The Tournament of the Possible

What the Armistice Left

A map, not a fixture list, is the document 1944 requires. The armistice of 8 September 1943 had cut Italy in two, and the championship along with it: in the German-occupied north, under the Italian Social Republic, the federation improvised through that autumn a substitute for the suspended national league — a Divisione Nazionale on the official paper, the Campionato Alta Italia in every mouth that spoke of it — a tournament of regions rather than of a nation, contested only by the clubs still within reach of it, and played out through the winter and spring of 1944 while Serie A slept its enforced sleep. Football redrawn by war: no south, no long train journeys, no illusions. Only the possible, organised into groups.

And the possible, in Milan, was a hard school. The city lay under Allied strategic bombing through 1943 and 1944; matches were interrupted by air-raid alarms as casually as other men's matches are interrupted by rain; players vanished into military call-ups and returned, when they returned, at odd intervals, so that every club fielded the squads the Italians of the day called rabberciate — patched, cobbled, mended like the elbow of an old jacket. This was the year of civil war and of the Resistance, and Milan was one of its capitals; liberation would not come until April 1945. To play football at all in such a winter — to lace boots while the sirens rehearsed — was less a sport than a small, stubborn act of defiance of a winter that promised nothing, a way of insisting that Sunday still existed. Behind the blackout cloth a city counted its coupons and leaned towards the radio set for news that was rarely good. On Sunday, for ninety minutes, twenty-two men still chased a ball.

Caretakers at the Arena Civica

The side that took the field did so as Associazione Calcio Milano — the regime had Italianised the club in 1939, filing away the anglophone souvenir of the founders and stamping 'Milano' in its place — and it staged its home matches at the Arena Civica, that grand old bowl in the heart of the city. The institution behind the shirt was held together by a handful of patient men. Umberto Trabattoni ran the club as Commissario straordinario — president in all but title, caretaker in all but temperament — with Antonio Busini beside him as technical director and regent, and Angelo Monti keeping the books as secretary.

On the field the side answered to Giuseppe Santagostino, 'Pin' to the faithful, who had taken the bench from Mario Magnozzi when the club was reassembled in the autumn of 1943, and who directed matters alla buona — informally, in the manner of a man who understands that in 1944 a training plan is merely a hostage to the next alarm — and to its captain, Giuseppe Antonini. No grand programme, no proclamations. Administration as endurance.

Fourteen Sundays in Lombardy

The draw placed Milano in the Lombardy zone with seven neighbours — Ambrosiana-Inter, Atalanta, Brescia, Varese, Pro Patria, Cremonese and Fanfulla — a double round-robin of fourteen matches, a championship you could reach by tram and by bicycle, which was precisely the point. Geography had become the first tactic of the age, and prudence the second.

The campaign opened on 16 January with a 1-0 over Fanfulla, football of the narrowest possible margin, and a week later, on 23 January, came the derby — Milano against Ambrosiana-Inter, even the names on the poster bearing the stamp of the times — and the cousins won it 3-1. Then, on 30 January, arrived the one thunderclap of the whole grey season: Atalanta swept aside 6-0, the heaviest result Milano would post all year, six goals in a single afternoon from a side that would score only eighteen across the entire campaign — as if it had decided to spend a third of its annual ration of joy in ninety minutes. There followed the first stumble, a 2-0 defeat away to Pro Patria on 6 February, then a 3-2 over Brescia on 13 February to which we shall return, and then the goalless Sundays — 0-0 with Varese on 20 February, 0-0 with Cremonese on 5 March — matches like thin broth, nourishment without pleasure.

The return round told the harder truth. Fanfulla took their revenge, 3-1, on 12 March; a week later, on 19 March, Milano took its own, beating Ambrosiana-Inter 2-0 — and whatever else 1944 withheld, it granted the rossoneri the second derby, which in any year, in any war, is a coin that never devalues. Atalanta were beaten again, 2-0 on 26 March; Replace with: "— before a final 2-0 home defeat by Cremonese at the Arena on 23 April closed the account like a shopkeeper pulling down the shutter, only this time the hand on the shutter was somebody else's."

