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Calcio: A History of Italian Football
John Foot
The first history of Italian football to be written in English, ‘Calcio’ is a mix of serious analysis and comic storytelling, with vivid descriptions of games, goals, dives, missed penalties, riots and scandals in the richest and toughest league in the world.‘Calcio’ tells the story of Italian football from its origins in the 1890’s to the present day. It takes us through a history of great players and teams, of style, passion and success, but also of violence, cynicism, catenaccio tactics and corruption.We meet the personalities that have shaped this history – from the Italian heroes to the foreigners that failed, the model professionals to the mavericks. ‘Calcio’ evokes the triumphs (the 1982 World Cup victory) and the tragedies (Meroni, the 'Italian George Best', killed by his number one fan), set against a backdrop of paranoia and intrigue, in a country where the referee is seen as corrupt until proven otherwise.Calcio is no longer a game. It is sometimes difficult to define it as a sport. It is certainly big business and a fanatical civic religion. There is no moral code here. Winners are always right, losers always wrong. This history of Italian football reveals all about the richest and toughest league in the world.
Calcio
A History of Italian Football
John Foot
For my dad, who loved football, and my son, who hates it
Author’s Note (#ulink_68d026d3-f84b-5a26-847f-95c5007325a3)
Readers are advised to consult the glossary at the end of the book.
Table of Contents
Cover Page (#u0cc3fd42-6399-5d8e-92f7-c65f19620658)
Title Page (#ue93ca992-a262-527e-8169-2e380e856d85)
Dedication (#u61a1d04e-54cc-5ff4-8e29-7cb78c64e70b)
Author’s Note (#u799da73c-1d3e-564d-8f3d-c696aa701c21)
Preface (#u239b3e46-5e95-55d6-ba66-8927ae865a58)
Chapter 1 Calcio and Football. Origins and Early History: 1880–1929 (#u16e75e2f-85e5-59e6-ae6b-06cad161c0c7)
Chapter 2 The Referee (#u7499ebb1-8d02-5949-971a-0af0ef08299f)
Chapter 3 Teams and Cities: Turin (#u5d726bbd-5713-56d0-a3af-d921772ed1a6)
Chapter 4 Teams and Cities: Milan, Rome, Genoa, Florence, Naples (#ubbb64153-362f-5bcf-b530-77d9401b2614)
Chapter 5 At the Back. Defenders and Defensive Football in Italy (#u0cefb27d-ede3-54eb-9767-4a8d2ad0199b)
Chapter 6 Players. Directors and Fantasisti (#ue881e0e4-df00-534a-9fc3-5317c09067f3)
Chapter 7 Goalscorers (#ud1a0f1ba-d827-50fd-b771-5fc9c4d28a84)
Chapter 8 Managers, Tactics, Fixers (#ueca6590f-69c7-533e-9d1a-35675a5e93f5)
Chapter 9 Scandals (#u32ae5708-4581-55cf-9e25-446996ff1f75)
Chapter 10 The Media (#u6d1b092c-d04f-5f30-b6ec-f2fe5cb8593a)
Chapter 11 Fans, Supporters, Ultrà (#u7ddc65c6-c5b9-540b-baec-842cbf7065cc)
Chapter 12 Murder, Massacre, Normality: Calcio and Violence since 1945 (#u9909212e-37fd-5237-bcac-c1eead363615)
Chapter 13 Power and Politics (#udea6ebb4-d15b-571e-a7b2-aa1989d9ec5a)
Chapter 14 Foreigners. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. From Orsi to Gazza (#u92b73bf7-52ea-57af-9d05-b8387262883f)
Chapter 15 Italia – La Nazionale. The National Team (#u0f9a5a14-8e43-5e45-b12a-8c592b990ac5)
Conclusion (#u067e848d-aac4-5599-b875-17afca9e77cc)
Notes (#ua9dbd1af-4b63-593b-bbc3-f9f58ca40e17)
Glossary (#u80a6c6f3-9d64-5632-80f3-11b249342fd2)
Appendix (#u61403cfa-2bd7-5626-890b-c58efb2b810a)
Index (#ud1b21317-400c-59c2-b469-ec9581b13d07)
Acknowledgements (#u2a0f3f3d-e16a-59f3-bf5c-fd4871777391)
About the Author (#u98a6afe2-acaf-5e9a-b9cd-8f64b664e8fe)
Praise (#u5692061f-7e6c-5ff8-8c02-7ec3324036e1)
Copyright (#u0bde7bbe-b35d-5555-8972-0b800dd34d83)
About the Publisher (#u341b0696-4870-5a5d-8e3d-94c5cb880e2a)
PREFACE (#ulink_80ef8b2b-f77e-5d9b-97b2-07b0d50c1c13)
‘Football is always late in making history’
GIOVANNI ARPINO and ALFIO CARUSO
I’ve never really forgiven Italian football, or Juventus, for buying my favourite player in 1980. Liam Brady was my hero and a footballing genius and I saw him from the North Bank as he scored against Manchester United in 1978. Later, I watched with awe as he destroyed Tottenham at White Hart Lane with one of the greatest goals ever seen on UK TV. Brady’s last act for Arsenal was to miss a penalty in the ill-fated shoot-out that decided the Cup Winners Cup final with Valencia in 1980. I followed Brady’s career in Italy religiously, waiting for signs that the prodigal son would return home. After two championships in two seasons with Juventus (the second of which was decided by Brady’s ice-cool penalty on the last day) Liam was sacked in favour of Michel Platini. Surely, now, he would return to Highbury. But Italian football continued to employ him for another five years: at Sampdoria, Inter and finally even Ascoli. When Brady eventually came back to England he was a shadow of the player he had been, managing one more season with West Ham (where he scored a beautiful goal against Arsenal) before retiring and finally coming back to Highbury as youth coach.
