The Fireman Who Fed the Flames

A Fireman Steps Off the Train

A train from the north came into Milano Centrale on a January morning in 1949, and a fireman got down from it. The fourteenth of the month, say some records; the twenty-second, say others; the arrival kept both dates and lost none of its meaning by it. His name was Gunnar Nordahl, and the city waiting for him beyond the platform gates would never be entirely the same again.

Consider, before anything else, the beautiful absurdity of his trade. In Sweden the footballer was required to remain an amateur — Olympic eligibility demanded it — and so the finest centre-forward in the north earned his bread as a professional firefighter, and between shifts at the station house he anchored the Swedish attack that won the gold medal at the London Olympics in the summer of 1948. To turn professional was, by definition, to leave Sweden. Milan — a great club with an old hunger and, for once, the means to answer it — made the arrangement, and in January 1949 the fireman came south.

He had not come to the uniform by whim. The Nordahls were mill people: his father Emil and his grandfather Isak had both worked the papermill at Hörnefors, the small sulphite town on the Gulf of Bothnia, and from 1936 to 1940 Gunnar went into the same industry as an ordinary industrial hand. Football then moved him rather than freed him. Degerfors IF recruited him the way Swedish clubs of that era were obliged to recruit — not with a contract but with a post, a fireman's job attached to the transfer like a dowry — and when IFK Norrköping fetched him on in 1942 the arrangement travelled with the player: from 1943 to 1948 he was a brandman at the Norrköping fire station, drawing a municipal wage and, in what was left of the week, shooting IFK Norrköping to four championships in a row. Which is to say the beautiful absurdity was not a single joke but a whole career: half a working life spent putting fires out, the other half spent doing to Swedish goalkeepers precisely what he was paid to prevent.

And there were a great many Nordahls. His mother, Nikolina, born Hällman in 1888, raised ten children in that mill town and mended their football socks between political meetings; one of the ten, William, died at eight years old. Five of the brothers played the game seriously and not one of them badly: Gunnar, Bertil and Knut would all turn professional in Italy, while the twins Göran and Gösta made their names in Sweden's top flight. Gunnar's son Thomas, a professional himself, once put the whole family into a single sentence — "Bland min farfars och farmors tio barn finns tre olympiska guldmedaljörer", among my grandparents' ten children there are three Olympic gold medallists — and there is no answering a sentence like that. Milan, in January 1949, was buying a third of a household's gold.

Sweden had the sense to film them before Italy took them away. In 1948 Håkan Cronsioe made Guldbröderna — The Gold Brothers — for Svensk Tonfilm: thirteen minutes of colour, narrated by Sven Jerring, the most famous radio voice in the country, showing Bertil, Knut and Gunnar at home in Hörnefors with their father reading the sports pages and their mother knitting; Knut at his work as a radio policeman; Gunnar in his fireman's uniform; and, at the last, a Sweden-Norway match at Ullevål. It survives in the national film archive, and it is the closing document of the amateur world — a kitchen, a family, three gold medals and a fire helmet, filmed a few months before Milan's money made such a picture impossible to take again.

There is a further irony here, and it is too good to hurry past. Juventus, the house of Gianni Agnelli no less, had already shown their reach in that same market — the Dane Ploeger, pursued by Milan, had been intercepted by them — and yet in the aftermath of that tangled affair it was Juventus who held a prior claim to the Swede and let it go, who indeed helped broker the deal, allowing Milan to sign him. Football's history is full of such small abdications, which a decade later read as the whole decade's first cause. At Centrale the rossoneri were waiting: several hundred by the sober accounts, thousands by the fond ones, and by the fondest of all the crush was enough to break windows, at the station and in the shops around it. The number grows with every retelling; the crush has never needed one. He is described as the first Swede ever to play his football in a foreign league. Sweden's own records put it more bluntly: he was the first Swedish footballer of any standing to be paid for the thing itself, at a transfer fee of seventy-five thousand kronor and a wage of fifteen hundred a month — fireman's money multiplied, and modest enough beside what the decade would eventually pay. Within a week Bertil had signed for Atalanta, and Knut would soon be at Roma: one kitchen table in Hörnefors supplying three clubs in Serie A. He stepped down into the noise, and the Golden Fifties — though nobody yet knew to call them that — had quietly begun.

