The Sheriff, Nordahlino and the Sixth Scudetto

Fog on the Navigli, Ink in Rome

Every city has its own way of announcing a great year, and Milan's is characteristically oblique: the fog comes down over the Navigli in the last weeks of winter, the trams push through it like patient oxen, and somewhere above it all the Madonnina keeps her golden counsel while men below sign papers that change the world. On 25 March 1957, in Rome, Italy put its name to the treaty that founded the European Economic Community, and though the ink dried far from Lombardy it was Milan — industrial, impatient, already humming with the first great surge of the economic miracle — that would do much of the work the signature promised. The country was joining Europe. Its most European city had, in truth, never really left.

Football, which is always a decade ahead of the diplomats in these matters, had its own accession under way. Andrea Rizzoli's Milan of the Golden Fifties had been built on the great foreigners — on Swedes and a Uruguayan, on the conviction that the San Siro should stage the best the world could offer — and in 1957 that conviction faced its sternest audit. The champions of this story would win a sixth scudetto, take a hard lesson in Madrid, and by autumn be playing in the young European Cup, so that the year reads now like a rehearsal for everything the club would become. But it began, as the best Milanese stories do, with a departure and an empty chair at the head of the table.

The Empty Throne

Gunnar Nordahl was gone. Write the sentence plainly, because that is how the city received it: the greatest goalscorer Milan had ever seen, seven seasons and 221 goals of him, sold to Roma, and with him went the last practical remnant of Gre-No-Li, since Gren had already departed and only Nils Liedholm remained — Liedholm the Swede, now captain, the midfield's presiding intelligence, a man who passed the ball the way a good notary drafts a will, leaving nothing to chance and nothing to be contested afterwards.

The faithful braced for famine. Centre-forwards of Nordahl's tonnage do not grow on the plane trees of the Sempione, and the question that hung over the summer like the smell of a kitchen before dinner was the simplest in football and the hardest to answer: who scores now? The club's reply was not one man but a whole market — and, as it turned out, a boy.

The Sheriff and His New Deputies

To conduct the succession Rizzoli engaged Giuseppe Viani, called Gipo, called more usefully lo Sceriffo — the Sheriff — a nickname he wore the way other men wear a watch, without comment and never removed. He replaced Hector Puricelli in the dugout and set about assembling his deputies: Carlo Galli arrived from Roma, moving against Nordahl's traffic; Ernesto Cucchiaroni crossed an ocean from Boca Juniors; Per Bredesen came down from Udinese, Luigi Zannier from Atalanta, Alfio Fontana back from his loan at Triestina; and from Piacenza, where he had plundered 23 goals in 21 Serie C matches, returned a slight forward named Gastone Bean, of whom more — much more — presently.

The Sheriff's first weeks were the stuff of ambushes. Napoli came to San Siro and left with a 3-5 scoreline that had the moralists reaching for their oldest sermons; Padova beat the champions-to-be as well, 2-0, on the October afternoon when Bean made his first appearance of the season; and then, crueller than any result, Liedholm himself was taken from the side — viral hepatitis, roughly October to December, two months in which Milan had to learn to think without its thinker. A lesser squad folds there. This one, oddly, straightened its back.

The Turning at Florence

Seasons, like risotto, have a moment when they turn — stir too early and you have nothing, wait too long and it catches — and Milan's came on 28 October 1956 in Florence, against the Fiorentina of the reigning title, the defending champions who had painted the previous spring purple. Milan won 3-0, away, against the holders, and the result did what such results do: it reorganised the league's imagination. From that afternoon the rossoneri pulled clear, and by the season's high water, in mid-March, they had put nine points between themselves and the Tuscans, which in the two-points-for-a-win arithmetic of the age was not a lead but a jurisdiction.

The derbies, for once, declined to decide anything. Both meetings with Inter finished 1-1 — the first on 21 October 1956, the return on 10 March 1957, when the opening goal was scored by the boy from Piacenza, of whom, again, presently. A drawn derby is the city looking in the mirror and finding itself neither more handsome nor more honest than it feared; Milan took its point, twice, and went back to the business of winning everywhere else, which is the only known cure for a derby that refuses to be won.

Nordahlino

Now the boy. Gastone Bean was born in San Canzian d'Isonzo, near Gorizia, out where the river runs Habsburg-green and the borders have moved more often than the church pews; he stood one metre sixty-nine in an age of oak-built centre-forwards, was twenty years old, and had already had one Milan spell, in 1953-55, so that his arrival from Piacenza was strictly a homecoming, though the crowd could be forgiven for not remembering the first visit. He was never a guaranteed starter — the Sheriff alternated him with Galli at centre-forward, as a careful cook alternates butter and oil — and yet when the championship was counted Bean had scored 17 league goals, the fourth-best tally in the division, in a race led by the capocannoniere Dino Da Costa of Roma with his 22, and ahead of his own colleagues Galli, who added 14, and Schiaffino, who gave 9.

