than a projectile. 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

Now the Schoolmaster. Vittorio Pozzo had a Milan past so slender it barely cast a shadow — a single match played for the club back in 1910 — and when the directors, sinking after the failure of the Austrian coach Ferdi Oppenheim, handed him the team in the autumn of 1924, they were hiring not a legend but a serious man with a reputation for method. His debut, on the fifth of October 1924, was bright: 2-0 at home over Andrea Doria, the kind of opening that lets a 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.

Here the historian permits himself the one luxury of his trade: the backward glance loaded with what came after. This same Pozzo, grey and joyless on the Milan bench, would within a decade lead Italy to the World Cup of 1934, retain it in 1938, and take Olympic gold in 1936 — the most celebrated manager his country would ever produce, the general of two world conquests. And his Milan interlude? Thirty-three matches, few good memories, a footnote written in fog. There is a moral here that I refuse to cheapen by stating it too plainly, so let me merely set it down and walk on: 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 mouthful 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 itself took a hand, rolling over the pitch and forcing the suspension of Milan-Padova after seven minutes — seven minutes! — as though the Lombard winter, having witnessed the six of Corso Marsiglia, had decided the kindest thing it could do for the Rossoneri was to hide them. 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 the fog had interrupted it: with the weather as co-author of the fixture list, and a team quietly grateful for every act of meteorological censorship.

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 Banas 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 Banas, 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.

While the Team Sank, a Cathedral Rose

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 year the fog stopped a match at 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 — a pure act of faith of the kind that separates a president from a proprietor. Proprietors invest in what is; presidents, the real ones, invest in what they insist will be.

The stadium would be inaugurated on the nineteenth of September 1926, and the gods of the Navigli, who have a taste for bitter herbs, arranged the housewarming: Inter beat Milan 6-3 in the opening match. Another six! But hold the two images 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, the concrete skeleton of what would become the most famous football house in Italy. The team of 1925 has been forgotten by everyone but the archivists. The decision of 1925 — Pirelli's five million lire of stubbornness — is still standing there today, beyond the Madonnina, with the Alps behind it on a clear morning.

The Verdict of a Grey Year

The season that had begun in that awful October played out to its ledger in the spring: twenty-two matches, ten won, two drawn, ten lost, forty-three scored, thirty-nine conceded, twenty-two points — eighth in the twelve-team girone by the group table's reckoning, though one respected ledger insists on seventh, and I record the quarrel rather than settle it, because a club's history should keep its disputed centimetres. Juventus won the group with thirty-seven points, confirming at leisure what Corso Marsiglia had advertised in an afternoon. It was the last season of the old Lega Nord and Lega Sud, and Milan secured their place in the coming Divisione Nazionale only in the closing rounds — survival, not glory, the campaign's one trophy.

The scorers' list reads like a field hospital's roll-call of replacements: Karl Muller, the dour, powerfully built Hungarian who stood in for the broken Ostromann, top-scored with twelve in twenty-two; Cevenini V added eight in fourteen; Santagostino six in seventeen. Carmignato kept goal eighteen times. And in the middle of the wreckage, a debut the club would spend years being grateful for: young Luigi Perversi, first seen in 1925-26, who would go on to pull the red-and-black shirt over his head three hundred and forty-one times. Lean years plant such seeds precisely because nobody is watching the nursery.

As for the Schoolmaster, his end came on the third of January 1926 — a 1-2 defeat at Sampierdarenese on the Villa Scassi pitch in Genoa, his thirty-third and final match — after which he walked away citing his work commitments, quietly, and by the accounts that survive provoking no great grief on either side of the parting. Note the date. One year to the day after Mussolini's speech had closed one Italy, Pozzo's farewell closed one Milan; I claim nothing for the coincidence except that history, like a good librettist, has an ear for anniversaries. Guido Moda took the bench, and the Schoolmaster of Turin went off towards the destiny nobody in Milan had managed to detect in him.

So what was 1925? A year of thirteen defeats and then ten more, of a six-goal lesson in Turin, of two imported talents broken like carnival crockery, of fog at seven minutes and snow at Christmas. And also: the year the ground was broken for San Siro, the year Perversi first appeared, the year a failing Milan manager began the long walk towards two World Cups. Those who follow the Diavolo from the far side of the world today, rising in the dark for distant kick-offs, will recognise the shape of the faith involved — loving the club not for what the table says but for what the club insists it will become. The table of 1925 said eighth. Pirelli's concrete, rising in the mud beyond the Madonnina, said otherwise; and the concrete, as usual, had the last word.