Italian football, then, stole my hero. Later, this interest in calcio (the Italian word for football) began to blossom when I moved to Milan in 1988 – ostensibly to study the origins of fascism in that ex-industrial city. My Italian was picked up largely through watching TV, and trying to follow the innumerable matches screened at that time. I started to buy the pink Italian sports daily – La Gazzetta dello Sport. My first vocabulary was football-linked: calcio di rigore – penalty; penalty – also penalty; rimessa laterale – throw in; calcio di punizione – free kick; ammonizione – booking; calcio d’angolo – corner; corner – also corner; il mister – the manager. Many of the terms seemed to be simply English words, although sometimes they had slightly different meanings. Other phrases were more difficult – gamba tesa – going into a tackle with your leg straight out; espulsione – sending off; melina – passing the ball around uselessly amongst the back four. I started to take the tram to one of the most stunning football stadiums in the world – the San Siro – at that time being refurbished for the upcoming 1990 World Cup.
In my first year in Milan, Inter easily won the championship under record-breaking manager Giovanni Trapattoni. I had found my team. Surely, they would go on to success after success. Moreover, they were the club supported by my future Milanese wife (and, perhaps even more crucially, my future mother-in-law). The good omen of Arsenal’s last-gasp championship victory in the same season sealed my decision: it was the wrong one. Inter would not win another championship for 17 years, and even then in the most bizarre circumstances imaginable. In the early 1990s, however, AC Milan were the team to watch. Under the innovative tactical regime of manager Arrigo Sacchi, the city’s other team played the most scintillating form of attacking football imaginable. Catenaccio (a defensive style of football, made popular in Italy) was rejected in favour of a fast-moving, aggressive game. Plus, Milan had the players to match this style of play. A Dutch trio dominated the early 1990s – dreadlocked Ruud Gullit (who flew back on the same plane as me to London on one occasion, and was followed around town by huge crowds of fans) provided pace, flair and explosive attacking skills. Frank Rijkaard was the midfield general (I also bumped into him at the airport – Milan is a small city) whilst up front prowled the most complete striker of his generation – Marco Van Basten. All this was supported from the back by two of the greatest defenders in football history – Franco Baresi and Paolo Maldini. Teams still played with sweepers when I arrived but Milan’s success was to herald the death of that tradition. This was football from heaven. I also noticed that the team’s president was a short, balding, charismatic businessman who smiled a lot and interfered with great frequency in his team’s affairs. I was to see a lot more of this man through the 1990s. I even ended up studying him. His name? Silvio Berlusconi.
In 1989 AC Milan reached the European Cup final for the first time in twenty years, and they destroyed Steaua Bucharest (4–0). I watched the game on the colour TV in my room. Foolishly, I decided to get a bus across town after the match. The bus arrived, and then stopped after about 100 yards amidst a mass of delirious fans. The driver finally gave up all hope when people began climbing on the roof. The celebrations went on for days. In 1990, Milan won the European Cup again – and on the way to the final they took apart Real Madrid – 5–0 – with a stunning display of authority, skill and power. There was no doubt that Milan were the greatest team in the world at that time, and Van Basten and Gullit dominated the European Footballer of the Year award throughout the early 1990s.
