The Year the Captain Went Home

The Fog Over the Navigli

There are years that announce themselves like trumpets and years that arrive like the fog off the Navigli — seeping under doors, settling on the shoulders of men in grey overcoats, asking nothing and promising less — and 1933 came to Milan in the second manner. Italy was a decade into Fascist rule, and that January the regime founded the Istituto per la Ricostruzione Industriale, the great crutch built to hold up banks and industries that the world's Depression had bent at the knee; Milan, being the country's workshop, felt the squeeze before anyone else — in orders, in wages, in the small arithmetic by which a working man decides whether Sunday's football is bread or a luxury. The city fed on rice and patience that year. Its red-and-black half fed mostly on patience.

Football, at least, had assumed its modern shape: one national division, Serie A, born in 1929-30, eighteen clubs, thirty-four Sundays, a single table that spared nobody the truth about themselves. And the truth of the early thirties was written in black and white. Juventus, professional to their fingertips, were in the middle of what would become five consecutive scudetti, and the two seasons that 1933 straddled would hand them the third and the fourth of the run. Milan, still run on austere, semi-amateur lines while their rivals professionalised, drifted where austerity always drifts: into mid-table, that grey purgatory which punishes the faithful more subtly than relegation ever could, because it asks them to keep hoping without ever giving hope a reason.

A Spring Without a Harvest

The 1932-33 season, which the new year inherited at its halfway mark, closed in June the way a failed risotto finishes — not with catastrophe but with the dull discovery that nothing has bound together. The club's own chroniclers at magliarossonera would file it away as another modest placing, another season that went straight back to disappointing, and the spring supplied the evidence with bureaucratic thoroughness: a 5-1 flaying in Florence on the last day of April; a 3-3 home draw with Alessandria; a goalless afternoon in Turin against Torino; then, on 28 May, a 0-3 home defeat to Bologna, which is the kind of result that empties a ground half an hour before the whistle. Lazio beat them 2-0 in Rome on 4 June, Juventus dismissed them 3-0 in Turin a week later, Triestina carried a 2-2 draw away from Milan, and the whole enterprise expired on 25 June at Casale, goalless, in the final round. Eleventh place: eleven wins, ten draws, thirteen defeats, fifty-seven scored, sixty-two conceded, thirty-two points. The ledger of a season that never learned its own name.

And yet the attack could cook. Mario Romani, arrived from SPAL, was enjoying the golden season of his life — nineteen goals in thirty-one matches, a centre-forward's harvest gathered in a mid-table field — while Pietro Arcari, third of that name in the registers and so forever Arcari III, scored ten, the captain Magnozzi ten, and a debutant named Giovanni Moretti nine. When the mood took them they were generous to the point of scandal: Padova were beaten 6-2 on 5 March, Pro Patria 5-0 a fortnight later. When it did not, they were flattened 4-0 in Rome in February and 5-1 in Florence in April. A team, in short, that had learned how to feast and had never learned how to eat regularly — and over a thirty-four-course season it is the eating regularly, not the feasting, that makes champions.

The Derby Belongs to the Others

Twice in 1933 the city staged its private argument, and twice Milan lost it. On 9 April, at San Siro, young Moretti gave the rossoneri a seventh-minute lead over Ambrosiana-Inter — for that was Internazionale's name in the Fascist years — and for a short while the afternoon belonged to the home side. It finished 1-3. The neighbours, as they so often did in that decade, had simply waited for the argument to come to them.

The return, on 1 November at the Arena Civica, was worse because it was clearer. Giuseppe Meazza — the derby's proprietor in those years, and the measure of everything Italian football was becoming — scored in the 56th minute and again in the 82nd, with Pitto adding a goal between them in the 66th: 3-0, and no appeal. There are defeats that sting and defeats that instruct, and this one instructed. Ambrosiana were professional, polished, pitiless; Milan were counting their lire in the club offices and holding to old virtues in a new world. The Madonnina, gold above the November fog, looked down on both halves of her city with the same expression — but that year one half had considerably more to thank her for.

Men in Grey Coats

Behind the results, the institution itself was changing hands in the manner of the age — quietly, administratively, without ceremony. Mario Benazzoli, president since 1929, left office in 1933, and the chair he vacated stood briefly empty, tended by Luigi Ravasco under the splendidly period title of Commissario Straordinario before Ravasco assumed the presidency proper, which he would hold until 1935. The secretary through 1932-33 was Angelo Monti, one of those indispensable men who keep football clubs alive with ledgers rather than legs. The turnover told its own quiet story: a club under financial strain, balancing books in the semi-amateur fashion while rivals down the road in Turin were building a dynasty on wages.

The bench turned over too, though the accent upon it did not. József Bánás, the Hungarian who had coached Milan since 1931, departed with the old season; József Viola, another Hungarian, took his place for the new one — the Danubian school passing the baton to itself, as it did all across the Italian game in those years. Posterity cannot even agree on the new man's spelling, Viola in some records and Violak in others, which seems fitting enough for a season in which Milan themselves could not settle on a single identity from one Sunday to the next.

