The Year the Club Lost Its Name and Found Its Spine

A Club Forbidden Its Own Name

The fog came down the Navigli that winter as it always had, unlicensed and unbothered, drifting over the canals and the tram-lines and the grey water where the city washes its sleeves; and somewhere inside it, training on hard ground, was a football club that the state had renamed. Associazione Calcio Milano: that was the registered title in 1940, because the regime — which had opinions on wheat, on vowels, on the origin of every word an Italian mouth might form — had decreed from 1939 that the anglophone 'Milan' was an impurity to be legislated out of the language. Autarky, the doctrine was called: Italy needs nothing from abroad, applied here to a single syllable. The club obeyed, because clubs obeyed in those years, and kept its real name folded in a drawer like a confiscated passport, to be reclaimed after the war in the era of Umberto Trabattoni's presidency — but we run ahead of ourselves, which is a chronicler's privilege and a historian's sin.

The men charged with the season were a study in the era's contradictions. The president was Achille Invernizzi, who had succeeded Emilio Colombo before the campaign began; and while the state busied itself purging English words, the bench belonged to two Hungarians — József Bánás as coach, József Violak beside him as technical director — retained from the season before, since apparently a Magyar accent offended the autarkists less than an English noun. The captain was Antonio Gino Bortoletti. The summer had brought Bruno Chizzo, Piero Pasinati, Carlo Biraghi and Enrico Boniforti, and up from the youth ranks a boy called Paolo Todeschini, whose name this chronicle will need again. The season itself had opened on 17 September 1939 and would close on 2 June 1940 — dates worth committing to memory, because history was preparing to bracket that fixture list with something far larger than football.

The Slow Puncture of Spring

Through the autumn and early winter the Rossoneri had climbed high enough to breathe unfamiliar air: they turned for home third, eighteen points on the board, only two behind the leaders Bologna — a mid-table club briefly seated at the high table, tucking its napkin into its collar. What followed was not a collapse in the operatic sense, no single catastrophe you could point to and curse; it was a slow puncture, the kind a cyclist discovers only when the rim begins to ring on the cobbles.

January opened with a draw in Trieste and a 4-0 dismissal of Modena that flattered everyone concerned; then Torino came to town and won 3-1, Fiorentina exacted a 1-0 in Florence, and February became a month of half-measures and worse — 2-2 at home with Genova 1893, defeat at Bari, 2-2 away to Lazio and, unpardonably, 2-0 at home to little Novara. March opened crueller still, beaten 1-0 in Bologna and 2-1 at home by Juventus, before the season produced its false dawn: a 2-0 win in Venice, Napoli dispatched 3-0 at the end of the month, a 2-0 victory away to Liguria in April — three wins so bright you could almost read by them. Then May told the truth: the cousins of Ambrosiana crossed the city and won 3-1 in Milano's own house, Roma added a 3-1 of their own, and the season expired with a goalless draw against Triestina and a 2-2 in Modena on the second of June. The final accounting: ten wins, eight draws, twelve defeats; forty-six scored, thirty-eight conceded; twenty-eight points; eighth of sixteen.

The Coppa Italia offered no consolation, only a sharper humiliation. Novara were beaten, and Fiorentina held to 1-1; but the replay, in Florence, was lost heavily — by five goals without reply, the reports say — and the Viola went on to lift the first Coppa Italia in their history. There is a particular flavour to leaving a cup by a scoreline you would rather not print, a bitterness like burnt onion at the bottom of the pan, and Milano supped it in Tuscany that spring.

The Hammer in an Idle Forge

And yet — the season's paradox, and its one incontestable glory — the best goalscorer in all of Serie A wore the red and black of an eighth-placed team. Aldo Boffi, capocannoniere: twenty-four goals in thirty appearances, and for once the ledgers do not even quarrel about it. Consider the distances involved. His nearest pursuer, Guarnieri of the champions Ambrosiana, finished on fifteen; Puricelli and Reguzzoni of mighty Bologna managed fourteen apiece. Boffi outscored the sharpest forwards of the two best teams in Italy by the better part of ten goals while playing for a side that lost twelve times.

A capocannoniere at a mid-table club is one of football's melancholy figures, a blacksmith's hammer ringing in an idle forge. The team scored forty-six; Boffi owned twenty-four of them, more than half the household's bread earned by one pair of boots. The moralist is tempted to wonder what such a man thinks in the bath after another defeat in which he alone looked capable of sin and salvation — but the moralist should also note the plain arithmetic: goals are a striker's virtue, and Boffi's was of the durable, repeatable kind that does not depend on the weather of a season. We shall meet the hammer again before this chapter closes.

Two Sundays in June

On the second of June 1940, the last day of the championship, the scudetto was settled at San Siro — and not in Milano's favour, nor with Milano even on the stage. Ambrosiana-Inter beat Bologna 1-0 before some forty thousand spectators and sealed the title with forty-four points; Bologna finished second on forty-one, Juventus third on thirty-six. The cousins feasted; Milano, that same afternoon, was drawing 2-2 in Modena, a footnote scribbled in the margin of somebody else's celebration. For one Sunday the city belonged entirely to the other half of its footballing family.

Eight days later it belonged to history. On 10 June 1940 Mussolini declared war on France and Britain, and Italy walked into the Second World War. Between the last ball of the championship and the first act of the nation's catastrophe there passed barely a week — a symmetry so neat that a novelist would blush to invent it. And yet the football did not stop; that is the strange thing, and in its way the human thing. The game carried on through the first years of the war, in a country of ration books and requisitions, and would keep carrying on until the regular championship could no longer be held at all — an improvised wartime tournament, the Campionato Alta Italia, would eventually take its place in 1944. But all that lay ahead. What the city knew in June 1940 was that summer had arrived carrying something heavier than heat, and that the next kick-off would come in a different world.