At San Siro, the atmosphere was electric, and vastly different to my experiences following Arsenal and Plymouth Argyle in England. Orchestrated singing was organized by ‘head’ fans with megaphones, who spent their time watching their fellow fans, and not the game. Fireworks and flares greeted the arrival of the teams. From San Siro’s towering terraces, you could see the whole pitch as if it were a chessboard. In anger, Italian fans did not just boo, or whistle: they went crazy. Cushions and more dangerous missiles were routinely hurled onto the pitch. Violence was common, just as the shock of Hillsborough was finally cleaning up the English game. I noticed with pleasure that there were very few racist chants at Italian matches. This was soon to change, and for the worse.
And then there were the rivalries – not so much the local Milan derby – but regional differences appeared to provide the opportunity for violence and conflict. Naples and their star player Maradona were particular hate-figures in the north. During the opening match of the 1990 World Cup, Maradona was booed by the huge crowd during Argentina’s warm-up in the San Siro. Cameroon were the choice for the Italians and they duly won, 1–0. Maradona was to get his revenge in spectacular fashion in his adopted Naples, three weeks later, as his penalty knocked the hosts out of the tournament. Milan and Roma also had a long-running rivalry going. At an Italian cup semi-final, attended by 80,000 passionate fans in the San Siro, the tension was palpable. When Milan missed a last-minute penalty and lost, fights broke out. I left the stadium and walked towards the station. Suddenly, a stone flew past my head. I looked up; in front of me stood a line of riot police, complete with helmets, batons and, in some cases, guns. Behind me, I noticed a number of youths (Milan fans, not happy with the result) with handkerchiefs covering their faces. They were hurling rocks and sticks. What to do? Go back towards the fans, or forwards towards the police line? I decided on the latter option. For a second, the line parted to let me through, and then closed again. This whole semi-riot, which lasted some hours, was barely reported in the Italian press.
Media coverage of football was total, and impossible to ignore. Goals were analysed way into the night, from every possible angle, but so were offside decisions, and even lip-read words. This was normal. Referees were lambasted for errors of judgement, and routinely accused of corruption and favouritism. Players were lambasted for one bad performance, managers sacked after a couple of bad results, teams said to be ‘in crisis, officially’ after a couple of draws. Whole programmes consisted entirely of men shouting at each other about football, for hours. One such programme – Il processo del lunedì (Monday’s Trial) – had been running since 1980. Local TV stations were also dominated by such low-budget programmes, concentrating largely on the Milan teams in my area, whose every game, training session and transfer was picked over in minute detail. I began to have conversations about football, quickly realizing that English football was simply not taken seriously in Italy. For Italians, English teams still played the long ball game, and the back four consisted of lanky defenders who would never get a game in Italy. When people asked me whom I supported and I told them, many replied, irritatingly, ‘Aston Villa?’ When I tried to explain who Arsenal were, I used Brady – but very few had heard of my club.
In addition, since the 1985 Heysel disaster, all English fans had been lumped together under the collective title of ‘hooligans’. This was to prove a reputation that was very difficult to shake off. There were hardly any English players in the Italian league, and even fewer were a success. Milan’s experiences with English players had been a near-complete disaster, with the honourable exceptions of Ray Wilkins and the much-loved Joe Jordan. Luther Blissett’s move to Italy had assumed mythical qualities. Blissett became famous for being bad; symbolizing what was seen as the low technical level in the English game.
Italians invariably assumed that their league was the best in the world. There is no doubt that Serie A was and is the hardest league to play in. The defenders and goalkeepers are simply the best on the planet, and the tactics are a combination of subtlety and brutality. Winning or losing is all-important in Italy, so if an attacker gets past you, he must be brought down. The ‘tactical foul’ is a way of life for Italian defenders – and not to be confused with the ‘useless foul’ from which your team takes no advantage. To be top scorer in Italy was truly a formidable task. To make things even more difficult, own goals were deemed until recently as any goal where a defender has merely touched, or brushed, the ball. Ian Rush, prolific in the English league for more than a decade, managed only seven goals in his single season with Juve. With the advent of the pressing game, there was less and less space for the fantasisti – those with great skill who created goals through genius and poetry. Hence the virtual exile of a whole series of discarded fantasisti, who became heroes abroad – Gianfranco Zola, Benito Carbone, Paolo di Canio. Even the genius of Roberto Baggio struggled to find space with a top club after his departure from Juventus in 1995. He later preferred to weave his magic in the provinces – with Bologna and Brescia. So many skilful players were produced by the Italian system, but very few were given a chance in the big teams. Winning – at all costs – was too important to allow for the luxury of inconsistency, or skill for skill’s sake.
