The Season They Took the Name

The City of Two Names

In the winter of 1938 the fog came down the Navigli as it always had, indifferent to decrees, and settled over a city that was about to be told, by men with rubber stamps and a horror of foreign syllables, that its football club's name was an offence against the nation. Milan — the English word, the founding word, the word the club had answered to since the century began — was to be scrubbed into Milano, and on 14 February 1939, midway through the season that opened that autumn, the club that had played 1937-38 as Milan Associazione Sportiva would be entered on every official register as Associazione Calcio Milano. The regime called this autarchy, the cleansing of the language; the fog, which has seen everything and pronounces on nothing, called it weather.

So 1938 is the year of two names and, as it happens, of two faces: a spring in which the rossoneri climbed nearly to the summit of Serie A, and an autumn in which they began sliding toward the cellar of a season that would end under a name not their own. Between the two came a first passport — Milan's debut in continental competition — a World Cup defended in Paris, and, in the same darkening air, laws that shamed the country that passed them. To tell the year honestly you must hold all of it on one plate, the way a proper risotto holds saffron and marrow together without letting either pretend the other is not there.

Spring at Altitude

The spring half of the 1937-38 championship was, by the standards of that lean decade, a feast. Milan closed the season with thirteen wins, twelve draws and five defeats, forty-three goals scored against twenty-seven conceded, and thirty-eight points — level with Genova 1893, a single point behind Juventus, three behind the champions, Ambrosiana-Inter, the neighbours whose own name had already been fed through the regime's mangle. Whether that finish should be written down as third place or fourth is a quarrel the ledgers have never settled: the English record books list Genova third and Milan fourth on equal points, the Italian ones grant Milan a share of third, and the arithmetic of goal difference — plus sixteen for Milan against plus fifteen for the Genoese — smiles quietly on the rossoneri. I record the dispute and decline to adjudicate it. What matters is that Milan finished the season breathing the thin air near the summit, closer to a scudetto than anyone in red and black had lately dared to dream.

Twelve draws in thirty matches tell you the shape of the side: hard to beat, schooled in patience by its Hungarian coach Jozsef Banas under the eye of the Austrian technical director Hermann Felsner, but not yet ruthless enough to convert stubbornness into conquest. It is the oldest tactical sermon in the book — 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 disappear over the ridge with a lead of three points that might as well have been the Alps beyond the Madonnina.

Capra's Derby, Boffi's Hammer

Within that spring, one afternoon deserves its own candle. On 20 February 1938 Milan beat Ambrosiana-Inter 1-0, their first league victory in the derby in roughly a decade, and the only goal was scored by Egidio Capra, whose surname any Lombard schoolboy will translate for you: the goat. 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 sacrifice, and it took a man named for the sacrificial animal to reverse the ritual. One goal, one to nil, a decade of indignity paid off at a stroke; the derby keeps its own cruel ledger, and that February, briefly, it balanced.

The steadier hammering was done by Aldo Boffi, the centre-forward, whom I shall call the Hammer because no other tool describes him: sixteen league goals in the 1937-38 campaign, nineteen across all competitions, struck 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 win the poems, the Boffis win the points — and in 1938 the Hammer was the most dependable industry in a city that prides itself on industry.

The First Passport

In June, for the first time in its history, Milan crossed a border to play competitive football. The Coppa dell'Europa Centrale — the Mitropa Cup, the great tournament of Central Europe — had been reshaped 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 will not soften. Milan's technical director, Felsner, was himself an Austrian, serving a Milanese club through most of the year in which the country of his birth was folded away — a private dispossession to set beside the public one that was about to take the club's very name.

The draw sent Milan against Ripensia Timisoara of Romania in the round of sixteen, the first leg 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. Elimination at the first hurdle, 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. Milan had learned Europe's first lesson, which is that Europe does not wait for you to find your feet. The second lesson — that Europe can be conquered — would take two more decades to arrive and belongs to other chapters. Every dynasty begins with a passport and a bruise, and in 1938 Milan acquired both.

Paris in June, Ink in Autumn

Seven days before that Bucharest chastening, on 19 June 1938, Italian football had 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. 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, and a Milanese could stand in the drizzle of his own city and know that the game he loved spoke, for now, in Italian.

Then the autumn, and the ink. In the autumn of 1938 the regime enacted the racial laws, the leggi razziali, against Italy's Jews; and the same nationalist machinery, turning its smaller and pettier gear, pressed its campaign against foreign words to a conclusion, so that on 14 February 1939, midway through the 1938-39 season, the club was re-registered as Associazione Calcio Milano. I am a chronicler of football and I will not pretend the two decrees weigh the same — one confiscated a name from a club, the other confiscated citizenship from human beings — but they came from the same pen, and an honest historian records the pen. The fog over the Navigli that autumn was the fog of every autumn; what moved beneath it was not.

The Long Winter Begins

The new season began badly and got worse — and midway through it, the new name arrived to preside over the wreckage. The 1938-39 championship, which kicked off in the autumn of 1938, would end the following spring with Milan ninth on twenty-eight points, while Bologna took the title with forty-two, Torino finished second on thirty-eight and Ambrosiana-Inter third on thirty-seven. Bare numbers, but beneath them a genuine fright: at its lowest ebb, after the nineteenth matchday, the side lay last in Serie A, staring into the cellar, and only a recovery in the run-in hauled it back to the grey safety of mid-table. From the brink of a scudetto in June to the bottom of the table in the depths of the season — the curve of that Milan generation had a cruel amplitude, and supporters who had allowed themselves a spring 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, leaving Banas to coach on alone until Jozsef Viola arrived as technical director the following March. The captaincy changed hands with the seasons too — Luigi Perversi wore the armband through the fine spring of 1937-38, Giuseppe Bonizzoni through the grim campaign that followed — and behind it all flickered the memory of 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 searching for itself; Milan in 1938 was searching for itself inside a country that was losing itself.

Through the slump, one constant: the Hammer kept striking. Boffi's nineteen league goals in 1938-39 — twenty-one in all competitions — stood level with the very best in the division, alongside Bologna's Ettore Puricelli, which is another way of saying that Milan's centre-forward was producing a champion's numbers inside a ninth-placed team. There is no lonelier trade in football than scoring for a side that cannot keep what you earn; Boffi practised it without complaint, blow after blow, an honest workman hammering away in a workshop where half the other tools were broken.

The Boy Who Arrived in January

And now the small figure in the corner of the fresco, the one whom time would enlarge beyond every grandee in it. 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 would spend 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, and 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 speaks of in lowered voices.

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 in 1938 against Liguria when nobody present, one imagines, understood what was making its debut. Clubs are judged by the players they keep and haunted by the ones they let walk. Loik's Serie A story began, unglamorously, in a Milan shirt, and the moral is addressed to every scout who ever watched a teenager shiver through a January match and saw only the shivering.

What the Fog Kept

So the verdict on 1938, delivered as the fog delivers everything in Milan — slowly, and to everyone at once. It was the year the club stood nearest the summit it would not reach, third or fourth as the ledgers please, and the year the descent began; the year of the first derby win in a decade and the first stamp in the European passport, both paid for in full; the year Italy stood on top of the world in Paris while the ground at home was poisoned by decree; the season in which they took away the club's name — the decree came in February, when the winter was at its deepest — and the club, obstinate as its city, kept its colours and waited. Names can be confiscated; what answers to them cannot. The rossoneri entered the dark years as Associazione Calcio Milano, but the fog, the Navigli, Boffi's hammer and the boy from January all knew perfectly well to whom they belonged — and history, which restores names the way spring restores water to the rice fields, would in time give everything back.