The Frozen Foot

Every year of this chronicle has its human story, and 1940's begins on the other side of the city, in the body of the most illustrious footballer Italy had yet produced. Giuseppe Meazza — Peppino — had been Ambrosiana-Inter's idol since 1927, a two-time world champion, the man whose name would one day be fixed to San Siro itself. Then, in the summer of 1939, came the disaster no defender had ever managed: an embolism starved his celebrated left foot of blood. The papers found the phrase that stuck — il piede gelato, the frozen foot — one of those journalistic coinages almost too cruel to be as accurate as it is. The surgeons saved the foot. Nobody could operate on time itself.

He played next to nothing of 1939-40 — the ledgers allow him a single appearance at most. Inter won the scudetto — sealed it at San Siro on that second of June — essentially without him, which is its own kind of wound: to watch your house celebrate and to understand that it has learned to live in your absence. And in the autumn of 1940, only thirty years old but diminished, Meazza was sold across the city to the cousins of Milano — one record dates the transfer to 28 November 1940 — to the very club he had spent a career tormenting. The accounts say he wept. We are not obliged to doubt them; a man who has given his whole playing life to one shirt is entitled to his tears at the border.

His debut in red and black would have to wait for the new year — 12 January 1941, a 2-2 draw with Juventus — and across two seasons with Milano, from 1940 to 1942, he would make forty-two official appearances and score eleven goals. Eleven: a modest harvest by the standards of the man, a rich one by the standards of the foot. There is a school of thought that reads only the numbers and calls this a decline. The chronicler prefers another word: a second act, played quietly, on the other side of the street — proof that greatness at half-light chose to keep playing rather than to be embalmed. Milano gave the frozen foot somewhere warm to finish its sentence.

Trabattoni's Ledger, Ara's Hand

The institutional year turned as well. Invernizzi's presidency ended, and for 1940-41 the club passed into the care of an extraordinary commissioner — commissario straordinario, in the language of a time that liked its administration the way it liked its uniforms — named Umberto Trabattoni. Note the name well: this was the beginning of a stewardship that would run deep into the next decade, Trabattoni serving as formal president from 1945 to 1954. Guido Ara took the bench as coach, Antonio Busini stood beside him as technical director, and the captain's band passed to Bruno Arcari. A new spine, fitted for a hard season.

The campaign opened on 6 October 1940 with a flourish that the rest of the month would spend contradicting: Napoli dismissed 4-0 at home — Boffi twice, Faccenda and Cappello once each — and then three straight defeats, 0-2 at Novara, the derby lost 0-1 at home to Ambrosiana on 20 October, 0-1 at Livorno. A lesser side, in a country newly at war, might have folded there. Instead the autumn hardened like good stock left to reduce: 1-1 with Triestina through Arcari; a 2-1 victory in Rome, Boffi from the penalty spot and Arcari again; 1-1 with Torino; a narrow 1-2 at Atalanta despite Cappello; a goalless afternoon against Venezia; then 3-1 at Bari, the goals from Degli Esposti, Boffi and Buscaglia, before Bologna — in Bologna — handed out a 4-2 lesson in which young Todeschini and Arcari scored, and taught Milano precisely how far away the summit still stood. Bologna, be it noted, would be the champions of that season. The year closed on 29 December with Fiorentina, the cup executioners of the spring, beaten 3-1 at home — Buscaglia, Boffi, Menti — which is as tidy a piece of bookkeeping as revenge ever does.

And here the chronicler claims the one liberty the calendar allows, because a season begun in that blacked-out autumn belongs in spirit to 1940 even where its arithmetic spills into the following spring: it ended with Milano third. Thirty matches, twelve won, ten drawn, eight lost; fifty-five scored and only thirty-four conceded — the best defence in the entire tournament, and the best record of anyone in the return round, which is to say that across the second half of the season nobody in Italy travelled better. Bologna took the title with thirty-nine points, the cousins were second on thirty-five, Milano third on thirty-four with Fiorentina level just behind on the same figure. Boffi, of course, was again among the leading scorers with sixteen league goals. Eighth in June; third by the following June. Somewhere between Ara's hand, Trabattoni's ledger and Boffi's hammer, a mid-table club had rediscovered its vertebrae.

The Verdict of 1940

No boats carried the Diavolo south that year, and none would for four decades: the club's first football on Australian soil lay far ahead, on the tour of 1980 that would carry the Rossoneri to Sydney and to Adelaide itself, and in 1940 the world was closing rather than opening — ports darkened, borders sealed, the game shrunk to the peninsula that contained it. The supporters who would one day keep vigil for this club on the far side of the world's clocks, rising before dawn in Adelaide to watch it play, were not yet born; but the thing they would keep vigil for was being tempered in exactly these years, in exactly this weather.

So weigh 1940 honestly, as a magistrate and not a mourner. A club stripped of its own name finished eighth and lost a cup tie by five. The same club, under a commissioner and a new coach, with the league's most reliable hammer up front and what would prove the meanest defence in Italy behind, began the climb back toward the light — and along the way it took in the most celebrated player in the country at the precise moment the rest of football considered him finished, and offered his frozen foot a second act. Trophies: none. Dignity: quietly rebuilt. In the year Italy chose catastrophe, Associazione Calcio Milano — whatever the regime insisted on calling it — chose continuity; and continuity, in June 1940, was the braver bet.