And then there was the pressure – from the media, the president and above all the fans, organized in groups known as ultrà since the 1970s and liable to turn nasty if things started to go wrong on the pitch. Inter sacked four managers in the 1998–9 season alone, largely thanks to ultrà campaigns. In 2001, enraged Inter fans petrol-bombed the team coach – with the players inside. Angry Naples fans stoned their captain’s car as he drove down the motorway in 2003 and in that same season two games in Serie A were called off early due to fan rioting. In 2007 football grounds were closed all over Italy after a policeman was killed as fans rioted during and after a Catania-Palermo derby. Fans frequently go on strike, refusing to support their team or even turn up – they also display slogans attacking specific players, other fans, presidents and managers. Thousands turn up to training sessions, millions tune in to games. This is a country where the most-read daily is still the pink La Gazzetta dello Sport (which is flanked by two other sports dailies dealing largely in football as well as numerous monthlies and specialist publications) and where, until recently, millions of Italians did their version of the pools every week, spending billions of lire and then euros in the process. Calcio is no longer a game. It is sometimes difficult to define it as a sport. It is certainly very big business. A better way to see calcio is as a kind of fanatical civic religion – where loyalty is total and obsession the norm. Fair play seemed to me to be a concept absent from Italian football discourse. Diving was common and not particularly frowned upon – as long as it worked. In fact, commentators often praised the ‘craftiness’ of non-sportsmanship. There was no moral code here. Winners were always ‘right’, losers always wrong.
As the 1990s wore on, I quickly began to realize that football in Italy was not only a massive sporting phenomenon, but also something that reflected on, and affected, political, cultural and social trends. I started to understand that it was almost impossible to comprehend Italy without understanding football, and vice-versa. This conviction crystallized in 1994, when Silvio Berlusconi made a dramatic entrance into political life with an organization – Forza Italia! – whose very name was taken from a football chant, and whose language was dominated by footballing terminology. Berlusconi, in his own words, had ‘taken the field’, he had ‘formed a team’ and he used his footballing success to bolster his political consensus. Football and Italian politics were not only linked, they were symbiotic, and it was unclear where the division between the two lay, if such a division existed at all. This alone would be a good reason to study and recount the history of Italian football. When you add the sheer beauty of the game, the passion and the debate it provokes, every day, amongst millions of people, the temptation to write this history became overwhelming. In May 2006, Italians were transfixed by what developed into one of the biggest scandals in the history of sport – and became known as calciopoli or occasionally Moggiopoli after its main protagonist, football fixer Luciano Moggi. Weeks later, their national team won its fourth World Cup. No writer could have dared to hope for such an extraordinary combination of success and squalor, skill and sleaze.
Sometimes, during the work on this book, I have felt like Malcolm McDowell in A Clockwork Orange. I have been forced to watch things that, in the end, have made me sick. I did not think it would be possible but, by the end, I had almost fallen out of love with football. After innumerable chat shows, post-match interviews, clichés, violence, racism, hysterical protests, dives and fake injuries, biased referees and corrupt presidents, I had almost had enough. As a kind of final affront, twenty-six years after Brady, Juventus signed Patrick Vieira, another Arsenal hero. But all this was never quite sufficient to stop me watching altogether. I kept going back, and, occasionally, the whole thing felt worthwhile. When Roberto Baggio scored his two-hundredth goal for example, or Adriano crashed in a left-foot shot, or Lilian Thuram, for the thousandth time in his career, trapped the ball, looked up, and passed it elegantly on to a midfielder. These moments, and many others, once made football the beautiful game. It cannot be described as beautiful any longer, especially in Italy, but all is not lost.
As with this opening chapter, the rest of Calcio will be organized around the themes which have dominated the thoughts of fans, players and football journalists: referees, teams and cities, managers and tactics, scandals, the media, foreigners, fans, violence, politics, the national team and money.
CHAPTER 1 Calcio and Football. Origins and Early History: 1880–1929 (#ulink_a96d00d3-9de4-52d6-9e00-209a77c93e59)
The first kicks
In the beginning there were the English. The first games on Italian soil of what we would recognize as football took place in the port towns of Livorno, Genoa, Palermo and Naples. Very little evidence exists of these impromptu games, apart from hearsay. Often they would simply be kickabouts amongst British sailors, perhaps even on the dockside, with some locals roped in to make up the numbers. Italy was on the way to and from India, and many British ships stopped off there. The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 led to a boom in English communities on shipping routes. No records of actual football clubs exist until the 1880s and 1890s, and the official birth of Italian football is usually traced back to the employee of a British textile company, one Edoardo Bosio, who formed the first club in Turin in the late 1880s, using footballs he brought back with him from England.
