Buying the Forwards Who Beat You

Concrete on the Western Edge

All through 1927 the city woke to the same new silhouette on its western edge, out where the streets gave way to meadow and market garden: four severe stands, one of them roofed against the Lombard rain, paid for — every brick, every bolt — out of the pocket of the president, Piero Pirelli, heir of the tyre dynasty. How that ground was raised and how it was opened has been told in the previous year's chapter; what belongs here is the plainer fact that 1927 was the first whole calendar year Milan spent living in it, and that the football played inside remained, for the moment, unworthy of the house. On the touchline stood Herbert Burgess still, the Englishman entrusted, across the season that ended in the summer and the one that began in the autumn, with the oldest of football's impossible tasks: making a team grow as fast as its stadium.

Beyond the turnstiles, Italy was in the fifth year of Mussolini's regime. April brought the Carta del Lavoro; December would bring the decree fixing the lira at the deflationary altitude of Quota 90, a revaluation that squeezed wages and industry alike — including the Pirelli factories whose profits had poured the stadium's concrete. Football itself had been reorganised the year before under the Carta di Viareggio, centralised and disciplined like everything else in the peninsula, and was being marched toward the single national league that would arrive in 1929-30. In a two-club city, both Milan and Inter laboured near the foot of the elite, and within a year the regime would force Inter into the merger that produced Ambrosiana. Against all this, Pirelli's privately financed arena stood like a declaration: whatever the state might claim, this belonged to Milan.

Snow, Replays and the Road to Rome

The playing year opened with a promise it had no intention of keeping. On 9 January, at San Siro, Milan beat Torino 3-1 — Torino, no less, the side that would finish the spring as the strongest in Italy — and for an afternoon the new ground and the old colours seemed made for one another. A fortnight later the team travelled to Cremona to settle a fixture the calendar had already mangled once, and won the replay 2-1; on 13 February Livorno were dispatched 3-0 at home, and qualification began to look almost serene.

Winter, however, kept its own fixture list. The meeting with Alessandria had been suspended and postponed and buried under snow until it was less a football match than a hostage of the weather, and when it was finally replayed on 27 February at the Campo degli Orti, Milan lost it 3-1. A week later came a colder lesson still: 6 March, at the Sterlino, Bologna 4-1 Milan, the kind of scoreline that tells a manager precisely how far his side stands from the true aristocracy.

Milan answered as honest teams answer, with goals at home and stubbornness away: 5-2 over Padova at San Siro on 13 March, then a 3-2 win in Rome against Fortitudo at the Stadio Nazionale on 20 March, the capital conceding, for once, to the province of the north. Second place in the qualifying Girone B, level with Bologna and two adrift of Torino — eighteen matches, eleven won, two drawn, five lost, forty-one goals scored against twenty-seven conceded, twenty-four points. The snowbound replays muddled the intermediate standings, and the almanacs still disagree over them; on the destination they are unanimous. Milan were through to the final round of six, where a season's truths are told.

Six Go Into the Furnace

It began, deceptively, with a derby. On 3 April, away to Internazionale, Milan won 2-1, and the faithful permitted themselves the most dangerous of luxuries, which is hope. But a final group of six — Bologna, Genoa, Internazionale, Juventus, Torino and Milan — is a furnace, and furnaces are indifferent to hope. On 10 April Bologna won 2-1; on 1 May Milan took the postponed first-round match against Genoa 4-2 at San Siro, one last full-throated afternoon; and then the descent proper: 2-3 to Torino at home on 8 May, 0-2 to Juventus on 15 May, 2-0 to Genoa away on 22 May.

There was one bright interlude, and it came in a different competition altogether. On 26 May, in the third round of the Coppa Italia, Milan went to Gea Firenze and won 5-1 — five goals on the Tuscan grass that the federation's clerks, Gea having withdrawn from the tournament, would later flatten into a two-nil forfeit on paper — the sort of afternoon that counts for nothing and is remembered anyway. June resumed the punishment: 1-1 with Internazionale on the 5th, 1-1 with Bologna on the 12th, then 3-0 to Torino in Turin on the 19th.

And then July, and the sentence. On the 10th, at Corso Marsiglia in Turin, in the full glare of summer, Juventus beat Milan 8-2 — the heaviest defeat of the season, an afternoon on which every deficiency of the year was put on public display, one by one. The final accounting of the girone finale: six points, two wins, two draws, six defeats. Sixth of six. Last, in the new house that had been built for first.

There is a coda. Torino won that final group on the pitch and then lost it in a courtroom: the Allemandi match-fixing case saw the scudetto revoked and the championship of 1926-27 left unassigned, so that the first title of the unified national era stands in the record books as a blank — a scudetto-shaped silence. Some record it to this day as Torino's and others as nobody's, and the disagreement is simply left standing. The new Italy of football had barely been born and had already produced its first scandal; the old Italy, watching from the touchline, permitted itself no surprise. So the one verdict of 1927 that history would remember was handed down by a tribunal, not a referee; it struck out the top line of the table and left the bottom line — Milan's line — exactly where July had put it.

