Sacked in First Place

A Publisher in the President's Chair

Andrea Rizzoli sat in the president's chair at Milan, and the family business was ink. It was an arrangement so apt it came close to allegory: the club in red and black belonged, in those years, to a publishing dynasty, in a city that printed the nation's words and manufactured its appetites. Italy was entering the first surge of what would come to be called its economic miracle, and Milan was its furnace and its counting-house, the industrial and publishing capital of the Republic. You could hear the age in the mornings — presses running, lathes turning, scaffolding climbing month by month toward a skyline that had stopped apologising for itself — and you could hear it again at six in the evening, in espresso bars where a Vespa stood at the kerb with its engine ticking cool while its owner settled, over a small cup, the question of the centre-forward.

The Republic spent the year on its institutional housekeeping. On the twenty-ninth of April, Giovanni Gronchi was elected President of Italy; on the fourteenth of December, the country was admitted at last to the United Nations. Between those two ceremonies of national respectability the club conducted ceremonies of its own — a fifth championship sealed in June sunshine, and, in November, the first European Cup tie Milan had ever played. San Siro's league congregations averaged some twenty-six thousand seven hundred that season, a figure that sounds modest until you remember that a great many of them came straight from a factory shift, and that a crowd's weight is measured not by its number but by its need.

Nineteen Matches, Then the Door

Every championship has an official story and a true one, and the true story of Milan's fifth scudetto begins with the man who was not there when it was won. Béla Guttmann had arrived in November 1953: Hungarian, restless, brilliant, a man who had survived the Holocaust and emerged with the settled conviction that no employer, no federation, no border would ever own him again. Football called him a nomad, and the word flatters football; he was a man who had learned, in the hardest school the century offered, that survival lies in never staying where you are not valued.

Nineteen games into his second season, Guttmann had Milan on top of Serie A. In most professions this constitutes success; in football it constitutes leverage, and leverage frightens boards of directors more than relegation does. His disputes with Rizzoli's board accumulated the way unanswered letters accumulate on a busy desk — invisibly for weeks, then all at once, in a pile nobody can pretend not to see — and in February 1955 the club dismissed the coach of the league leaders. At the press conference Guttmann delivered the sentence that would follow him around Europe for the rest of his wandering life: "I have been sacked even though I am neither a criminal nor a homosexual. Goodbye." It was the wit of a wounded man, and it was also a legal brief. From that day forward he insisted that every contract he signed contain a clause forbidding his dismissal while his team stood top of the table.

One should resist the urge to paint the boardroom as a den of melodramatic villains; the great houses of that Milan were run like the publishing firms they resembled, where an editor who crosses the proprietor is replaced regardless of the circulation figures. The fine print is argued over still — whether the table showed Milan first or merely a narrow second on the morning of it, precisely which match proved to be his last. But the shape of the thing deserves to be said aloud: a club sacked a man in first place, and the man was right to be insulted.

Fourteen Goals on Two June Sundays

The inheritance passed to Héctor Puricelli — Ettore, the Italians called him, and both names belonged to him honestly, a Uruguayan of Italian stock, which in this Milan of Schiaffino was fast becoming a house style. He took over from February, in a season that had just produced one of the strangest Sundays in the league's memory: on the thirteenth of February 1955, Inter, Juventus, Roma and Milan — the four great houses of the Italian game — all lost on the same day, a synchronised humiliation the championship would not manage to repeat until the eighteenth of September 2022. The football gods, having made their little joke, then stood aside to watch.

For what followed was an avalanche — though not an unbroken one, for the spring had its stumbles: Roma took both matches from Milan that season, and the first of May brought a 3-2 defeat away to Udinese, the very rival breathing hardest on the leaders' necks. But then came the answer. In May Milan won 4-2 away to Lazio in Rome and beat Juventus 3-1 at San Siro, results of the kind that turn a title race into a procession; and then, as if to be certain the point had been taken, they went to Genoa on the fifth of June and won 8-0 — eight, away from home, the widest away victory in the club's Serie A history — before dismissing SPAL 6-0 at San Siro on the twelfth of June, Nordahl himself scoring four of them. Fourteen goals across two June Sundays: this was not a team defending a lead, it was a team eating the calendar.

The season closed at forty-eight points from thirty-four matches — nineteen won, ten drawn, five lost — with eighty-one goals scored and thirty-five conceded. Four points clear of Udinese on forty-four, with Roma at forty-one and Bologna at forty — and twelve clear of Internazionale, champions of the two preceding seasons, whom Milan had failed to beat in either meeting, both derbies having finished 1-1: proof, if the tacticians require it, that a scudetto is won not against your rival but against everybody else. The Friulians' fine season would later dissolve in a bribery scandal that saw them demoted, though the stain never came near Milan's title. The arithmetic became irreversible on the twelfth of June, the SPAL afternoon, with a round still to spare. The final Sunday — a 1-1 shrug away to Pro Patria on the nineteenth — was the champion putting its signature beneath a document already set in type.

Twenty-Seven, and Nobody Astonished

At the head of it all, as ever, stood Gunnar Nordahl. Twenty-seven league goals in 1954-55 — twenty-eight in all competitions — and with them a fifth title as capocannoniere, seven clear of Udinese's Lorenzo Bettini on twenty. Consider what that sentence contains. The great Swede had been scoring at this rate for so long that Italy had stopped being astonished, which is the highest compliment a country can pay a footballer: he had become part of the national scenery, like the expresses that left Centrale to the advertised minute. You set your expectations by him and you stopped remarking on it.

