The Year the Name Was Taken and the Net-Breaker Arrived

A Surname Confiscated

The fog that climbs out of the Navigli in a Milanese winter has never asked permission of any government, and in 1936 it went about its ancient business — softening the trams, erasing the far end of every street, reducing the Madonnina to a rumour of gold above the rooftops — while beneath it the men of the regime busied themselves with the renaming of things. In May, Mussolini proclaimed his Empire, Ethiopia conquered; by the autumn the phrase 'Rome–Berlin Axis' was being minted for the newsreels; and in the ministries it had long been settled that Italian sport must be made to speak Italian, whatever language its heart had been beating in.

So Internazionale went about the peninsula as Ambrosiana, Genoa answered to Genova 1893, and in 1936 the club of our devotion, which had worn its English 'Football Club' like a birthmark, surrendered the surname and became Milan Associazione Sportiva. Note carefully what was lost and what survived. 'Football Club' — the seafaring, Anglo-Saxon half of the name — was struck from the register; but 'Milan' itself, with that short English vowel no Tuscan grammar could domesticate, remained. A regime may legislate a letterhead; it cannot legislate what a city calls its own heart. And 1936, as if to mock the tidiness of decrees, refused even to be one season: it was the weary end of 1935–36, finished eighth, and the fresh, ambitious opening of 1936–37, which the spring beyond would reward with fourth. A man standing in the calendar year had a foot on each bank of the canal, and the water between them was moving faster than anyone admitted.

Eighth of Sixteen, in Numerous Company

The championship that expired in the spring of 1936 deserves neither flowers nor curses; it deserves an accountant's shrug. Thirty matches, ten won, eight drawn, twelve lost; forty goals scored against forty-one conceded, that solitary goal of deficit as eloquent as any editorial; twenty-eight points and eighth place in a division of sixteen — and not even eighth in solitude, but eighth in numerous company, level on points with Alessandria, with Genova 1893, with Napoli, a little peloton of the respectable pedalling along together while, far up the road and quite out of sight, Bologna collected a third scudetto with forty points. The squadrone that made the world tremble, the slogan of the age insisted. Milan, in the spring of 1936, made nobody tremble, except perhaps its own bookkeepers.

Adolfo Baloncieri kept the bench, and discovered what every coach of a mid-table side eventually discovers: that the league table is a mirror without manners. Above him the institution itself dissolved politely. Pietro Annoni stepped aside from the presidency in May 1936 and the club passed to a reggenza, a regency council, which is the Italian way of lending dignity to an interregnum. Giuseppe Bonizzoni wore the armband and, one supposes, the worry that comes stitched into it. The scoring fell chiefly to Pietro Arcari — eleven goals in the league, thirteen across all competitions, and if one period source garbles his figures into nonsense, the arithmetic that holds is eleven and thirteen. Part of the season was played not at San Siro, which was being worked on, but at the old Arena, so that a club which had mislaid its surname spent months borrowing an address as well. There are years in which a club is a house; 1936 was a year in which Milan was a suitcase.

Two Derbies, Two Draws, One Ache

And then there was the derby, the city's abiding pain. On 2 February 1936 the return match of 1935–36 finished 2–2; the first leg, back in the autumn of 1935, had ended 1–1; and so a whole season of municipal fury closed its accounts all square, which sounds like justice and felt like nothing of the kind. For the standing verdict remained, and it was the only verdict that mattered in the bars along the Navigli: Ambrosiana-Inter went unbeaten against Milan through this entire era, and every drawn derby was another coat of varnish on that unbearable fact. A draw is a curious dish — it feeds neither hunger — and Milan had been dining on them against the cousins for years.

October brought the new season's first instalment and the same old taste. On 4 October 1936, before roughly twenty-one thousand souls, Milan pressed for much of the opening half-hour, carried the argument to Ambrosiana with the impatience of a side that senses its moment — and were punished against the run of play when Bisigato's shot went in off the post. It took a twenty-metre drive from the new man Capra, skidding off the soft autumn ground and past the goalkeeper, to level it: 1–1 at the finish. One imagines the crowd filing out into the early autumn evening with that particular Milanese resignation which is nine parts patience and one part blasphemy, the kind muttered quietly enough for the Madonnina not to hear. A draw with Ambrosiana was not a disgrace; it was something worse. It was a habit.

May in Naples, Ruin in Alessandria

The cup offered the season's one genuine ascent, and like most ascents it ended with a fall. In the fourth round Milan went to Fano and won 4–2; on 24 May 1936 they went to Naples and won the quarter-final 2–1, which is never a small matter, winning in Naples in late May with the season's legs already heavy and the south already warm; and between those two away errands the run held its least-remembered jewel: Bologna — the very Bologna then marching to a third scudetto — beaten 3–0 in the fifth round, three goals without reply against the squadrone itself. Then, on 31 May in Alessandria, the semi-final: 1–0 to the home side, and out.

