Champions in Their Socks

Forty-Four Years, and a Country in a Hurry

Count backwards from the summer of 1951 and the last Milanese championship stands forty-four years away, in 1907, when football in Italy was still a gentlemen's misunderstanding conducted in long shorts. Three titles had been won in the club's infancy — 1901, 1906, 1907 — and then nothing: not through one war, not through another, not through the comings and goings of coaches and forwards who promised the sun and delivered the usual Lombard drizzle. A supporter born on the day of the last title would have turned forty-four still waiting, old enough to have sons who mocked him gently for his loyalty.

By the spring of 1951 the city itself had stopped apologising. Italy was rebuilding under De Gasperi — patiently, with Marshall Plan money and its own obstinate hands — and the chimneys of the industrial north smoked with something close to optimism. At San Siro a football team had been assembled that scored goals the way Milan was then putting up apartment blocks: relentlessly, in quantity, without pausing to admire the work. The 1950-51 championship reads less like a table than a manifesto: sixty points from thirty-eight matches, twenty-six won, eight drawn, four lost; one hundred and seven goals scored and thirty-nine conceded. Inter finished second on fifty-nine — one point behind, after nine months of labour — and Juventus third on fifty-four. It was Milan's fourth championship, the first won under the single national division that had existed since 1929, and above all the first in forty-four years; no man who stood on the terraces that June needed the sum explained to him.

Three Swedes and a Hungarian Blackboard

The architects deserve naming in the correct order, which is never quite the order of fame. President Umberto Trabattoni paid for the house. Lajos Czeizler, a Hungarian of that itinerant Danubian priesthood of coaches who carried the passing game across Europe like friars carrying scripture, drew the plans, with Antonio Busini as technical director at his shoulder. And the load-bearing masonry — the glorious, goal-shaped masonry — was Swedish. Gunnar Gren, Gunnar Nordahl, Nils Liedholm: Gre-No-Li, three surnames the newspapers welded into a single word, three northerners who had come south and decided to stay.

Nordahl above all. He had arrived in January 1949 — the fourteenth by some records, the twenty-second by others, as an earlier chapter has already conceded — described as the first Swede to take his football to a foreign league, and he had brought his old trade with him as a name: in Sweden he had been a fireman, and Il Pompiere he remained. In 1950-51 the Fireman scored thirty-four goals in the championship alone, thirty-eight across all competitions, and took a second consecutive capocannoniere crown to set beside the thirty-five of the season before — the second of what would in time be five, which remains a record, and which is the sort of number one simply lays on the table and leaves there, like a winning hand.

Around the Swedes, Italians of sturdier clay. Lorenzo Buffon kept the goal. Carlo Annovazzi drove the midfield and helped himself to sixteen league goals, an indecent figure for a mediano. The summer of 1950 had brought reinforcements, the full-back Arturo Silvestri from Modena and the little winger Mario Renosto from Venezia — remember Renosto; June has a use for him. And the armband belonged to Andrea Bonomi of Cassano d'Adda, whose story waits at the end of this chapter, because it will not fit anywhere else in it.

A Hundred and Seven Goals

How does a team score a hundred and seven goals in thirty-eight matches? Not politely. The autumn answered the question first, in nines and sevens — Novara, Naples, the eleven-goal Christmas Eve at Atalanta — and the previous year's chapter keeps the score of it. The spring went on in the same currency: in February 1951 came a 9-0 against Palermo, the largest home win of the season, on an afternoon when San Siro must have felt less like a stadium than a granary being filled against the memory of forty-four lean years. Not politeness, then, but calculation: a side that means to reach a hundred and seven cannot afford a quiet month, and this one did not take any.

There were scares, because there are always scares, though the cruellest of them — a derby lost at home, and Bologna helping themselves a fortnight afterwards — had come and gone before Christmas. A side that scores a hundred and seven will concede thirty-nine; Czeizler's Milan defended the way rich men economise — sincerely, but without conviction. What saved them was never the defending. It was the refusal, sustained from September to June, to stop scoring; the understanding, which is the oldest tactical truth in the game and the hardest to live by, that the surest way to concede one goal fewer is to score two more.

The Scudetto Arrives by Loudspeaker

Sunday, 10 June 1951. Lazio came to San Siro; Flamini scored in the thirteenth minute; Nordahl — who else — replied in the twenty-fifth; and in the thirty-ninth Primo Sentimenti, fifth of the footballing Sentimenti brothers, put Lazio back in front — this after his brother Lucidio, in the Lazio goal, had already saved a penalty from Annovazzi. Milan lost, 2-1, at home, on the day they became champions of Italy. For while San Siro fretted, Torino were beating Internazionale in Turin, and when the loudspeaker gave the crowd the score from the other afternoon, the ground understood before the players did. The news reached the team in the dressing room, so that forty-four years ended not with a roar at a goal but with a shout at an announcement — half-dressed men embracing among the boots and the liniment, robbed of the on-pitch celebration and past caring, champions in their socks.