Like everything about Italian football, even these origins are contested, controversial and politicized. This controversy begins with the very name used for football in Italy (and the title of this book). The nascent Italian football authorities gave the game an Italian name – calcio – in 1909. Previously, the organization which ran the game had been known as Federazione Italiana Football. This change was a politically inspired one. Nationalist ideals had already permeated those who ran the game in Italy, and there was hostility to foreign players. Hence the decision not to use an English term as was the norm elsewhere. The Germans had translated football into Fussball, whilst the French left the word as it was. But the choice of calcio was also historical. Calcio Fiorentino was a game, with a ball, and a pitch, which had been played in Florence during the Renaissance. The choice of calcio was an attempt by Italians to claim the game for their own. They had really invented what was now called football many hundreds of years earlier.
Under Benito Mussolini’s fascist regime (1922–1943) this nationalization of football was taken much further. Calcio Fiorentino was not only identified as the precursor of modern football, but was reintroduced in Florence itself, amid much pomp and ceremony. The games were moved from the proletarian Piazza Santa Croce – where some original calcio tournaments had taken place – to the bourgeois Piazza della Signoria, and guidebooks made an explicit link between Calcio Fiorentino and football. Even some experts tended to buy this version of events. The great Italian football journalist, Gianni Brera, wrote in his monumental history of calcio that the English had merely ‘reinvented’ the game.
Not all went along with this flagrant rewriting of history, however. One journalist refused to use the new term, arguing that he would still write ‘football’, and that the use of calcio offended the traditions linked to the ancient game played in Florence. Over time, despite this small rebellion, calcio did become the official word for Italian football.
There was one small problem here. Calcio Fiorentino bore very little resemblance to modern football. Ball games had been played for centuries in Italy and the church authorities in Pisa, in 1300 or thereabouts, had banned such games on their cathedral steps. In its original form, calcio had been played first by noblemen, and then increasingly by the plebs, in Florentine public squares, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Games tended to take place around important court events. The rules were lax, when they existed at all. In the version of the game that has survived there were two teams (of 27 players each, vaguely set up in a kind of 9–9-9 formation), a measured pitch, and six referees who stood in a small stand on the side of the pitch. Much else was left to the players themselves. The ball was moved by hand or by foot, but could not be thrown, apart from by the three ‘goalkeepers’ at the back, and points were scored by getting the ball across the opponent’s end line, or into a kind of goal. Most forms of violence were permitted.
Pictures of Calcio Fiorentino show two teams massed together in the centre of a field or piazza, with a few spectators looking on. The players are wearing hats, and some lie injured on the ground. Musicians beat drums in the background. Later, re-inventions of the game codified a whole series of elaborate rules, but Calcio Fiorentino itself had been banned because of the increasing violence during and around matches. Ancient signs forbidding ball games can still be seen in some Florentine squares.
A version of Calcio Fiorentino is still played in Florence, with games taking place in the spring and summer and attracting significant numbers of tourists and locals. The tournament is now played in its original setting in Santa Croce. To watch a game is a bit like witnessing a combination of pub brawl, rugby match and medieval re-enactment. ‘Players’ spend much of the time wrestling with an opponent in complete isolation from the ball or the game itself. The 2005 tournament was suspended after the violence became so bad that one team simply walked off. In its 1930s reincarnation, and its current touristy form, calcio has been adapted to appear more like football. Games now last for 50 minutes and have various levels of officialdom. Team captains are given the task of stopping fights and calming down their own players and winning teams are rewarded with a purebred cow. So modern is the Calcio Fiorentino of today that it has its own, highly elaborate, set of anti-doping rules, downloadable from the internet. Calcio Fiorentino players can now be banned for more than two years for taking a series of banned substances, including marijuana.
Calcio Fiorentino, therefore, tells us little or nothing about the history of Italian soccer. Fascism had re-invented a tradition. To return to the real history of soccer in Italy, we need to go back to the English, and to those with links to England.
Pioneers
Edoardo Bosio was born in Turin in 1864. He worked for the textile firm Thomas Adams (based in Nottingham), and had travelled widely in the UK and elsewhere. He took a liking to football in England, where it was already a highly popular and professional sport, and decided to import the game to Turin. In 1891 he formed the first soccer team in Italy from players drawn from his workplace. The club was called International Football Club. One problem for Bosio was that his team had nobody to play against. There were no football federations, no written rules, no referees, no pitches. Games were similar to park kickabouts. In 1891 another English player – Herbert Kilpin – reported on a match he had witnessed in Turin. ‘I noticed two curious things: first, there was no sign of a referee. Second, as the game continued, our opponents’ team got bigger and bigger. Every so often someone from the crowd came on to the pitch, with great enthusiasm. Soon we found ourselves playing against a team of at least twenty players.’