The Captain Goes Home

Every year keeps one human story beneath the ledgers, and 1933's wears the armband. Mario Magnozzi was Livorno-born — 20 March 1902, a son of the Tyrrhenian port — and Livorno-made: the Italian championship's leading scorer in 1924-25, an international twenty-nine times over with thirteen goals for Italy, a bronze medallist with the azzurri at the Amsterdam Olympics of 1928. His city let him go to Milan only in 1930, when he was already a finished master, and for three seasons he wore the rossoneri captaincy — ninety-seven appearances and thirty-one goals, or thirty-two if you trust the other ledger; the record-keepers quarrel over that single goal the way heirs quarrel over a spoon.

In the summer of 1933 Milan sold their thirty-one-year-old captain back to the city that had raised him. Some later summaries would misplace the move by a year, but the fixture list is a notary: he led Milan through the whole of 1932-33, and by the autumn he was wearing amaranto again. Football's cruellest habit is its scheduling, and on 1 October 1933 it did what it always does — it sent the departed man straight back through the old front door.

Milan beat Livorno 3-1 at San Siro that afternoon, and there was a pleasing symmetry among the scorers: Tansini, himself a returnee, back at the club after wandering through Napoli and Padova, struck in the 46th minute and the 85th, with Romani adding the other in the 62nd. But the goal that mattered to the connoisseur came in the 34th minute, and Mario Magnozzi scored it — the old captain, on the old ground, putting the ball past the men he used to lead. It did not save his new side, and one suspects it did not need to; some goals are not about the result at all, but about a man signing his name in a visitors' book that once belonged to him. He would play out his days at Livorno until 1936, then coach the amaranto he loved, and he died in his city on 25 June 1971 — the circle closed where it had opened, at the water's edge.

The armband he left behind passed to Carlo Rigotti — Rigotti II, in the numbering of the age — a versatile defender who could hold the midfield when asked, now charged with captaining a side that was about to spend an entire autumn contradicting itself.

An Autumn of Contradictions

The 1933-34 season opened in September with a refreshed cast — Bortoletti, Rigotti, Stella and Capitanio among the arrivals, Tansini among the returns — and it began as though the summer had solved everything: Lazio were beaten 4-2 on 17 September, Brescia 4-0 on 15 October, Torino 4-0 on 19 November. At San Siro, Milan were very nearly a great team; the season would gather twenty-six of its points at home, and in front of their own people this side feared nobody alive.

Away from home it gathered seven points, and not one of them came from a victory — not a single away win the whole season through. It was that autumn which crystallised the saying that this Milan could beat anyone yet lose to anyone, a phrase the supporters repeated with the weary tenderness one reserves for a brilliant, unreliable relative. The full accounting, when the season closed the following spring, would read ninth place — twelve wins, nine draws, thirteen defeats, fifty scored, forty-nine against, thirty-three points — the portrait of a team permanently at war with its own reflection.

But the year saved its finest hour for December. On the 10th, the champions came to San Siro — Juventus, holders of the scudetto and en route to another, the very standard of Italian professionalism — and Milan fell upon them from the first minute, literally: Moretti scored with the match sixty seconds old. Cesarini replied in the 16th, and for a while the natural order threatened to reassert itself; then, in the 60th minute, Caligaris of all people turned the ball into his own net, and in the 74th Moretti struck again. Three-one. The unbeatable had been beaten, at home, by a mid-table side that could not win a match on the road, and everyone who saw it understood that this was not a revolution but a feast day — the kind the calendar grants a poor parish precisely once a year, and which the parish remembers longer than the rich remember their banquets. It is on such afternoons that mid-table clubs keep their faithful.

The Verdict

Judge 1933, then, as one judges a lean harvest honestly gathered. Milan finished eleventh in June and were bound for ninth; they lost both derbies of the calendar year without scoring more than once across the pair; they changed president, coach and captain inside twelve months; they sold their leader home to Livorno and watched him score against them within weeks of leaving. And yet the year kept, as even the leanest years do, a few coals alive under the ash: Romani's nineteen goals, the arrival of Moretti, and the December afternoon when the champions of Italy left San Siro beaten.

Great clubs are not built in their triumphant years; the triumphs merely reveal what the lean years built. Those of us who follow the Diavolo today from the far side of the world — where a Milanese winter Sunday arrives as a summer dawn — know that the loving of this club was learned in decades like the thirties, when there was nothing to love but the loving itself. In 1933 nobody in Milan had heard of Adelaide, and Adelaide had not yet lost a night's sleep to the Diavolo; but the faith that keeps those small-hours vigils was already being minted, one grey mid-table Sunday at a time, in a city under the fog waiting for its team to become what it did not yet know it would be.