Three Points from the Tie-Break

Add it all up and it makes fourteen matches: five won, three drawn, six lost; eighteen goals scored, sixteen conceded; thirteen points; fifth place among eight. Ambrosiana-Inter qualified directly for the inter-regional phase; Varese and Brescia finished level on sixteen points and Varese advanced on the tie-break; Milano stayed home. There is no dressing it up: fifth of eight, eliminated before the final round, a season without a prize.

And yet 1944 obeys laws of its own. Three points separated Milano from the pair who fought out the tie-break, and those points were mislaid not only on the pitch but at the recruiting office, along interrupted railway lines, in nights spent underground listening to the sky. Judge the table if you must; I prefer to judge the fact that the table exists at all. A club that answers the roll-call on all fourteen Sundays of such a winter has, in its own fashion, kept faith — and keeping faith, that season, was the only silverware on offer.

The Men Who Turned Up

The roll of those who answered deserves its own lines. Giovanni Rossetti kept goal in all fourteen matches, the season's one fixed point in a world without any. Walter Del Medico, ever-present across the fourteen, and Romano Penzo, whose eleven appearances were enough, finished as joint leading scorers with seven goals apiece — fourteen of the side's eighteen between them, which is to say that two men carried the attack the way two porters carry a wardrobe up a Milanese staircase: without applause, and without the option of putting it down.

Around them, echoes and premonitions. Aldo Boffi was still in the squad — the great pre-war bomber, more than once the league's leading scorer between 1938 and 1942, a name that in peacetime had produced goals as reliably as a timetable once produced trains. And because war empties dressing-rooms and fills them again with strangers, the scarcity of available men brought guests of unusual pedigree: Ferruccio Valcareggi, who would one day, as manager of the national team, take Italy all the way to the final of the 1970 World Cup, wore the shirt of Milano in that patched campaign. History does not always announce itself; sometimes it simply borrows a locker for a season and moves on.

The Guest from Vicenza

And then there was the other guest, the one whose passage makes the whole grey season glow with a sad and particular light. Romeo Menti was twenty-four that winter, a forward from Vicenza whom Torino had lent to Milan so that, in a broken country, he might play nearer his parents — one small mercy inside the great redistribution of footballers the war had set in motion — and on 13 February 1944, in the 3-2 victory over Brescia, he made his debut in rossonero. He played his last match in the shirt on 16 April; the records of that season, kept as well as anything was kept in 1944, credit him with nine official appearances and a single goal. A cameo, a footnote, a signature in a wartime guestbook.

But read the footnote to its end. Menti left and rose into legend with the Grande Torino, the invincible side of the immediate post-war, and it was Menti who scored that team's last goal, in Lisbon; and on 4 May 1949 he died with almost the entire squad when their aircraft flew into the hill of Superga. Nobody watching him in the patched Milano of 1944 could have known they were looking at a martyr in transit. He was simply another young man playing football between air-raid sirens — five years from immortality and five years from death, the two of them destined to arrive, as they sometimes cruelly do, on the same afternoon.

Firemen in the Front Room

The championship Milano could not reach came, in the end, to Milan. In July 1944 the final round was staged at the Arena — the club's own front room — among three survivors: the firefighters of Spezia, VV.FF. Spezia; Torino, which that year carried the name of FIAT; and Venezia. The firemen beat Torino 2-1, drew 1-1 with Venezia, and carried off the title — a title the federation would recognise, and then only as an honorary scudetto di guerra, in 2002, fifty-eight years after the smoke had cleared. Milano, eliminated in its own region, could only stand in the doorway of its own house and watch other men dance. The final came to Milan; Milan never came to the final.

The war had one more winter to take from Milan, and it took it. Set against that, what the season returned looks small and refuses to be dressed up: thirteen points, fifth of eight, a confiscated name, a patched squad, one derby lost and one derby avenged, a six-goal afternoon in January, a quiet guest passing through on his way to Superga. No prize, and no pretending otherwise. But a season is also a record of attendance, and this one shows a club present on all fourteen Sundays it was asked for, in a city that could promise it nothing at all — not a fifteenth Sunday, not a train, not a morning. That is the whole of 1944, and it was enough to go on with.