Nothing Won Since 1907

To understand the delirium you must first understand the hunger. Milan in 1949 was a city still mending itself after the war, brick by brick and tramline by tramline, the first scooters threading between the scaffolding, the espresso bars loud from six in the morning; and its red-and-black half nursed a wound older than any rubble: no scudetto since 1907. Forty-two years. Men had been christened, married and buried between one championship and the hope of the next. The president, Umberto Trabattoni, resolved to answer that hunger the only way a Milanese of means knows how — by spending lavishly on the rebuilding — while Giuseppe Bigogno worked the training ground, and the captain's armband itself told the story of a club in transition, passing through Giuseppe Antonini and Héctor Puricelli before settling on the steady arm of Andrea Bonomi.

It was already a dressing room with a navigational flavour, as though the club were fitting out a merchant fleet rather than a forward line: Paddy Sloan had come from Ireland, Albert Guðmundsson from Iceland, and now a Swede from the fire brigade. There is a pre-season bauble in the record too — the Coppa Carnevale, taken with a 5-1 dismantling of Lazio in the final, a claim that rests on a single source and should be carried lightly — but trifles can be prophetic, and the appetite this one hinted at was entirely real.

The Left Foot at the Arena

The debut came quickly, as debuts should when a man has crossed a continent for them. On 27 January 1949, in a rescheduled eighteenth-round fixture against Pro Patria at the old Arena Civica, Guðmundsson — the Icelander cast, fittingly, as prologue — slid a through-ball into the Swede's path, and Nordahl struck it left-footed into the net. Milan won 3-2, and the Arena understood at once what the platform at Centrale had only guessed.

What followed was not a settling-in period, because Nordahl did not believe in them: sixteen goals in fifteen games before the season closed, a ratio from the age of myth delivered in the age of ration books. The nickname arrived as naturally as the goals. Il Pompiere, the Fireman — later swollen by pure affection into il Pompierone, the great big Fireman — and buried in it was a joke every Milanese could savour: the man who had spent his working life extinguishing fires now spent his Sundays starting them, methodically, in opposing penalty areas. Milan issued him others as the goals accumulated — Il Bisonte for the shoulders, Il Cannoniere for what the shoulders were for — but it was the fire brigade that stuck, because the fire brigade was the only one of them that was literally true.

When the books closed on 1948-49, Milan stood third: fifty points from thirty-eight matches, twenty-one won, eight drawn, nine lost, eighty-three goals scored and fifty-two conceded. Above them sat Internazionale on fifty-five, and above everyone, on sixty, Torino. Juventus trailed fourth on forty-four, which in an ordinary year would have been the season's most quotable line. The Swede's sixteen in fifteen were an intervention rather than a campaign: the team's leading scorer across the whole of it was Riccardo Carapellese with seventeen, and the tireless Omero Tognon made a league-high thirty-eight appearances, which is to say all of them. It was not an ordinary year, and the reason is a hill above Turin.

The Hill at Superga

On 4 May 1949 the aircraft carrying the Grande Torino home crashed into the basilica hill at Superga, and the entire first team — the finest side of its era, the backbone of the national team, the measure against which every other club took its own height — was gone in an instant. Italian football has never absorbed a heavier blow, and I will not pretend that any turn of phrase is equal to it. The season was still unfinished; Torino were awarded the scudetto, their sixth, and played out the remaining fixtures with boys from their youth ranks, while a country that was still teaching itself how to rebuild found one more thing to mourn.

The mourning followed Torino to Spain that summer, where the inaugural Latin Cup — the new competition of the Latin lands, contested in June and July of 1949 — awaited Italy's champion. Torino went, and Torino sent their boys: they lost 3-1 to Sporting of Lisbon in the semi-final, and Barcelona beat Sporting 2-1 in the final on 3 July. Milan were not there. The club's own Latin Cup afternoons, 1951 and 1956, still lay folded in the future. But absence is part of a story too. In 1949 Milan were not yet the club that Europe summoned; within a handful of years they would be the club that Europe braced for.