The Men Who Carried the Year

Every lean season has its honest labourers, and 1926-27 had Gianangelo Barzan, the captain, who made 27 appearances and scored six goals, every one of them from the penalty spot — a captain's trade, converting what others had earned. The top scorer was Alessandro Savelli, eleven in the league and twelve in all; Carlo Cevenini added ten, Rodolfo Ostromann and Giuseppe Santagostino nine apiece, and the debutant Paride Pasqualetto seven in his first season, a young man arriving just in time to learn how heavy the shirt could be.

In midfield sat the Hungarian Arpad Hajos, 27 appearances and three goals, keeping the side's time the way a town band keeps a procession's — steady, unglamorous, missed only when it stops. Behind them, Giuseppe Carmignato and Giuseppe Rossoni divided the gloves, and with the gloves the bruises, guarding a defence that in the final group was abandoned rather more often than it was protected.

The Last of the Milkman's Sons

Now the small history, which in football is always the true history. In the Milan of the early century there lived a milkman whose five sons all became footballers: Aldo, Mario, Luigi — the great 'Zizi' — Cesare and Carlo, numbered by the newspapers like popes, Cevenini I to V. In 1920-21 all five had famously lined up together for Inter, a tale still told wherever old men gather to insist that the past was warmer. Carlo, born in Milan on 8 March 1901, was the youngest of the five, and it fell to him to be the last of the name in red and black.

He had first worn Milan's shirt as a boy of sixteen in 1917-18, then wandered as journeymen wander — Inter, Novese, Crema — before coming home in 1923 for a second spell, and in 1926-27 he gave the club ten goals in its grimmest campaign. Seven rossonero seasons in all, three before the wandering and four after; ninety-two official appearances and thirty-four goals, and the last of those appearances — the fixture list is a novelist without pity — was the 8-2 in Turin. In the summer of 1927 he moved to Lazio, and the name Cevenini left Milan quietly, without ceremony, at the precise moment the club was noisily assembling its future.

He was, like most of his generation, a worker as well as a player — the railways employed him away from the pitch — and the game would carry him further than his father's milk rounds ever promised: to Tunis, where from 1935 to 1937 he coached the Squadra Italia, and then to the amateur fields of Rome, the city where he died on 9 January 1965. Football is generous with its exits to those who ask little of them.

The New Milan

The response to sixth-of-six was not resignation. In the summer of 1927, with Innocente Corti serving as sporting director, the club went to market with intent — and went, above all, to Turin. From Juventus, the very Juventus of the 8-2, came the forwards Piero Pastore and Giuseppe Torriani: beaten by eight in July, Milan answered by buying two of the beaters. From Cremonese came Mariano Tansini, another man for the attack, and the goalkeeper Dario Compiani. The captain's band was handed to Abdon Sgarbi, twenty-four years old, a young man asked to lead what the chroniclers were already calling the 'new Milan'. And out through the same door went the old guard: Cevenini to Lazio, and Savelli, the top scorer, gone in the very summer the team resolved to score more.

The new Milan introduced itself with thunder. Having sat out the opening matchday, the team took the field at San Siro on 2 October and beat Napoli 5-1, and the debutant Torriani — lately of Juventus — scored a hat-trick on his first afternoon in red and black, with Stefano Aigotti and Pastore completing the score. A tripletta on debut, in the new stadium, against southern opposition: had 1927 ended that evening, the year would be remembered as a festival.

An Autumn of Even Scores

It did not end that evening. The thunder did not last, and the autumn settled into the drawn match: 2-2 with Reggiana on 9 October; 1-1 at Pro Vercelli on the 16th; a 2-1 win over Cremonese on the 30th to keep the season respectable; 1-1 with Genoa on 13 November; 2-2 with Alessandria on the 27th — points gathered one at a time, and the table barely moving for them.

The away days were crueller. On 20 November Milan went to Rome and lost 3-1 to Lazio — Carlo Cevenini's new club. On 4 December Padova won 2-1; on the 8th, at San Siro itself, Torino — always Torino, that year — won 3-1. The season threatened to become a fair copy of the one before it.

Yet the year refused to end in surrender. On 11 December Milan won 3-1 at Brescia, and on 26 December, the feast of Santo Stefano, they closed 1927 by winning 2-1 in Naples, avenging nothing, promising something.

The Building and the Belief

The table said last of six in July, and the campaign begun in the autumn was gathering its points one draw at a time; the 8-2 in Turin would keep its full weight forever. And yet the year built more than it lost. Pirelli had raised, at his own expense, a stadium greater than his team, and in doing so had committed the club to an argument it would spend decades winning: that Milan's proper scale was forty thousand and rising, that the house must come before the household. Burgess kept an honest touchline; Barzan converted what there was to convert; the last of the milkman's five sons slipped away to Rome; and a twenty-four-year-old captain and a debutant with a hat-trick were handed the future and told to carry it.

These were the Lean Years, and the pride in them is of the unfashionable kind — the pride of paying for concrete in a devalued decade, of replaying snowbound fixtures until every one of them was settled, of losing 8-2 in the July sun and signing your conqueror's forwards by October. Out on the western edge the scaffolding was gone and the stands stood a year old, almost empty of honours, patient beyond regimes, lire and league formats alike. In 1927 Milan owned nothing but the building and the belief — and of the two, the belief was the harder thing to build.