Quickly other pioneers took up Bosio’s lead and formed clubs in Turin and elsewhere. In September 1893 (a date which is still, for many, the real birth date of calcio) the Genoa Cricket and Football Club was set up by British consular officials. No Italians could be members. A year later, another club was formed in Turin, the Football Club Torinese. These were small clubs, who rarely travelled beyond their own city borders. For a short time, even cricket was more popular than football.
James Richardson Spensley
In 1897, an English maritime doctor, James Spensley, arrived in Genoa to look after the sailors on passing coal ships. A polyglot, philanthropist and scouting enthusiast, born in London’s Stoke Newington, thirty years earlier, he was also a football devotee who organized the first real game in Italy. This pioneering match was between Genoa and Football Club Torinese in 1898, with a certain Reverend Richard Douglas officiating. In the meantime Genoa had changed their rules, on Spensley’s insistence, to allow Italians to play and be members. A quota system was introduced to protect the English. Italians would not be allowed to make up more than half of the total membership of the club.
Numerous details survive from that historic first game: Genoa-Football Club Torinese, 6 January 1898. We know that 154 tickets were sold at the full price of one lira and 23 at half-price and that 84 people paid extra for numbered seats and that the whole event made a profit of over 100 lire. The police were present and drinks were available. The referee’s whistle cost 2.5 lire while the doorkeeper was paid a mere one lira for a day’s work. The Turin team took home a victory, and it appears that at the return match a decision was made to form an Italian football federation. This nascent body then set about preparing the first Italian championship, for May of the same year. Genoa retains its name to this day – despite being pressured to Italianize, along with all clubs with foreign titles – under fascism. Spensley is remembered with affection in the city and in the 1970s a plaque was unveiled in his honour, on the wall of his house.
There is still a Genoa club Spensley amongst the many supporters’ clubs linked to the oldest team in Italy.
The first championship
In May 1898, Italy’s first football championship took place in Turin, in one day. Official records date from here. Genoa’s victory in 1898 thus counts as a championship success, with the same statistical weight as that of 2004. The three-month-old Italian football federation brought together four teams for the tournament, three of whom were from Turin, along with Genoa.
For many years, championships were not fought out in a modern, league-type system but through ‘challenges’ similar to short cup competitions. All three matches in 1898 were played in a field on the edge of Turin, which bore little resemblance to the industrial city that was to sprawl across the Piedmont plains in the twentieth century. Players from all four teams took trams to the pitch and the first championship game was a derby, between two Turin-based clubs. Played at nine in the morning on 8 May, it finished 1–0 to Internazionale di Torino with John (Jim) Savage, who was a marquis and the team captain, scoring the winner.
Genoa (in white shirts) won their semi-final against Ginnastica di Torino 2–1 and the final, against Internazionale (at three in the afternoon, after a sandwich lunch), by the same score, after extra-time. Spensley was in goal for Genoa. The team contained three other British players and at least five foreigners. Genoa took home a cup – donated by the Duke of the Abruzzi – and each player was given a gold medal.
Italy’s first football champions were therefore a club with an English name, Genoa. There were only around 50 spectators for the semi-finals and little over 100 for the final. As well as a referee (whose name remains unknown) there were two seated ‘line-judges’ whose job it was to adjudicate if the ball had crossed the goal line, or not, as there were no goal nets. According to football historian Antonio Ghirelli, the crowd cheered their teams and even fought briefly amongst themselves. They also booed the referee, ‘a habit which would continue’, he dryly notes.
The total takings were 197 lire. Football was way down the list of popular sports in Italy at the turn of the century, coming something like seventh in the reporting hierarchies in the newborn sports press. Cycling, riding, motor sports and hunting were all far more popular pastimes.
The small crowd was understandable. Many people had other things on their minds. May 1898 was not a particularly happy time for Italian society as a whole. As Genoa celebrated its first championship in Turin, Milan was in chaos. Bread riots had led to barricades going up across the city. The government decided to repress the protests and the army was sent in. To this day, nobody knows how many protestors (and bystanders) were killed, but modest estimates put the number at 400. Martial law was declared, soldiers camped in Milan’s central Piazza del Duomo and mass arrests were carried out, including priests and moderate reformists. King Umberto I rewarded General Bava Beccaris, at the head of the military operation, with a special medal.