The season did not formally close that afternoon, and the purists are right to insist on it, which is their particular tragedy. A week later, on 17 June, came a dead rubber in Rome, lost 2-1 while the rest of the league emptied its pockets in the sunshine — Inter putting five past Genoa, Juventus six past Atalanta, Bologna seven past Lazio, everyone suddenly generous once nothing was at stake. Some accounts therefore call 10 June the final day of the season and others merely its decisive one. The title had a date, and the date was the tenth. And there is something profoundly Milanese in winning it while losing, the way a merchant closes his greatest deal on the day his umbrella blows inside out.

Four Days of June

There was no time to sober up. From the 20th to the 24th of June, San Siro hosted the third edition of the Latin Cup, the annual convocation of the leading clubs of France, Italy, Portugal and Spain — the nearest thing that era possessed to a European crown, and the entire tournament played in Milan, which is to say that the city, having waited forty-four years for one festival, was handed a second before the bunting of the first had come down.

In the semi-final on 20 June, before some thirty-five thousand, Milan beat Atlético Madrid 4-1 — and here came Renosto's afternoon. The winger from Venezia had been bought, in essence, as a delivery service, his season's work the slinging of crosses onto the head of Nordahl; on this afternoon the deliveryman kept the parcels for himself and scored a hat-trick — the seventeenth minute, the fifty-fifth, the seventy-fifth — while Nordahl, in a rare fit of modesty, added only the other. Perhaps the truest tribute to Czeizler's Milan is precisely this: a team in which even the men hired to serve the goalscorer held strong opinions about goalscoring, and acted on them in front of witnesses.

The final came on 24 June, against Lille, and it was not a contest but a coronation: 5-0, Nordahl three — of course three — with Renzo Burini and Carlo Annovazzi adding the rest. The statisticians noted with period courtesy that Lille's André Strappe finished as the tournament's top scorer with five; Milan noted, rather more loudly, that the cup itself — the first international trophy in the club's history — was not leaving the city. Fourteen days, then, from the loudspeaker to the silverware: a forty-four-year famine ended and a first foreign conquest secured, both at the club's own ground, both inside a fortnight in which the flashbulbs never quite had time to cool. The Golden Fifties were not coming. They had arrived, and they had arrived by tram.

The Five-Hundred-Lire Captain

Every triumph needs its plain man, and Milan's wore the armband. Andrea Bonomi was born on 14 February 1923 in Cassano d'Adda, a small town east of Milan where the river Adda runs quick and green out of the mountains, and he came to the club in 1941 for five hundred lire — a fee so modest it reads today like a misprint. He made his Serie A debut on 22 November 1942, in a wartime city learning to live by night in its cellars, and he simply stayed, through the worst years and into the best. They called him Ciapin. He was a wing-half and full-back without an ounce of glamour, a man who supplied in running and grit what nature had declined to supply in refinement, and in 1950-51, while the Swedes gathered the headlines and the flashbulbs, Ciapin played all thirty-eight league matches and lifted, as captain, the Scudetto his city had awaited for forty-four years — and then, that same June, the Latin Cup besides.

And there is this — the reader has met it in 1947, but 1951 is the year the story pays out. The boy pulled drowning from the Adda at six by the ten-year-old Valentino Mazzola was now a champion of Italy, and Mazzola, captain of the Grande Torino, had died at Superga only two years before Bonomi's title. And the championship itself was delivered to him, on that tenth of June, by a Torino victory — the bereaved club of the boy who once fished him from the river reaching out, as it were, one more time. Some accounts are settled in currencies we do not hold.

On 25 November 1951 the Azzurri called, once and once only: a 1-1 draw with Switzerland, a single cap, the whole of the international recognition granted to a man who had captained the champions of Italy through every match of their season. He would wear the armband once more, through the season that followed, and then go out of the club without ceremony and without romance — but that departure happened in a summer this year never saw, and the next chapter is where it is owed. What 1951 holds is the summit itself, reached the way Ciapin reached everything, on foot and without complaint, in the Lombard manner — which holds that the view from the top is a thing you keep in your pocket afterwards, not a thing you talk about.

Autumn, and the Po

Autumn turned the page and the 1951-52 championship began, carrying news the champions could not yet read: that in this league nothing is inherited, not even by champions, and that every June must be earned again from a standing start in September. The Fireman would have other fires and the decade would keep most of its promises; but the first law of the Golden Fifties was already legible in their first autumn, and the champions were reading it without knowing that they were.

And in November, the river rose. On the night of the 14th the Po burst its banks in the Polesine, down in the Rovigo country, and some eighty-four people died and around one hundred and eighty thousand were driven from their homes — one of the worst peacetime floods Italy has known, arriving in the very autumn the industrial capital was still toasting its footballers. A nation rebuilding itself on borrowed money and its own hands was reminded what its rivers think of human planning. One river had given a small boy back to Lombardy; another took eighty-four lives from the Veneto in the same twelve months that brought the championship home, and 1951 held both facts in one hand all year without ever quite closing its fist.

What survives of the year is not the table but the room: a dressing room at San Siro on the tenth of June, boots on the floor, liniment in the air, a loudspeaker still crackling somewhere beyond the wall, and a side that had just been beaten 2-1 at home learning from a stranger's voice that they were champions of Italy. Fourteen days later, on the same grass, they were handed a silver cup that had never been to Milan before. Forty-four years ended in a shout indoors, with the door still open and nobody yet properly dressed.