The Trial at Linate

A City Growing Rich, a Team Between Dynasties

The chronicler who would understand Milan in 1960 must begin not at San Siro but in the streets around it, where the scaffolding never came down and the fog off the Navigli mixed with cement dust to produce that peculiarly Milanese weather in which nobody can see anything and everybody is making money. This was the heart of the miracolo economico, and Milan was its boiler-room: the industrial and financial capital of a country that spent the summer showing its scrubbed face to the world at the Games of the XVII Olympiad in Rome, 25 August to 11 September, Italy's coming-out ball — while the real work, as ever, went on in the north, beneath the gaze of the Madonnina, in a city too busy to watch parades.

The football team of this booming city was, by contrast, a great house between dynasties. The Gre-No-Li Milan of the mid-fifties had been dismantled piece by piece, the way one sells off a grand estate; what remained in the spring of 1960 was a side coached by Luigi Bonizzoni beneath the technical direction of Giuseppe 'Gipo' Viani, presided over by Andrea Rizzoli, captained by the ageing and eternal Nils Liedholm with Juan Alberto Schiaffino as his vice — a team good enough to finish third and not quite good enough to matter. Third they duly finished in 1959-60: forty-four points from thirty-four games, seventeen won, ten drawn, seven lost, fifty-six scored against thirty-seven conceded — respectable arithmetic, the arithmetic of a well-run restaurant that has lost its chef. Above them Juventus took a fifty-five-point championship, their eleventh, with Sivori and Charles doing the cooking; Fiorentina followed at forty-seven; and below, at a satisfying distance, Internazionale languished on forty, which in a barren year is the sort of detail a Milanese keeps warm all winter.

Four Blows in One Derby

For there was one afternoon in that spring when the old house remembered it had been a palace. On 27 March 1960, matchday twenty-four, some seventy-two thousand souls climbed into San Siro for the derby, and what they witnessed has not been erased from the ledgers since: Milan 5, Internazionale 3, and four of the five struck by one man, José Altafini — the first player in the whole history of the fixture to score four goals in a single Milan derby, a record that stands unmatched to this day.

Consider the architecture of the thing. Altafini scored Milan's first, second and fourth goals before the interval — three in a first half, which in a derby is not greed but gluttony, the gluttony of a man who has been shown the whole banquet and sees no reason to leave the table — and then, in the fifty-fourth minute, he produced the fourth for the momentary 5-1; before the afternoon was out San Siro had risen to him, and the applause came not only from the terraces but from Liedholm himself; and when the captain applauds the centre-forward, you may take it that something has occurred beyond the ordinary commerce of goals. Inter salvaged their three and carried them home; nobody remembers the three. History, which is unjust and correct, remembers the four.

Spring's Ledger, Europe's Silence

The rest of the spring reads like the account-book of a prosperous but unambitious firm. The calendar year opened on New Year's Day itself with a 4-0 demolition of Sampdoria, the replay of a December fixture the fog had swallowed; then Juventus came to San Siro on 10 January and left with a 0-2 that told everyone how the title would go. Milan responded in the manner of the wounded bourgeois — furiously, and away from home: 3-0 at Bologna, 3-0 at SPAL, home wins over Atalanta, Alessandria and Genoa, the great derby feast of March, a 3-2 over Padova — until a 1-0 stumble at Palermo on 24 April put out whatever candle still burned. On 15 May Juventus completed their double over the rossoneri, 3-1 in Turin; and on 5 June the season expired quietly, 0-0 at Atalanta, like a guest leaving without saying goodbye.

And Europe? Europe, for the whole of calendar 1960, was silent. As holders of the 1958-59 scudetto Milan had entered the European Cup the previous autumn, put out Olympiacos in the preliminary round in September — 2-2, then 3-1 — and then met Barcelona in the round of sixteen, who removed them with a thoroughness that still stings to transcribe: 0-2 at San Siro on 4 November 1959, 5-1 in Catalonia three weeks later, one goal to seven on the aggregate. Both legs fell before the year turned, so that 1960 itself passed without a single European night at San Siro — a strange privation for a club that had helped to invent those nights, like a great tenor spending a year unable to sing.

What June offered instead was the Coppa dell'Amicizia, the Italo-French cup of friendship, which Milan treated with the seriousness Lombards reserve for anything involving the French: Toulouse were beaten 6-3 at home on 12 June and 2-0 in their own country a week later, and the 1960 edition went, on the collective ledger of its clubs, to Italy — Milan's eight goals entered proudly among the credits. It is not a trophy over which grown men weep, but a kitchen that can serve eight goals to French opposition across two sittings has not forgotten how to cook; and Altafini, who had finished the league campaign with twenty goals — twenty-eight across all competitions — was manifestly the stove on which everything was cooked.

The Master Departs

Then came the summer, and the summer was surgery. Juan Alberto Schiaffino, six seasons a rossonero and the finest footballing brain the club had employed since the war, was sold to Roma; with him went Ernesto Grillo, Gastone Bean and Giancarlo Danova, and in the opposite direction arrived Mario David from Roma, Santiago Vernazza from Palermo and Paolo Barison from Genoa — honest reinforcements, the sort a prudent house-steward buys at market. But the true business of that summer, the transaction for which 1960 will be remembered when every scoreline in this chronicle has faded to sepia, was the purchase of a boy; and the club itself framed the boy, quite openly, as Schiaffino's succession.