All eyes were on Milan, as Italian society tore itself apart, and little attention was given to three ninety-minute games on the dusty periphery of Turin.
Paleo-calcio. Rules, Managers, Foreigners, Sundays
The early game in Italy – which we might call paleo-calcio – was poles apart from the sport you witness if you turn on your satellite TV station today, or even pop round to your local football pitch. There were no managers of any sort (although people similar to managers began to emerge quite quickly, in some accounts as early as 1901), no training beyond a few shots with the ball, and the players were all, to a man, amateurs. There were no stadiums, no real tactics, the ball was heavy and goalkeepers didn’t even attempt to catch it. Punching or kicking out were much preferred. Kit was made up of long-sleeved shirts, often with buttons. Many essential items were imported from England – balls, shirts, boots. Shorts were long, and trousers were often worn, as were caps. There were no changing rooms, so players usually turned up, and went home, already changed.
Many rules in place at the birth of calcio were dissimilar to those that govern today’s game. A player was offside if, when the ball was played, there were fewer than three players between him and the goal and until 1907, the offside rule applied to the whole pitch. After that date, you could not be offside in your own half. For many years, a draw usually led to a replay, not extra-time. Disciplinary rules were rudimentary. Pitch invasions led to replays, not sanctions (thereby encouraging more pitch invasions). There were no shirt numbers until the 1939–40 season and no substitutes at all until 1968. Early Italian football history was also dominated by foreign players, presidents, clubs, entrepreneurs, referees and words, and above all by the English, the Swiss, the Germans and the French.
From the start, matches were often played on Sundays, despite the fact that Italy was a Catholic country. The reason for this anomaly was simple. Most people worked on Saturdays, and the battle for an ‘English Saturday’ – one without work – was one of the historic demands of Italy’s nascent trade union movement in the early twentieth century. Later, the Church was to complain about this tradition (which is also true of Catholic Spain). Until the 1990s, when Pay-TV destroyed the rites and rhythms of the great Italian football Sunday, the Sunday afternoon match formed a central part of Italian culture. Some fans went to games, partaking in the physical act of watching their team. Others hung around outside stadiums, trying to get in free or just lapping up the atmosphere. Many others simply waited for news, or visited bars. Once radio became widespread, the little transistor became a key element of the classic Sunday family outing, pressed as it often was to the ear of the father, or listened to through a primitive plastic earpiece. With the advent of TV, the afternoon outing had to be cut short in order to get back in time for Ninetieth minute, a programme with short reports on all games, transmitted at about 18.30.
Spensley and the Reign of Genoa, 1898–1904
James Richardson Spensley’s Genoa team went on to dominate early Italian football history, winning the title in 1899, 1900, 1902, 1903 and 1904. The doctor played in goal in all of these finals apart from 1899, when he moved to left back to allow one of only two Italians in that particular team to take over between the posts. Spensley, the first name on the first team sheet of the first official game in Italy, retired as a player in 1906. He then became one of the earliest referees in the Italian game and a key member of the embryonic football associations. It is not clear what kind of managerial role Spensley played, if any. Did he select the team? Did the team train at all? Nobody really knows. But, being captain, we can assume that some kind of leadership was provided by the doctor and some Italian histories even list Spensley as a kind of modern coach of Genoa. This detail is an example of the temptation to read back football history, imposing the structure of the modern game onto that of the past. When war broke out in 1914 – although Italy did not join until May 1915 – Spensley signed up as a military doctor. He died in agony in a hospital in Germany, from injuries sustained, it is said, whilst tending to an enemy soldier.
In the photos that survive of James Spensley, the doctor-goalie is wearing a white shirt (not what we would think of as a football top – but a real shirt) and his sleeves are rolled up. His shorts reach down to below his knees. He is not particularly tall and his boots appear to be normal boots, without laces. He has no gloves and sports an impressive beard and moustache. The goal, behind him, has no net. In England, by this time, the game had taken on many aspects of modern football. Italy was still in the dark ages, in footballing terms, as the twentieth century began.
The big teams are born. Juventus, Milan, Internazionale, Torino
Slowly, but inexorably, calcio grew in influence and importance. The second championship lasted three days, the third in 1900 twenty days. Other cities became football centres – above all Milan, traditional rival to Turin as Italy’s football capital. The infrastructures associated with the modern game began to take shape. Clubs formed all over the country, including in the south, and the business possibilities of the game also became evident.
