A Goat Settles the Ten-Year Debt

Capra's Afternoon

On 20 February 1938 Egidio Capra scored the only goal of the derby and Milan beat Ambrosiana-Inter 1-0, their first league victory over the neighbours in roughly a decade. Capra: any Lombard schoolboy will translate the surname for you — the goat, the animal a village leads out when something has to be given up. There is a moral hiding in the onomastics and I refuse to leave it hidden. For ten years the derby had been the fixture at which Milan arrived as the offering, and it took a man named for the sacrifice to turn the knife the other way round. One goal, ninety minutes, ten years of indignity settled at a stroke. A club that has spent a decade as the fixture its neighbours look forward to does not get its dignity back a little at a time; it gets it back in an afternoon, or it does not get it back at all.

The steadier scoring that season was done by Aldo Boffi, the centre-forward: sixteen goals in the league, nineteen across all competitions, delivered with the regularity of a man who treats scoring not as inspiration but as trade. Every good Milan side has needed such a workman at its point — the artists are given the poems, the Boffis are given the points — and in the spring of 1938 the most dependable industry in a city proud of its industry stood at the head of the rossonero attack.

Thin Air Near the Summit

By the standards of that lean decade the 1937-38 championship, closed out that April, was a feast: thirteen wins, twelve draws, five defeats, forty-three goals scored against twenty-seven conceded, and thirty-eight points. Level with Genova 1893. One point behind Juventus. Three behind the champions, Ambrosiana-Inter on forty-one, whose own name had already been fed through the same nationalising mangle that was coming for Milan's. That finish was third — third ex aequo with Genova 1893, the two of them level on points and Milan the better by a goal of difference, plus sixteen against plus fifteen, whatever the foreign record books have preferred to print. The championship's own rules were content to let tied clubs share the step, and only the Central European Cup's paperwork demanded a single ordering; so on 31 May 1938 the federation drew lots to separate the pair, which is a way of saying that the last word on a nine-month season was given to a hand in a hat. What nobody contests is the altitude. Milan finished that season breathing the thin air near the summit, closer to a scudetto than anyone in red and black had lately dared to want.

Twelve draws in thirty matches describe the side better than any adjective could: hard to beat, schooled in patience by its Hungarian coach József Bánás under the eye of the Austrian technical director Hermann Felsner, and not yet ruthless enough to convert obstinacy into conquest. It is the oldest sermon in the game — the draw is a virtue only until it becomes a habit — and that spring Milan were virtuous to a fault, holding what they held, scoring when invited, and watching Ambrosiana pull away by three points that might as well have been thirty.

The First Border

In June, for the first time in its history, Milan crossed a border to play competitive football. The shared third place had carried something the club had never in four decades possessed: qualification for an official international competition. In the end the lot scarcely mattered, because Italy sent four clubs to that summer's tournament and Milan was among them. The Coppa dell'Europa Centrale — the Mitropa Cup, the great tournament of the middle of the continent — had been rearranged that year by history itself: the Anschluss had annexed Austria, and the Austrian clubs withdrew from the competition. There is a bitter footnote here that I decline to soften. Felsner, the man directing Milan's football, was himself an Austrian, serving a Milanese club through most of the year in which the country of his birth was folded away and its teams struck off a fixture list.

The draw sent Milan against Ripensia Timisoara of Romania in the round of sixteen, and the first leg was staged — by one of those geographical caprices in which the old Mitropa specialised — not in Timisoara but in Bucharest, on 26 June 1938. There Milan were beaten 3-0, thoroughly and instructively, the way novices are beaten. A week later, on 3 July, at home in Milan, came the reply: 3-1 to the rossoneri, a genuine fury of a comeback that fell precisely one goal short, the tie going to the Romanians 4-3 on aggregate. Out at the first attempt, then — and yet consider the company. That edition was won by Slavia Prague, and of the Italians only Genova 1893 and Juventus lasted as far as the semi-finals. Europe's opening lesson had been delivered, which is that Europe does not wait for you to find your feet. The second lesson — that Europe can be taken — was two decades away and belongs to other chapters. What Milan carried home from Bucharest in the summer of 1938 was a stamp and a bruise, and every dynasty begins with both.

Colombes, Nineteen June

Seven days before that Bucharest chastening, on 19 June 1938, Italian football stood on the roof of the world. In Paris, at the Stade Olympique de Colombes, Vittorio Pozzo's national side beat Hungary 4-2 to retain the World Cup — the first nation ever to defend the trophy — with Silvio Piola scoring twice. News of that order reached Lombardy the way all news reached it in that year, by wireless and by newsprint, and whatever else history will say of those years, and it will say plenty, the football of the peninsula was at that moment an art practised at a height nobody else could reach. A Milanese could stand in the drizzle of his own city and know that the game he loved spoke, for the time being, in Italian.