Eliminated by Alessandria — the same Alessandria with whom Milan shared its very rung of the league table, a provincial club of modest means and evidently immodest nerve. Football, which has no manners, then arranged the sequel: when the new championship opened in September, Milan's first home victory, a 4–1, came against precisely Alessandria — vengeance served in the Piedmontese style, cold and complete, like vitello tonnato. It changed nothing about May, of course. Cups remember only their winners; the rest of us are left to remember our semi-finals, and Milan was about to make a small tradition of remembering them.

The Boy from Seregno

Now to the heart of the year, which beat not in any boardroom but in the Brianza. In the summer of 1936 Milan won a quiet race against Bologna and Fiorentina — both had scouted the boy — for a twenty-one-year-old centre-forward playing for little Seregno: Aldo Boffi, born 26 January 1915 in Giussano, a land of workshops and early mornings where things are built to last. He was not a stylist and never pretended to be one. He was a finisher of the old, violent school, and the violence lived in the shot: the crowds would come to call him spaccareti, the net-breaker, a nickname that is half tribute and half damage report.

He made his rossonero debut on 1 November 1936 against Torino, a provincial unknown stepping into a side being rebuilt around him, and by the season's end the unknown had a title: top scorer of the Coppa Italia, seven goals in six cup ties, with eight league goals besides — or nine, depending on which ledger you trust, the ledgers of that era having been kept by cold-fingered men in overcoats. The exact figure matters far less than the direction of it. From his very first autumn, the boy from Seregno scored as naturally as other men complain.

What Milan had bought, though nobody could yet notarise it, was a decade. Boffi would take three capocannoniere crowns — nineteen goals in 1938–39, shared with Puricelli; twenty-four in 1939–40; twenty-two in 1941–42 — and finish with something like a hundred and thirty-six goals across eight rossonero seasons, the greatest of the club's pre-war marksmen. Every legend has a paragraph in which it is still only a rumour, a name on a transfer ledger, a debut on a November afternoon; for the net-breaker, that paragraph is the autumn of 1936. Remember it when the story reaches the war years and the goals keep arriving through the darkness: they were all loaded onto the train at Seregno.

A President in October, a Mister in December

The autumn also repaired the institution. The regency had governed since May in the manner of all regencies, competently and without conviction; on 21 October 1936 it ended, and on the 22nd Emilio Colombo took the presidency. The new board did what serious boards do, which is to pay for its opinions: the recruitment that had brought Boffi from Seregno had also brought Egidio Capra from Fanfulla and Remo Cossio from Udinese, and Luigi Perversi now carried the captain's armband. Capra would finish the season as the side's leading league scorer with twelve. The attack, in short, had been rebuilt from the provinces, which is where Italian football has always kept its freshest produce, the way a wise cook shops at the small markets and not the grand shopfronts.

The football itself began wretchedly and improved by force of decision. On 13 September, in Rome, Lazio administered a 3–0 lesson; on the 20th came the 4–1 over Alessandria; on the 27th, a goalless afternoon at Lucca. The side drifted, and the new board acted with a speed the regency could never have found: on 5 December Baloncieri was relieved of the bench, and on 6 December it passed to William Garbutt — the Englishman, the celebrated 'Mister' of Italian football, who only months earlier had won La Liga with Athletic Bilbao before the Spanish Civil War drove him out of Spain and back towards Italy. Savour the irony, because history rarely serves it so precisely plated: in the very year a decree struck the English words from the club's name, the club went out in December and hired the most English of coaches. The letterhead could be Italianised by circular. The football, when it truly mattered, still asked for England.

The Verdict of the Fog

The spring beyond the calendar's edge would notarise the autumn's decisions. Under Garbutt, largely credited with the revival, the side climbed out of its drift, and when 1936–37 closed the ledger read: thirty matches, thirteen won, ten drawn, seven lost, thirty-nine scored and only twenty-nine conceded, thirty-six points, fourth place — behind Bologna, champions again at forty-two, Lazio at thirty-nine, Torino at thirty-eight. And there was a second consecutive Coppa Italia semi-final, reached past Alessandria, Venezia and Bari, and lost this time to Genova 1893 only after a 1–1 stalemate that even extra time could not break, and then a replay surrendered 2–1 — a second spring funeral, but better attended than the first, and with the mourners already talking about next year.

So what was 1936? On its surface, a year of middling arithmetic: an eighth place, two drawn derbies, a cup run ended in Alessandria. Underneath, one of the quiet hinges on which a club's history turns. Milan entered the year with a foreign surname and a caretaker government; it left with a president named Colombo, an English Mister fresh from a Spanish war, and a boy from Seregno whose right to the centre-forward's shirt would carry the attack into the decade of the real war. The regime believed it had renamed the club. It had merely relabelled the bottle. What was inside — the short English vowel, the red and the black, the stubborn refusal of the fog to obey anybody — went on ageing in its own way, and the autumn of 1936, which looked so ordinary through a tram window misted by November, turns out to have been a vintage. History, like risotto, is made patiently, and finished off the heat.