And yet the landscape around him had changed. The trinity the crowds had christened Gre-No-Li was no longer intact: Gunnar Gren had left for Fiorentina in 1953, and the famous syllables now named a memory rather than a forward line. In Gren's place, pulling the strings alongside the third Swede, Nils Liedholm, was a Uruguayan who played the way a great editor works — nothing wasted, everything intensified: Juan Alberto Schiaffino, world champion with Uruguay in 1950, brought from Peñarol to be the creative fulcrum of the side. Two continents had already agreed on what to call him. In Italy and in France he was baptised "el mago", the magician, and L'Équipe went further still and coined "Dios del fútbol", the god of football — and through these seasons he and Alfredo Di Stéfano conducted, in the newspapers if not anywhere official, a private duel for the unofficial title of best player on earth. The scudetto of 1954-55 was the first of his life in the red and black. Fifteen goals he contributed across the season's competitions, with the Dane Jørgen Leschly Sørensen adding fourteen, Eduardo Ricagni — arrived from Juventus — eight, and Frignani and Liedholm seven apiece.

The campaign's other arrivals would matter in ways nobody could yet measure. A young defender named Cesare Maldini came from Triestina, bringing a surname the club would one day be unable to imagine itself without — and bringing, too, a pair of eyes that spent the season studying Schiaffino from a few metres away, at the range where a defender learns what cannot be defended. Long afterwards, wearing by then the authority of a Milan captain, Maldini would give an Argentine newspaper the shortest and best description anyone has managed of the Uruguayan: "Tenía un radar en el cerebro" — he had a radar in his brain — for tracing the geometry of a football match before the geometry had occurred to anybody else. A forward, Valentino Valli, came from Piombino to write himself, as we shall see, into Milan's first European page. The armband, for the record, belonged to Omero Tognon, the tireless mediano, with Nordahl standing as his deputy — though in truth a team like this had authority to spare, wherever the captaincy happened to rest.

Five Days at the Parc des Princes

A champion's reward, in those last summers before the European Cup existed, was the Latin Cup, and so to Paris Milan went in the final week of June — the twenty-second to the twenty-sixth — to stand for Italy among the champions of the Latin nations. At the Parc des Princes on the twenty-second they met Stade de Reims, and were beaten 3-2 only after extra time: a defeat with honour, though honour, as every Milanese banker will tell you, is a currency that cannot be deposited.

Three days later Milan beat Os Belenenses of Lisbon 3-1 to take third place — Ricagni twice and Nordahl supplying the goals — and watched Real Madrid defeat Reims 2-0 in the final. The attentive reader should file those two names, Madrid and Reims, carefully away. The continent's new hierarchy was announcing itself in that Parisian June, and Milan would have intimate dealings with it soon enough.

The First of November, Under Lights

For that same year the great idea arrived: a cup for the champions of Europe, played home and away, across borders, under lights. Milan entered the inaugural European Cup in the autumn of 1955, and their first opponent in the new world was 1. FC Saarbrücken. The opening leg was played at San Siro on the first of November 1955, and Milan contrived to lose it 3-4, their goals coming from Frignani on the quarter-hour, Schiaffino on thirty-three minutes and Dal Monte on thirty-seven — three scored inside the first thirty-seven minutes of the club's European history, and still not enough on the night, for the Saarlanders answered four times through Krieger, Philippi, Schirra and Martin. The flashbulbs went off around a scoreline the team would spend the return leg correcting.

The reply came on the twenty-third of November at the Ludwigspark in Saarbrücken, and it was emphatic: 4-1, the new man Valli scoring in the eighth minute, an own goal credited to Puff arriving on seventy-five, Valli again on seventy-seven, and Beraldo completing matters four minutes from time. Milan advanced 7-5 on aggregate — twelve goals across two legs, because this team did not know how to be dull — and the road ahead led to Rapid Wien in the quarter-final and, in the spring beyond this chronicle's border, to Real Madrid. The gift of 1955 was the beginning itself: the first November night on which Milan discovered that its true dimension was continental.

For the men who played it, the discovery was mostly logistical — a passport, a border post, a hotel where nobody spoke Italian, a return home with the lights of a foreign ground still printing themselves on the inside of the eyelids. Institutions rarely notice the moment they change size.

The Clause

The autumn had meanwhile opened a new league season, and it opened with a warning. From its first weeks the 1955-56 campaign belonged to a Fiorentina that would lose only a single match all season, and Milan, under Puricelli's continued command, spent the closing months of the year in the unfamiliar posture of pursuit — with Nordahl, of course Nordahl, still scoring as though the fixture list were a private commission. The reigning champions of Italy thus ended 1955 as pursuers, which is the game's oldest joke: the crown never sits, it merely pauses.

And the last word of the year belongs to a clause. From the day of his dismissal onward, Béla Guttmann required of every club that hired him a single line of contract forbidding his removal while his team stood top of the table. It is unremarkable legal prose, and it states in ink what everyone in the dressing room knew and the boardroom preferred not to say: that a fifth championship, eighty-one goals, an avalanche in June, had been built on the work of a man who was not there in June to see it finished.

Football is a forgetful industry, and it fell to the wounded party to draft his own remembrance. He had it typed into contract after contract, in country after country, for the rest of his travelling life — a wanderer carrying one fixed sentence about not being moved, the way other men carry a photograph.