Set the two Junes side by side and the year explains itself without assistance. In Paris the football of the peninsula was the best on earth; in Bucharest, a week later, a Milanese club learned that citizenship of the best footballing country on earth buys a side precisely nothing once the whistle goes abroad. National greatness and club greatness are separate achievements, and the first has never once won a match for the second.

The Autumn of the Decrees

Then the autumn, and the ink. In the autumn of 1938 the regime enacted the racial laws, the leggi razziali, against Italy's Jews. The same nationalist machinery, turning its smaller and pettier gear, pressed its campaign against foreign words toward a conclusion: the club that had played 1937-38 as Milan Associazione Sportiva was given to understand that the English word itself — the founding word, the word answered to since the century began — would be struck from the register in the new year. The regime called this autarchy, the cleansing of the language; men with rubber stamps and a horror of foreign syllables had decided that a football club's name was an offence against the nation. What was entered in its place, and on what day, is business for the chapter that follows.

I am a chronicler of football and I will not pretend the two decrees weigh the same. One confiscated a word from a club; the other confiscated citizenship from human beings, and there is no scale on which those sit together. But they came out of the same pen, and an honest historian records the pen.

A Bad Beginning

The new season began badly and got worse. The 1938-39 championship kicked off in the autumn of 1938 with the side that had finished three points from a scudetto, and by the turn of the year it was sinking; how far it sank, the recovery that hauled it back and the placing that recovery bought are all a matter of the spring, and the spring belongs to the next chapter. From the thin air near the summit to the cold at the wrong end of the table inside a single turn of the calendar — that Milan generation had a cruel amplitude, and supporters who had allowed themselves a season of dreaming were served, as the year turned, a plate of penance.

Nor was the institutional house any calmer. Emilio Colombo, the journalist who had held the presidency since October 1936, presided over a technical carousel: Felsner gave up the technical directorship in October 1938, a mere four matchdays into the new campaign, and the hands that took hold of the tiller after him are counted in the following year's account. The armband changed with the seasons too — Luigi Perversi wore it through the fine spring of 1937-38, Giuseppe Bonizzoni through the grim campaign that followed — and somewhere behind all of it flickered William Garbutt's Milan interlude of 1937, so brief it scarcely warmed the bench. A club that changes its name, its technical director and its captain inside a single season is a club looking for itself; Milan was looking for itself inside a country that was mislaying itself. And through the slump, one constant: Boffi went on scoring.

Debut at Liguria

The most consequential thing that happened to Milan in 1938 was not a goal, a placing or a decree, and nobody in the ground noticed it at the time.

On 16 January 1938, away to Liguria, in a 1-1 draw of no importance whatsoever, a raw teenager signed the year before from third-division Fiumana made his Serie A debut for Milan. His name was Ezio Loik.

He stayed three quiet seasons in red and black — sixty-three official appearances, thirteen goals, an apprenticeship the club's own chroniclers record with honest restraint — enough to show what the boy was made of, nowhere near the peaks he would go on to reach. His last match in a Milan shirt was a 2-2 draw at Modena on 2 June 1940, after which the club let him go to Venezia without ceremony, the way one returns a book one has decided not to finish. In Venice he met Valentino Mazzola. In 1942 the two moved together to Torino, and there Loik became a pillar of the Grande Torino and a winner of five championships, one half of a partnership the game still discusses in a lowered voice.

He died on 4 May 1949, aged twenty-nine, on the hill of Superga, in the aeroplane crash that wiped out the whole of that Torino team. Milan cannot claim his glory and I will not try; but Milan can claim his beginning — that grey January afternoon against Liguria when nobody present, one imagines, understood what had just walked onto the field. Clubs are judged by the players they keep and haunted by the ones they let walk, and the moral is addressed to every scout who ever watched a teenager shiver through a winter fixture and saw only the shivering.

One Set of Colours

One set of colours, then, whatever the registers were shortly to say. The shirts would read in the new year what they had read since the century began, and the distance between a register and a pitch is the distance between a rubber stamp and a Sunday afternoon. Colombo kept his chair. Bánás kept his side. The goat's goal kept its place in the record of 20 February.

Past that winter waited not a bad season but a bad decade. Milan went into it carrying three points of regret from the spring, a placing the archives never agreed on, a bruise brought back from Bucharest — and, unnoticed in the corner of the fresco, the teenager from the January draw at Liguria, whom time would enlarge beyond every grandee in the picture.