The Mister Out of a Spanish War

A Word Struck from the Register

Somewhere in a federal register in 1936, a clerk drew his line through two English words, and the club of our devotion lost its surname. 'Football Club' — the seafaring, Anglo-Saxon half of the name, worn like a birthmark — went out of the paperwork, and Milan Associazione Sportiva went in. It was not persecution; it was tidiness, which in that decade was frequently the same instrument. The regime had long since settled that Italian sport must be made to speak Italian, whatever language its heart had been beating in, and the peninsula obliged: Internazionale went about its business as Ambrosiana, Genoa answered to Genova 1893. In May, Mussolini had proclaimed his Empire, Ethiopia conquered; by the autumn the phrase 'Rome–Berlin Axis' was being minted for the newsreels. Set beside an Empire, a letterhead is a very small thing to correct.

Note carefully what was taken and what stayed. The English words went; 'Milan' itself did not. That short English vowel, which no Tuscan grammar could ever domesticate, sat in the middle of the new name like a stone in a shoe, and went on being shouted every Sunday by men who had never read a decree in their lives. And 1936 refused even to be one season. It was the weary end of 1935-36, which 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 either bank of a moving current, and the water between them was going faster than anybody admitted.

Eighth of Sixteen, in Numerous Company

The campaign begun in the autumn of 1935 ran its course to May 1936, and deserves neither flowers nor curses. 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 at all.

Adolfo Baloncieri kept the bench, and learned what every coach of a mid-table side eventually learns: that the 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; one period source garbles the figures into nonsense, but eleven and thirteen are the numbers that hold. Part of the season, moreover, 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. Milan in 1936 was not a house. It was a suitcase.

The Habit of Drawing with Ambrosiana

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 all square, which sounds like justice and felt like nothing of the kind. The standing fact remained, and it was the only fact that mattered in the bars: Ambrosiana-Inter went unbeaten against Milan through this entire era, and every drawn derby laid another coat of varnish on it. A draw is a curious dish. It feeds nobody, and Milan had been dining on it 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 evening with that particular Milanese resignation which is nine parts patience and one part blasphemy, the blasphemy muttered quietly and kept indoors. 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. 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. 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 Race for a Centre-Forward

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. One register enters the birth as 26 February instead; on the year and on the town everything agrees, which for the 1930s is practically notarised certainty. His apprenticeship had been served first at hometown Vis Nova and then at Seregno, where he took the strange, sad honour of finishing top scorer even as his club sank out of Serie B beneath him — the purest audition a centre-forward can give, since goals scored on a sinking ship cannot be credited to the ship. 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 away at Torino, a 3-1 defeat and thus the traditional welcome the game reserves for its future darlings, 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 — eight by most counts, nine by one. 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 certify it, was a decade — the crowns and the career total belong to the chapters that will have to count them. Every legend has a season in which it is still only a rumour, a signature on a form, a debut on a November afternoon; for the net-breaker, that season is the autumn of 1936. Remember it when the story reaches the war years and the goals keep arriving through the dark: every one of them was 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 out of 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 moved at 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 arrangement, because history rarely plates it so precisely: 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. A letterhead can be Italianised by circular. The football, when it truly mattered, still asked for England.

What the Year Left Standing

The spring beyond the calendar's edge would confirm the autumn's decisions: it would reward the side with fourth place and break its heart in another semi-final, and the reckoning of both is the business of the next chapter, which keeps the books for 1937.

On its surface the year holds very little — an eighth place, two drawn derbies, a cup run ended in Alessandria, a surname shortened by circular. Underneath, it is one of the quiet hinges on which a club's history turns. Milan entered the year with a foreign surname and left December holding three men it had not owned in the spring: a president named Colombo, an English Mister out of a Spanish war, and a centre-forward from the Brianza whose right to the centre-forward's shirt would carry the attack into the decade of the real war. None of the three troubled the newsreels; the newsreels that autumn were busy with an Empire and an Axis. But when the reel had run through and the projector cooled, what was left standing in Milan was a board that paid for its opinions, a bench that gave its instructions in English, and a boy who struck the ball hard enough to be named for the damage.