The Publisher Buys a Brain

Grey Screens in the Bar Windows

On the third of January 1954, RAI began regular television broadcasts, and across Lombardy the first grey screens flickered into life in bar windows and apartment stairwells — small aquariums of light with a row of coats standing in front of them and the espresso going cold on the counter behind. Italy was deep in its post-war rebuilding, the economic miracle gathering pace the way a factory gathers it: one shift, then two, then a queue at the gate before dawn. Milan — city of looms and lathes and print works, of Vespas learning the corners at the head of every street — was its engine room.

And Milanese football was booming with the rest of it. The uncomfortable truth, for those of the red-and-black persuasion, was that the boom belonged just then to the cousins: Internazionale had taken the scudetto in 1953 and were completing another in 1954, back-to-back titles that our half of the city had to live beneath, and did, badly. Still the people came — nearly nineteen thousand of them, on average, climbing the San Siro terraces for Milan's matches, Sunday after Sunday, in the settled bad temper of men certain that the thing is coming to them and merely late. The question of 1954 was whether the club shared their certainty.

The Bronze of Spring

The answer, in spring, was: not yet. Milan closed the 1953-54 championship in third place for the second season running, with forty-four points, level with Fiorentina, while Inter finished champions on fifty-one and Juventus second on fifty — which is to say, close enough to see the summit, far enough to feel the cold coming off it. Third is the cruellest of the podium places: it flatters a season without redeeming it. The newsreel runs, the crowd is loud, the camera pans, and it pans to somebody else's trophy.

There was one crown, though, and it rested where it nearly always rested. Gunnar Nordahl finished as Serie A's top scorer with twenty-three goals — his fourth capocannoniere title in five seasons, an act of production so regular it had almost ceased to be news. The great Swede scored the way the liners crossed: on schedule, in bulk, in all weathers, until nobody on the quayside troubled to look up. Yet the trio that had made him a legend was a trio no longer. Gunnar Gren had departed for Fiorentina in 1953, and Gre-No-Li — that lovely three-syllable engine — now ran on two cylinders, Nordahl and Liedholm, power and thought still in residence but the third man's cunning gone south.

The season's derbies had told the story of the gap in miniature: Inter took one of them 3-0, István Nyers helping himself to all three goals, and Milan answered 2-0 through Nordahl and Sørensen — an exchange that left honour intact and nothing whatever settled. And on the bench, since the tenth of November 1953, sat Béla Guttmann, the Hungarian who had replaced Arrigo Morselli in mid-season, and who watched the third-place spring with the narrowed eyes of a man deciding what to keep.

Fifty-Two Million Lire

Summer changed the ownership of the problem. Umberto Trabattoni, the president who had presided over the scudetto of 1951, stepped down after the season's end, and into the chair came Andrea Rizzoli — a publisher, a man out of the world of print runs and front pages, who understood better than most that a city which had just acquired television would require something worth putting on it.

He supplied it at once. In Switzerland that summer the World Cup had been played, and Uruguay, fourth in the tournament, carried in their ranks the finest constructor of football the Río de la Plata had yet exported: Juan Alberto Schiaffino, star and orchestrator of the 1950 Maracanazo, the afternoon a small republic silenced Brazil in Brazil's own new stadium. Milan bought him from Peñarol almost the moment the tournament released him, for a fee the whole world agreed was a record and no two countries wrote down the same way — fifty-two million lire in the Italian ledgers, seventy-two thousand pounds sterling in the English. The currencies disagreed; the superlative did not. Rizzoli had paid more for a footballer than anyone in the history of the game — a man who had come from front pages had gone out and made one — and, here is the beautiful part, he had bought not a goalscorer but a brain.

It is worth knowing exactly what fifty-two million lire lifted out of Montevideo. Schiaffino had been found, along with his brother Raúl — himself known in the barrio as El Pequeño Maestro, the little master — at a neighbourhood club called Tigre, in the seaside district of Pocitos: two boys off a street corner, one of whom the Uruguayan writers of the day remembered as a flaquito de jopito rubio, a skinny little thing with a blond forelock, so slight that men who ought to have known better held his physique against him. They were wrong in the usual manner of scouts, who can weigh a boy but cannot read him. Uruguay called him into the national team before he had played so much as a first-team match for Peñarol; the club debut came only on the twenty-ninth of December 1945, by which time the country had already made up its mind about him.

Eleven seasons he gave them, 1943 to 1954: two hundred and twenty-seven matches, eighty-eight goals, four Uruguayan championships — 1949, 1951, 1953 and the fourth won in the very year he left. Montevideo does not file him under goals either. It files him as the conductor of la escuadrilla de la muerte, the death squadron: that Peñarol forward line of 1949 — Ghiggia, Schiaffino, Hohberg, Míguez, Vidal — five men strung across the front and one mind arranging them, the whole thing playing like an orchestra with a director who never raised his voice.

And behind all of it, the Maracanã. It was Schiaffino who scored Uruguay's equaliser on that afternoon in 1950, in front of something near two hundred thousand Brazilians, and it is his own account of the seconds afterwards that explains why San Siro would rise to him before he had touched a ball in red and black. Asked what he heard once the net moved, he said simply: un silencio único — a unique silence, a silence of its own kind. Two hundred thousand people, and no sound whatever. A man who has made the largest stadium on earth go quiet carries that quiet about with him ever after; it came to Milan in the same luggage as his boots.

