Eleven Unbeaten, Two Points Short

The Initials on the Letterhead

M.A.S. — three initials with all the romance of a filing cabinet, and for the whole of 1937 they were what the oldest football club in Milan answered to. A government that mistrusted foreign words had turned Milan Football Club, christened at the century's turn by Englishmen and worn for decades like a good tweed coat, into Milan Associazione Sportiva. The lettering on the door changed. The red and the black did not, and neither did the hunger underneath them; in the bars where a wireless set played on a Sunday evening, nobody troubled himself with initials.

The hunger has a number, because numbers are the bones of every story: no scudetto since 1907, and — though nobody leaning on a rail at San Siro that year could know it — none coming until 1951. That is the marrow of Milan's inter-war life, a proud old club gone respectably mid-table in a Serie A that was itself a young invention, a single national round only since 1929-30, sixteen clubs strong by now, two points for a win, the whole peninsula funnelled into one table the way a province's traffic is funnelled through a single station. Above everyone stood Bologna, the great machine of the age; below, the rest jostled for the honour of being tired in April.

And 1937, being a calendar year and not a season, must be read at a confluence: the spring belongs to the campaign of 1936-37, which ended in May with Milan fourth; the autumn opens the campaign of 1937-38, which would end, the following spring, with a shared third place and a passport. Between the two run the same city, the same trams, and one young centre-forward out of the Brianza learning his range.

Eleven Without Defeat

The 1936-37 season began in the worst manner available to it: on 13 September 1936, opening day, Lazio beat Milan 3-0, and a team that loses its first match by three has announced not merely a defeat but a philosophy in need of repair. Adolfo Baloncieri presided over the repairs until December, when the bench passed to William Garbutt, an Englishman of the old school — a handover the previous year's chapter has already witnessed, Spanish war and all — and from there the season turned, slowly at first, then unmistakably.

Under Garbutt, Milan reeled off eleven matches without defeat, the kind of run that converts a league table from an accusation into an invitation, and as the season entered its final stretch the position had become almost indecent: second place, two points behind Bologna, six matches to play. For a club thirty years without a title, two points in April is a perfume more dangerous than any wine. But legs are honest even when hearts are not, and the fatigue of the climb told down the stretch: the wins thinned, the challenge faded, and when the round-robin closed on 16 May Milan stood fourth with 36 points — thirteen wins, ten draws, seven defeats, thirty-nine goals scored and twenty-nine conceded. Bologna took a second consecutive scudetto with 42; Lazio, the opening day's tormentor, finished on 39; Torino on 38.

One may be cruel about a fade or one may be accurate, and accuracy is kinder: this was a squad that had started the year needing a philosophy and ended it needing only a summer. Garbutt brought no silver. He brought order, and in the lean years order is what has to come before everything else.

The Cup of Long Evenings

The Coppa Italia of that same season was a different kind of story, told mostly after the ninetieth minute, in that extra half hour where football stops being sport and becomes endurance theatre. Milan opened generously — Alessandria dismissed 4-0, Venezia 2-0 — then met Bari in a quarter-final that ran to a 2-2 draw through extra time, and fell at last in the semifinal to Genova 1893, again after the long half hour: a 1-1 stalemate that even extra time could not break, and then a replay surrendered 2-1. It was the second consecutive spring in which the club was buried at the semi-final stage — a funeral better attended than the first, with the mourners already talking about next year — the cup going the way of a train that leaves while you are still buying the newspaper.

Yet inside that run something permanent was forged. Aldo Boffi, a debutant of twenty-one, scored seven goals in the tournament — a figure for a single Coppa Italia that would stand as a club record, equalled in a later age only by Gianni Rivera and surpassed by no one. When a boy in his first season sets a mark that only the Golden Boy of a future generation will ever touch, the club may be forgiven for suspecting it has found something.

Boffi Finds His Range

Where he came from — the Brianza boyhood at Giussano, the apprenticeship served under a sinking club at Seregno, the debut away at Torino on the first of November — stands written in the previous year's chapter, and needs no second telling here. What belongs to this year is what he did with it. Across 1937 he came of age. One record gives him eight league goals in the fourth-place spring, another nine; both give Egidio Capra a dozen, and Capra was Milan's leading league scorer that season. Add the seven of the cup, which nobody disputes at all. The eye, in any case, needed no counting: Milan had found the man around whom its attack, and frankly its hope, would be built.

What came afterward is known — something like 136 goals in red and black across nine rossonero seasons, the greatest of the club's pre-war marksmen; three Serie A capocannoniere crowns, nineteen goals in 1938-39 shared with Puricelli, twenty-four in 1939-40, twenty-two in 1941-42; and a prime the war would cut short the way a late frost takes an orchard in blossom. In a decade when Milan had no scudetto to chase, he was the reason to go.

The Bench Turns Toward the Danube

The club's own house had been given a steadier hand. On 22 October 1936 Emilio Colombo assumed the presidency, replacing the consiglio di reggenza — that council of regents by which Milan, like a duchy between dukes, had lately been governed — and through all of 1937 he presided while Luigi Perversi wore the captain's band, a captain of the old, punctual kind, the sort who is simply, reliably there, because being there is what a captain does.

In the autumn the bench changed again, and this time it changed eastward. József Bánás, a Hungarian, took the coaching role, with the Austrian Hermann Felsner alongside him as technical director — Milan entrusting itself to the central European school at the very moment central Europe had most to teach about football and least to teach about peace.

The market brought reinforcements whose names the transfer records keep — Mario Loetti, Giuseppe Antonini, Leandro Remondini, Vicente Arnoni, Bruno Berra, Luigi Diamante — and one at which the modern reader must stop: Ezio Loik, a teenager then, of whom the next chapter must speak, since his debut waited for January and his story runs far past this club. He passed through Milan the way certain comets pass through a sky that history has reserved for another constellation. The club may claim only the footnote; and footnotes, in the lean years, are treasures.

Saint Stephen's Day

The campaign that opened in the autumn of 1937 carried its cup duties into the depths of winter. On 5 December Milan put Varese aside 2-0; on 26 December — Saint Stephen's Day, when a Milanese ought by rights to be at his own table and not at a football ground — Liguria held Milan 0-0 through yet another extra time; the replay, on 29 December, Milan won, closing the calendar year with the small, unglamorous virtue of refusing to be eliminated. That cup run would end only in the spring, against Torino, in a semifinal that itself required a replay and extra time. This Milan could be beaten, but never quickly, and the winter timetable knew it: ties that would not finish, replays that had to be fitted between one train and the next.

The league season those winter ties punctuated was, by then, a season bound for a shared third place and the club's first passport abroad — but the lots that settled the one and the border that tested the other both fall inside the next year's calendar, and the next chapter shall have them. A year ends where the almanac says it ends, not where the story would prefer.

What Was Planted

Counted in silverware, 1937 is an empty year. Take instead the measure a vine-grower takes, by what went into the ground, and it becomes one of the quietly decisive years of the whole lean age: order under the Englishman, then ambition under the Danubians; a president in place of a regency; a cup of long evenings; a table missed in April by two points; and, before everything else, a centre-forward whose goals would carry the crest through the war toward better days.

The alias would fall away in its own time, and the name would come home. What this year left behind would not fit in a cabinet — a club that had learned it could stay on its feet for ninety minutes and then for thirty more. On a Sunday that autumn a man in Milan buttoned his coat, took the tram out to San Siro, and went to watch a young centre-forward from the Brianza strike a football as though he meant to break something.