The San Siro, which coins nicknames the way the old mints once coined ducats, christened him Nordahlino — little Nordahl — and the diminutive was both affection and audit: he was not the great Swede and never would be, but he had answered the summer's question, and in a championship autumn that is worth more than resemblance. The readers of Il calcio e il ciclismo illustrato voted him their favourite Champion of 1957, an honour of the sweetest and most perishable kind.

Perishable indeed. When José Altafini arrived in 1958, Bean slid back to luxury reserve, and his last match in red and black came on 15 May 1960, against Juventus, with the trumpets long since put away. But the moralist should resist the obvious sermon. Careers are not ledgers; they are moments, and Bean's moment — the winter and spring of 1957, seventeen goals where a legend had stood — is the kind most footballers would trade a decade for. The understudy is not the lead. He is the proof that the theatre goes on.

A Point in Turin, a Crown with Three Sundays to Spare

The crown arrived on 19 May 1957, with three rounds still to play, and it arrived — this is the detail one loves — not with a triumph but with a point: a 2-2 draw away to Torino, the afternoon the club's chroniclers and the record books alike set down as the clinching of the title. There is something fitting in a championship sealed by a draw in Turin, of all cities — the crown accepted with a nod rather than a flourish. What matters is the substance: Milan were champions of Italy for the sixth time, and nobody from the Alps to the toe of the boot disputed that the best side in the peninsula wore red and black.

The final ledger read 48 points from 34 matches — 21 won, 6 drawn, 7 lost — with 65 goals scored and 40 conceded, Fiorentina second on 42 and Lazio third on 41. Seven defeats is a champion's confession of mortality; the 65 goals are the acquittal. A team that had sold the greatest scorer in its history had somehow scored its way to the title, the burden shared out among a boy, a Roman and a Uruguayan like an inheritance divided fairly among sons of very different temperaments.

Madrid, the Stern Teacher

In June came the Latin Cup, the old summer congress of the Latin champions, staging its final edition in Madrid — and Milan, winners of the 1956 tournament, be it noted, for the two years are forever being confused, met Real Madrid in the semi-final on 20 June and were dismantled, 5-1. There is no gentler verb that respects the reader. Three days later the players gathered themselves to beat Saint-Étienne 4-3 for third place, a consolation with the taste of reheated coffee, and came home carrying something more useful than a trophy: an exact measurement of the distance between themselves and the white monarchy of Europe. Madrid would be the examination; this had been the mock. Milan filed the lesson away.

Autumn Overture: Joining Europe by Instalments

As champions of Italy, Milan entered the European Cup of 1957-58, and the preliminary round against Rapid Wien became a serial novel in three instalments: 4-1 at home on 2 October, a 5-2 collapse in Vienna on the 9th, and — the rules of the day being what they were — a play-off in Zurich on 30 October, won 4-2, so that Milan's whole European adventure was rescued in Switzerland, on neutral grass, by a side that had learned in Madrid what such evenings cost. The round of sixteen was altogether more imperial: Rangers were beaten 4-1 away and 2-0 at San Siro across November and December, and the continent began quietly to take notes.

At home, meanwhile, the champions were discovering the oldest of football's ironies: the crown and the form book rarely share a season. The defence of the scudetto, begun in September, sagged from the first, and the league year that opened in the autumn of 1957 would end with Milan ninth — ninth! — in the table they had ruled in May. New men had come: Ernesto Grillo, Giancarlo Danova, and, among the young, names to conjure with later — Giovanni Trapattoni, Mario Trebbi — but the season had already chosen its theatre, and it was not a domestic one.

For the road through Vienna, Zurich and Glasgow led, as we now know, to the European Cup final of May 1958, to Real Madrid once more, and to a 3-2 defeat after extra time that belongs to next year's chapter and to next year's grief. Judge 1957 instead on its own evidence. In March, in Rome, ministers signed Italy into Europe with a pen; in the autumn, at San Siro and in the fog-softened cities of the north, Viani's Milan signed the club into Europe with its feet. A sixth scudetto won without Nordahl proved the deeper truth, that the institution had outgrown its kings: the great Swede left, the Sheriff arrived, the thinker fell ill, and still Milan won — because by 1957 Milan was no longer a collection of champions but an idea of how the game should be played, and ideas, unlike centre-forwards, cannot be sold to Roma.