Eight Days Between a Scudetto and a War

Seventeenth of September, Second of June

The fixture list ran from the seventeenth of September 1939 to the second of June 1940. Set those two dates down before any score, because history was preparing to bracket them: eight days after the second of them Italy would walk into the Second World War, and everything this club did that season it did in the narrowing space between. It did it, moreover, under a name it had not chosen. Associazione Calcio Milano was the registered title in 1940 — the regime having decreed from 1939 that the anglophone 'Milan' was an impurity to be legislated out of the language, autarky applied to a single syllable — and the club obeyed, because clubs obeyed in those years, and would not have its own name back until after the war, in the era of Umberto Trabattoni's presidency.

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, a Magyar accent evidently offending 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 before the year is out.

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 quartered among its betters and in no hurry to give the room back. 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 sum of it: 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 no gentle way to leave a competition by a scoreline you would rather not print. Milano carried that one home from Tuscany with the rest of the luggage.

Twenty-Four Goals in an Eighth-Placed Shirt

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 for the second season running and this time sharing the crown with nobody: twenty-four goals in thirty appearances. 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. It is tempting to wonder what such a man thinks in the bath after another defeat in which he alone looked capable of sin and salvation — and then the plain fact reasserts itself: 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 him 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 boy off Milan's own streets grown into the greatest star the national game possessed, world champion in 1934 and again in 1938, two hundred and eighty-four goals in nerazzurro, 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, an occlusion of the blood vessels, 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 thing threatened not merely a season but the career entire. The surgeons saved the foot. Nobody could operate on time itself.

He played next to nothing of 1939-40 — the appearance records allow him a single game at most — and the ailment took the better part of two seasons from him. 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, he was let go: Inter believed him finished — the sort of decision that keeps historians in work — and sold him across the city to the cousins of Milano, one record dating 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. There is a school of thought that reads only the closing figures of a career and calls what came next a decline. Another word serves better: 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. What that act amounted to, appearance by appearance, is bookkeeping the following year's chapter is left to do. Milano gave the frozen foot somewhere warm to finish its sentence.

The Commissioner's Autumn

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 tightened week by week, the way blackout cloth is pinned across a window — plain work, repeated nightly, until the room holds: 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 neat as revenge is ever permitted to be. Somewhere between Ara's hand, Trabattoni's commission and Boffi's boots, a mid-table club had rediscovered its vertebrae: a spine that would carry it to third by June, though the spring that did the carrying is kept in the custody of the following year.

What the Blackout Kept

In 1940 the world was closing rather than opening — ports darkened, borders sealed, the game shrunk to the peninsula that contained it. Inside that shrinking, a football club went on doing the only thing still available to it: turning up on Sundays, and being better at Christmas than it had been in June.

A club forbidden its own name finished eighth and lost a cup tie by five. The same club, under a commissioner and a new coach, with the most dependable centre-forward in Italy ahead of what would prove the meanest defence in the country, began the climb back toward the light — and along the way took in the most celebrated player in the land at the precise moment the rest of football considered him finished. It won nothing at all. It ended the year by beating the team that had thrown it out of the cup, and went into January with a repaired foot's debut still to come: the windows curtained, the wireless on low, the next date already printed on the fixture list.