The Trial at Linate

He was born in Alessandria on 18 August 1943, which means the whole affair was transacted around a boy who had not yet turned seventeen, and he had already been a professional for a year: a Serie A debut at fifteen for his home-town club on 2 June 1959, a 1-1 draw against, of all opponents, Inter. It was Franco Pedroni, an ex-rossonero then coaching Alessandria, who whispered the name northwards, and Milan moved with the cunning of a Lombard merchant: a fifty per cent co-ownership stake taken in 1959, the boy left at home to ripen for a further season, the way one leaves a wheel of grana in the cellar because one knows precisely what it will be worth when it comes up.

Gipo Viani, who trusted his own eyes but liked witnesses, arranged a trial for 20 May 1959 at the club's training field out at Linate, hard by the airport — and posted Schiaffino and Liedholm as examining magistrates. One need invent nothing: rain falling on the field, Viani observing from the dry side of his car window, a frail-looking adolescent asked to show the great men what he carried, and the examiners concluding, in whatever silent language the elect use among themselves, that the inheritance was safe — so that when Schiaffino left for Roma a year later, the club could hand the boy, in effect, his place. When Alessandria were relegated at the end of 1959-60, Milan completed the purchase that June: the reported terms were sixty-five million lire plus Giancarlo Migliavacca and the loan of Sergio Bettini, on top of the stake already held — though other ledgers total the entire affair at something nearer one hundred and thirty million, which is not a contradiction but merely the eternal difference between what a thing costs and what one admits at home. From that day his career was bound to Milan alone.

The farewells and baptisms followed with an almost liturgical neatness. Rivera's last act for Alessandria came on 19 June 1960, in the Coppa delle Alpi against La Chaux-de-Fonds; his first official match for Milan on 18 September, a Coppa Italia tie won 5-3 — away, by the mischief in which football specialises, at Alessandria itself; and his league baptism seven days later, on 25 September, wearing the number ten in a 3-0 dispatch of Catania. He was seventeen by then, the birthday having fallen in August, so the pedants who quarrel over whether Milan signed a sixteen-year-old or fielded a seventeen-year-old are, for once in their lives, both right. The press, needing a label, reached for English and called him the Golden Boy. A certain Lombard pen would later coin something more barbed and more affectionate — abatino, the little abbé — but that quarrel belongs to later chapters; in 1960 there was only the astonishment.

Autumn Under Todeschini

The new championship opened on 25 September with Paolo Todeschini on the bench — and let the record be tidied here, because hurried chronicles have sometimes smuggled Nereo Rocco into this autumn, as though impatient for the great era to begin. Rocco did not coach Milan for a single day of calendar 1960; the year belongs to Todeschini, and Rocco to the chapters that follow, where he will arrive soon enough, like thunder that has been visible over the Alps for an hour.

Todeschini's autumn was the autumn of a young, uneven, occasionally magnificent team. Catania were dismissed 3-0 on the opening day with the boy at number ten; a week later Milan went to Padova and were taken apart 4-1, which is the tuition adolescence pays; Bologna were then crushed 5-1 at San Siro as though in apology. The masterpiece came on 6 November at the Comunale in Turin, where Milan beat the champions Juventus 4-3 in their own house — and it says everything about the perversity of that season that Milan would beat Juventus in both league meetings and still finish behind them. The derby of 20 November was lost 0-1 to Inter, proof that the gods keep double-entry accounts; Napoli were beaten 2-1 away and Torino 2-0 at home, Roma held Milan 2-2, and Christmas Day itself was spent at Bari, goalless, the players' panettone postponed by professional obligation.

When that season closed the following June, Milan stood second with forty-five points — eighteen won, nine drawn, seven lost, sixty-five scored against thirty-nine — four short of Juventus's forty-nine, and were rewarded with passage into the Inter-Cities Fairs Cup. Altafini had again been the club's leading scorer, twenty-two league goals and twenty-six in all, while the young Sandro Salvadore shared with him the most appearances, thirty-four: a statistic that quietly announces the changing of the blood. And Nils Liedholm, captain through all of it, would retire when that season ended — so that 1960 was his last full calendar year, and it is fitting that it contained both the derby at which he applauded a team-mate's genius and the airfield at which the future was examined and approved.

The Verdict

So what was 1960? By the standards of the cabinet-makers, almost nothing: a third place, a second place begun, a friendship cup taken off the French, not one European night under the floodlights. And yet no year in this chronicle did more work per trophy. In twelve months the club buried one aristocracy and enthroned another; it let Schiaffino go with honour to Roma and received, from his own hands as it were, the boy who would carry the number ten into the scudetti of 1962 and 1968 and the European Cups of 1963 and 1969. Empires announce themselves quietly. Rome that summer showed the world its Olympiad; Milan, wrapped in its fog of cement dust and lire, showed nobody anything, and merely completed the signing of a sixteen-year-old from Alessandria. History has long since delivered its verdict on which investment matured the better — and the verdict, as usual, was Milanese.