In November 1897 a group of school students from the prestigious Massimo D’Azeglio school in the centre of Turin – a school attended over the years by such Turin luminaries as FIAT magnate Gianni Agnelli and Primo Levi – met to organize the foundation of a new Turin sports club. They settled on a Latin name – Juventus – ‘youth’. What was to be the biggest club in the history of Italian football became a calcio team in 1899 – Juventus Football Club. The famous black-and-white shirts came to Turin – allegedly – via an English referee called Harry Goodley.
Given the task of buying some football kit in England, he sent back Notts County’s, which thus became the black-and-white of the Turin team.
Juventus won their first championship in 1905, by one point from Genoa. It was about this time that shirts and other items of kit began to be produced in Italy, and not simply imported from England. In 1907 Juventus pulled out of the playoff final in protest against a change of venue. They were not to win the title again until 1926.
The early history of Turinese football was extremely complicated but began to take shape in 1906 with the formation of a second, unified, Turin club to rival Juventus. Torino Football Club was set up in a beer hall by ‘twenty or so Swiss men with bowler hats and a lot of good will’ (Marco Cassardo).
Torino’s first ever official game was a derby victory in 1907, although the club’s fans would have to wait until 1928 for their first championship success. Since then, Torino’s history has been intimately linked to that of its hated, rich and envied cousins. Torino’s colours were claret red – leading to one of the club’s nicknames (along with Toro, the bull, their symbol) – the granata. Many of calcio’s greatest, most controversial and most tragic moments were to be associated with the extraordinary history of Torino.
In 1899 a group of Milanese industrialists and English and Swiss footballers in alliance with the local Mediolanum gymnastic society created the Milan Cricket and Football Club. Milan had rapid success, winning their first championship in May 1901. The team’s most influential early player was Herbert Kilpin. Like Bosio in Turin and Spensley in Genoa, Kilpin played a pioneering role in the development of Milanese calcio. In his native Nottingham he had played in a team named after the Italian nationalist leader Giuseppe Garibaldi, complete with red shirts. A minor player in England, he became a legend in Italy – perhaps the first real football star – underlining the huge gap in the level of play in that early period.
As a utility player, Kilpin popped up in defence, midfield and in attack, and was captain of Milan for ten years. His nickname was ‘Il Lord’. Legend also relates that he chose the team’s red-and-black shirts. There is some controversy over the team’s ‘Devils’ nickname, however. Relatives of Kilpin argue that it was his Protestantism, in a Catholic country, which led to the epithet.
Kilpin is supposed to have said that ‘our shirts must be red because we are devils. Let’s put in some black to give everyone a fright.’ Kilpin’s Milan team won three championships, and might well have claimed a fourth if it were not for a split in the football federation (over the question of foreign players) in 1908.
Another oft-repeated story (first spread by Kilpin himself, and then rewritten with poetic licence by Gianni Brera) is that he abandoned his own marriage party to play a game in Genoa, whereupon he broke his nose. The most famous of all early footballers, he played up to the age of 43, and then became a referee. According to legendary Italian national manager Vittorio Pozzo, Kilpin liked a drink, and used to keep a bottle of ‘Black and White’ whisky in a hole behind the goal. Kilpin, again according to Pozzo, claimed that the only way to forget a conceded goal was to drink a sip of the hard stuff. When he died in 1916 the sports press was moved to hyperbole: ‘[Kilpin]…a magic name, which moved the first passionate crowds to sporting delirium…a name which encapsulates the history of our football’.
Just how very different the early game was from today can also be seen by looking at Kilpin’s official record for Milan. He played a mere seventeen championship games (with seven goals) between 1899 and 1906, for which he was awarded three titles. Early photographs show Kilpin running for the ball in a wide field with scattered fans looking on and some half-built houses in the background. In another famous photo Kilpin is decked out in full Milan kit, including long white trousers, long black socks, long-sleeved Milan shirt with buttons and Milan cap.
Kilpin left a very rare series of anecdotes about the early game, written just before his death in 1916. He relates that 500 fans turned up in 1900 in the pouring rain for Milan’s first ever match, and tells the tale of a remarkable game in something called the Negrotto Cup. In Kilpin’s version (the only one we have) Milan’s goalkeeper had brought a chair onto the pitch with him as he had nothing to do all game. There he sat, cross-legged, smoking a series of cigarettes and sporting a straw hat, as the goals went in at the other end. ‘In the closing stages’, relates Kilpin, ‘he was bored to death. He asked me, “Can’t I play a bit as well?” I let him leave the goal, he went up front and scored…the twentieth goal.’ Milan duly won the match, 20–0.