The Fireman's Prescription

The summer of 1949 brought a Hungarian to the bench: Lajos Czeizler, flanked by the technical director Antonio Busini, a coach whose curriculum had run through Norrköping in Sweden — where the man he had managed was none other than Nordahl himself. And here the fireman revealed his second gift to Milan, which was, in effect, a shopping list: it was Nordahl who urged the club to fetch his old Norrköping coach for the bench and his countrymen Gren and Liedholm for the field, and Trabattoni completed the prescription. Gunnar Gren and Nils Liedholm signed that summer and pulled on the red and black in September, Gren making his debut on the eleventh in a 3-1 win over Sampdoria — and the sentence that would define an age could finally be spoken in full.

Gre-No-Li. From the three surnames the newspapers pressed a single word, and the world would learn to say it in one breath, like a spell, or a grace before dinner — a banner, a slogan, very nearly a trademark of the age. Nordahl was the goalscorer, the point of the lance; Gren the playmaker, all angles and forethought; Liedholm the deep-lying engine, the metronome who decided when the music quickened. All three were Olympic champions of London 1948, which is to say they arrived not as promises but as proofs. Sweden had made them amateurs by statute and champions by temperament; Milan made them professionals, and would in time make them something rarer still. Taken one at a time they were three fine footballers and could be marked as such; taken together they were a method, and Italian defences would spend the years ahead discovering that you cannot man-mark a recipe.

Of the three, Gren arrived with the longest folklore trailing behind him, and it had begun with a boy who would not let a ball touch the ground. On 7 October 1934 the Gothenburg Football Association staged a juggling competition; a thirteen-year-old from little BK Strix kept it up for a hundred and twenty-six touches, close to double the runner-up, and the local papers wrote that the child could have gone to the circus. He went to Gårda BK instead, and made his Allsvenskan debut against Malmö FF on 1 May 1938; he took the Swedish championship with IFK Göteborg in 1942; and in 1946 he became the first man ever awarded the Guldbollen, Sweden's golden ball for its footballer of the year, which is a pleasant thing to be — the first name on a list that has never since stopped growing. Italy, which has an ear for these matters, listened to the same precision and gave it a different title: Il Professore, the Professor. Sweden had raised a juggler; Milan hired a geometer.

Six to Five

Then, on 6 November 1949, the derby — round ten of the new championship, Inter against Milan, and eleven goals, the highest-scoring derby della Madonnina ever played, a record that stands untouched to this day: the sort of afternoon a newsreel would have had to run twice before anyone believed it. Candiani struck twice inside the opening seven minutes and Milan led early; at the interval they led still, four goals to three, Nordahl and Liedholm among the scorers, and for a long while the afternoon tilted red and black. Then Amedeo Amadei — and great deeds by the enemy deserve their due — completed his hat-trick, and Inter won 6-5. There are defeats that diminish a team and defeats that advertise one, and this, maddeningly, was both: a beaten Milan that all of Italy suddenly wanted to watch.

The season that eleven-goal afternoon belonged to would not be settled until the spring of 1950, and what that afternoon had set in motion — the most prolific attack Italy had ever counted, and the strangest injustice ever done to one — would be measured then, and is measured in the following year's chapter, where the bill properly falls due. What 1949 was entitled to know by November was only this: how gloriously the new machine already ran, and how little now remained to be fastened down before 1907 could stop being a reproach and become merely a date.

The Sowing

1949 is the year all the others lean on. It began with a man getting down from a train and passed through the darkest afternoon Italian football has ever known; it closed with three Swedish Olympians in red and black, a Hungarian on the bench, and a city relearning the habit of hope. The war had taught Milan how to rebuild; Superga taught football how much can be lost in a single hour; and Nordahl, Gren and Liedholm taught the Milanese that greatness could be imported, planted in Lombard soil, and made to grow as if native. The waiting that began in 1907 did not end in 1949 — the table is honest: third, and then the chase — but its ending was written there, the way the harvest is written in the sowing. The fireman had come south to a city burning with hunger, and instead of putting the fire out, he fed it. History has never recorded a kinder act of arson.