The deal itself was settled, by Schiaffino's own recollection, while the World Cup was still being played in Switzerland — and it was settled, as the club's own account of its legends records, through the good offices of a countryman. Héctor Puricelli, the Uruguayan who had scored goals in these colours a decade before, put himself between Montevideo and Milano and turned an introduction into a signature: a South American bridge that the English telling of the world record almost always forgets to walk across. Remember the name. It will come back wearing a different hat — not in these pages, but in the next chapter of this book.

Around that signing, quieter business was done. From Triestina came a twenty-two-year-old defender named Cesare Maldini; from Juventus came the Argentine forward Eduardo Ricagni, who would score in the season's very first match. No headline called the Maldini signing historic. Headlines cannot see forward; it is the one mercy of the trade.

The Nineteenth of September

The new season opened at San Siro on the nineteenth of September 1954, and the fixture list — which has no sense of drama and therefore produces it constantly — had arranged for Milan to host Triestina, the very club from which the boy Maldini had just arrived. Milan won 4-0. Schiaffino, on debut, scored twice, and the terraces understood within the hour what the world-record fee had actually purchased: not speed, not muscle, but time — the gift of a player who appears to receive the ball a moment before it has been kicked to him, and to have read the next three moves while the rest are still disputing the last one.

But the quieter story of the same afternoon is the one worth stopping for. In that eleven — Lorenzo Buffon in goal, Francesco Zagatti beside him, Liedholm and Nordahl and the new Uruguayan ahead — stood the debutant from Trieste, playing against the shirts he had worn the season before and betraying no tremor about it. Cesare Maldini was unawed. Among some of the most decorated footballers in Italy he simply took his position, held it that day, held it all season, and at the season's far end would hold a scudetto in his very first year of red and black.

Nobody on the terraces knew what had truly begun. The young man would one day captain Milan to the European Cup of 1963; his son Paolo and his grandson Daniel would carry the same surname onto the same grass; a bloodline had quietly attached itself to a football club, the way ivy attaches itself to a house it intends to hold up forever. Dynasties do not announce themselves. They walk out on a September afternoon, mark their winger, and go home for dinner.

The Autumn Gallop

What followed was the kind of autumn a man afterwards remembers in order. A week after Triestina, Sampdoria were beaten 3-0 in Genoa; Atalanta fell 3-1 at San Siro on the third of October; Catania were taken 3-1 in Sicily; Napoli beaten 2-0 in their own arena; Torino dismantled 4-1 at home on the twenty-fourth; Bologna beaten 2-1 in Bologna to close the month. Seven wins from seven to open a championship — not a run so much as a timetable, one a Sunday, kept the way this city keeps its trams.

Then, on the seventh of November, the derby, and with it one of the season's finer ironies. It finished 1-1; both derbies of 1954-55 would finish 1-1; and what that pair of shrugs was finally worth, when the two houses came to be measured against each other in June, is a sum the following year's chapter is left to add up. Say only this much here: a championship is won not against your rival but against everybody else, on the grey provincial Sundays where glory offers no assistance and only stubbornness counts. The Sunday after the derby, Fiorentina — Gren's Fiorentina — were beaten 2-0 in Florence, and Novara were swept aside 3-0 a week later.

December supplied the sermon. In Rome on the twelfth, Milan lost 2-1 — the single defeat among the dozen documented results of that autumn, a small reminder from the football gods that gallops are permitted and flights are not. The reply came on the twenty-sixth, St Stephen's Day, Lazio beaten 3-0 at San Siro. Omero Tognon wore the armband across both of the year's seasons; Nordahl, his vice-captain, was meanwhile assembling yet another top scorer's campaign, whose final total, and what it was worth by the summer, are figures for the next chapter to count out. And so the year closed with Milan playing like champions-elect.

The Hungarian at the Edge of the Year

And the conductor of this autumn? Béla Guttmann: itinerant, brilliant, unmanageable, a man who had taken the team in November 1953 and who, by roughly the nineteenth round, had Milan sitting on top of Serie A. It belongs to the black comedy of our club's history that he would not be permitted to see the season out. The manner of his going, and the one sentence he left behind him in the doorway — a sentence that has outlived every league table of the era — are the property of 1955, and will be paid over there in full.

Whose team it was, though, was never in dispute. The side that would be crowned in June 1955 was recruited, drilled and set galloping in the calendar year 1954, under Guttmann's eye; the harvest was gathered by other hands, but no honest telling of the vineyard omits the man who pruned it.

No Silverware, and Everything Else

So where does 1954 belong? Not under silverware: between January and December the cabinet gained nothing, and a pedant could write the year off as a third place followed by an unfinished season. But pedantry is the enemy of understanding. Some years win titles; rarer years make titles inevitable, and 1954 was of the second, superior kind.

Consider what the year handed on. A publisher-president with the nerve to break the world record. An Architect from Montevideo who would win the title in his first season and add the scudetti of 1957 and 1959 before he was done. A boy from Trieste installed at the back, first stone of a dynasty three generations deep. Nordahl still scoring on schedule, Liedholm still thinking for eleven men, Tognon carrying the armband, and a Hungarian's autumn that would leave the champions of the previous two years twelve points behind by the following June. Call the coming title the fifth championship of the club's history, or only the second since Serie A became a single round-robin, depending on how you prefer to count — the trophy has never once cared.

A lifetime later, what the supporters of this club are watching — though few would phrase it so — is still the long consequence of that September: the wallet opened, the Uruguayan arrived, the boy from Trieste marked his winger and said nothing. The champions crowned in June 1955 were made in 1954, in plain daylight, in the ordinary working noise of the city — while everyone stood at the bar windows in their coats, watching the new grey screens.